ICANN's Contract Renewed

mrogers writes "The International Herald Tribune is reporting that ICANN's contract has been renewed for the next five years. This means the non-profit corporation, which is responsible for allocating IP addresses and administering the top level of the Domain Name System, will not become independent from the U.S. Department of Commerce until at least 2011. The contract is also available as a PDF."

Comments

More ICANN

[andrewman327]

For those of you new to the controversy, there is a long history of ICANN being debated on Slashdot.

For all of its faults, I do not think that there is harm in renewing ICANN's contract. I do not know if they should be renewing it for 5 years, though, as that is an eternity in Internet time.

Those who complain about ICANN cite generally now-resolved issues that have arisen but fail to demonstrate how another agency would have prevented them from becoming problems. On the flipside of the argument, eWeek has a detailed op-ed piece of ICANN's issues.

Re:More ICANN

[Wesley Felter]

Yes, I especially like the way that ICANN helps keep domain prices the same, even though the cost to provide them drops every year.

Re:More ICANN

[karl.auerbach]

Don't read too much into this contract. It is really only a purchase by the gov't from ICANN of a very few, limited services.

What is important to understand is that this contract does *not* include all of the controversial stuff.

This contract does *not* include ICANN's role as arbiter of who gets to put a new top level domain into the root zone. Nor does this contract deal with ICANN's right to impose its regulatory system onto the domain name registries, registrars, and domain name buyers. Nor does this deal with ICANN's operation of the L-root server.

All that this contract does, in the DNS space, is to obligate ICANN to do some clerical work, according to a prescribed procedure and schedule, to handle requests to update name server (NS) records in the root zone and to update the TLD whois records accordingly.

All-in-all, this leaves ICANN in a precarious legal situation - ICANN is most clearly a combination that restrains trade. And most countries have laws about that sort of thing. As soon as the US government lift's its hand from ICANN's shoulder - and that hand is not to be found in this contract - then folks around the world might begin to ask whether ICANN's combination in restraint of trade passes legal muster under their national laws.

ICANN, presumably gets its authority to do all the stuff that is controversial via a separate document, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the US gov't. That has not yet been renewed.

Re:Ip's?

[kimba]

ARIN hands out IP addresses in North America to ISPs and network operators, however, ARIN only hands out numbers it has been given by IANA.

Re:Ip's?

[wfberg]

I though ARIN was in charge of IP's?

ARIN is a Regionnal Internet Registry, it only doles out IP's for North America. In Europe, there's RIPE, then there's APNIC for Asia-Pacific, LACNIC for Latin America and AfriNic for Africa (the latest RIR).

The RIRs have handled IP and AS address allocation since before ICANN existed. While ICANN is officially (to some) at the top of the hierarchy, the RIRs don't really need ICANN. For that matter, nobody really needs ICANN - if the entire staff of ICANN were to go on holiday for 2 years, scant anyone would notice. In fact, I'm not entirely sure they have been working for the past few years at all.