ICANN Meeting Passes on .com, .xxx decisions

Rob writes "As the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers wound up its annual meeting in Vancouver yesterday it was inactions that were still causing all the controversy. Major decisions on the .com and .xxx domains had been postponed until next year, as the domain name management body seeks to balance the interests of governments and commercial domain name organizations."

Comments

The real reason

[andyring]

I think the real reason they haven't made a decision yet is because this is what happens when you take a bunch of high-paid bureaucrats who answer to no one and let them have free reign of things. They don't make decisions! They're simply incapable of it. It's easier to defer a decision under the guise of some lame excuse for a long time, that way you can more easily justify your "job" and it makes it look like you're actually doing something. Mix it in with governments from around the world, and it's a picture-perfect recipe for nothing to happen.

Oh, and since it's getting slow already, here's the article:

ICANN meeting passes on .com, .xxx decisions

5th December 2005

By Kevin Murphy in Vancouver

As the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers wound up its annual meeting in Vancouver yesterday it was inactions that were still causing all the controversy.

Major decisions on the .com and .xxx domains had been postponed until next year, as the domain name management body seeks to balance the interests of governments and commercial domain name organizations.

During a public forum on Saturday, domain registrars voiced concerns over the proposed settlement between ICANN and VeriSign Inc, which would give VeriSign a five-year extension to its .com registry contract and the ability to raise prices 7% a year.

And proponents of the .xxx domain said their proposals to launch a porn-only address has been turned into a political football by ICANN's governmental advisors, a charge not being strenuously denied by ICANN or governments.

"The very few governments that have written to ICANN, with the possible exception of the US, are not opposed to our proposal on substantive grounds," said Stuart Lawley, president of would-be .xxx operator ICM Registry Inc.

"The ICM application is being held hostage in a dispute between ICANN and the GAC," he added, referring to ICANN's Government Advisory Committee, which has members from dozens of international governments.

Lawley had arrived here working on the assumption that ICANN's board would approve .xxx on Sunday. However, it was pulled from the agenda at the eleventh hour after the GAC asked for more time to review the .xxx proposal.

"Some governments are concerned with the content of .xxx itself, then there are those concerned about process," GAC chair Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, a senior Malaysian telecommunications regulator, said in an interview with ComputerWire.

Members of the GAC "are just trying to understand the processes ICANN took" he said. Some had assumed that because a proposal to offer .xxx from ICM was rejected in 2000, that it would also be thrown out this time, he said.

There's a bigger political picture too. Following the recent World Summit on the Information Society, a UN meeting on internet governance, governmental interest in the ICANN process has been reignited.

"In some respects, this discussion about .xxx is a proxy for the renewed attention governments are paying to ICANN," ICANN president Paul Twomey told us.

WSIS created a document called the Tunis Agenda, which promised to leave existing internet management bodies including ICANN essentially untouched, while also recognizing the roles government can play.

"It's not unimaginable that some governments went into this GAC meeting with their own interpretation of Tunis Agenda," Tarmizi said. "There were those who saw the Tunis Agenda being a statement of political will for change to take place, there were some who said it just reaffirmed what we had already being saying."

While Tarmizi would not be drawn on which governments are demanding the extra scrutiny of

So, let's review...

[meisenst]

We don't want ICANN to be run by the United Nations.

No, wait, we don't want ICANN to be run -like- the United Nations. Okay.

So, ICANN has already passed decisions on the major resolutions of interest until next year, and instead is now the subject of political tugs of war, so much so that nothing is being accomplished except idle banter between politicians, committees and private industry.

I'd say that it's already being run like the UN! =)