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

Somebody had to.

[Rob T Firefly]

ICANN't believe it.

.....sorry.

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

[4solarisinfo]

I do not know if they should be renewing it for 5 years, though, as that is an eternity in Internet time.

Actually, I think if it's going to be renewed, it SHOULD be an 'eternity in Internet time'. Standards change often enough, and ICANN is one of the few stabilizing factors out there. It's one thing to keep pushing the technology envelope, but working on large systems with a long lead time You really learn to appreciate that if nothing stays the same, you can never finish.

Lovely!

[cashman73]

These are the brilliant geniuses that brought us the completely useless domains of .aero, .museum, and .coop, not to mention the spam-haven of .biz! I wonder what sort of cr*p they can bring out in the next five years? ;-)

Re:Lovely!

[Compulsion]

.crp most likely

Government Cost

[spacemky]

I found this paragraph in the contract interesting:

The Contractor shall furnish the necessary personnel, material, equipment, services, and facilities to perform the following requirements without any cost to the Government. On or after the effective date of this purchase order, the Contractor may establish and collect fees from third parties (i.e, other than the Government) for the functions performed under this purchase order, provided the fee levels are approved by the Contracting Officer before going into effect, which approval shall not be withheld unreasonably and provided the fee levels are fair and equitable and provided the aggregate fees charged during the term of this purchase order do not exceed the cost of providing the requirements of this purchase order. The Government will review the Contractor's accounting data at anytime fees are charged to verify that the above conditions are being met.

ICANN 2

[Anonymous Coward]

ICANN needs to address domainers who acquire domain names essentially for ransom. Two months ago, while trying to purchase a cool domain name that had expired more than 45 days prior, we were told we had to submit a backorder request, which we did. On about the 40th day, we were told the then current registror had not yet released the domain name (they had just started a 5 day process of release). But the domain name never was released. Instead, a known domainer had somehow managed to get the domain name on the 5th day, just prior to release. What is annoying is that the domainer is also an ICANN approved registror, which makes one question the legalities involved.

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.