The Politics of ICANN

dstates writes "The good news is that the Internet has become a central enough part of global life that politicians are starting to pay attention to the details of Internet management. The bad news is that the politicians are paying attention to the Internet. Politico.com has an interesting note on the politics surrounding the annual meeting of the The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which is opening its annual meeting in San Francisco today. While some people find it frightening that a US corporation controls name usage on the Internet, the prospect of a UN body assuming control raises its own concerns."

Comments

Better the int'l community, than strictly US.

[Torinir]

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It's an old adage that never seems to either go out of style or cease to be applicable.

Putting all of the Internet naming eggs in the US basket is dangerous. With the strange goings on in US politics of late, and with the abuse by DHS/ICE, I can only see bad things coming in the future if the international community doesn't step up to the plate and offer something better.

I really don't have too much of an issue with a UN controlled ICANN clone. It's not like they can screw it up more than a Republican controlled ICANN. THAT is the scariest part.

Re:Better the int'l community, than strictly US.

[ElectricTurtle]

I have defended the United States' de facto control of internet policy for many years, but the unscrupulous and in fact unconstitutional and illegal actions by DHS/DOJ and other agencies in the last year or two has changed my perspective. We have lost the moral authority we once had to be impartial protectors of the internet, but the UN is not the answer. All the countries which already have filtering, censorship, tracking etc. will push that on an international level (which they already do, but the UN hasn't had any teeth to get it done), and even in a compromise between a free internet and a censored and tracked one, something still must necessarily be lost.

The internet needs to be decentralized to be protected. Distributed DNS solutions need to be pursued. Barring that, root servers should be controlled by each sovereign nation for each national TLD. This at least will give people choices.

Re:A fair way of doing things

[Spazmania]

1, 2 and 3 describe the state of the DNS exactly as it is today.

As for #4, why phase out anything?

Re:No difference.

[Xest]

Yes, I've seen many comments on Slashdot that letting the UN handle it would be countries like Iran could choose to have things censored, but that's complete and utter bollocks- how would Iran get consensus? The UN isn't based on what every country says goes, it's based on international consensus. There are also often attempts to discredit the UN's ability to handle this sort of thing by pointing to issues with the security council and so forth too.

But the problem is, that's also a load of complete and utter bollocks. The fact is that the UN already runs important international infrastructure just fine, so fine that it doesn't even break the news because it does it so well and so transparently most people aren't even aware. The UN has bodies which handle international telephony, international maritime standards, international airline standards, and international postage standards. It does this so that different countries systems can interoperate just fine, whatever the UNSC does is completely irrelevant as these bodies are run by completely different people in completely different places. It makes sense to add ICANN to this set off bodies which the UN already handles so well because the UN's track record of handling such things is thus far excellent, whilst the US' record with the internet is becoming ever worse- from small town US Judges ordering foreign company's domain names be seized through to government backed seizure of domain names, the US just isn't a trustworthy overseer of the internet anymore.

Re:No difference.

[DittoBox]

The UN put Libya on the Human Rights Council. They only suspended their involvement when Gaddafi started fucking over the people who asked for better government. I don't want the UN involved. At all.

A little consistency?

[ghjm]

So, let me get this straight. We're perfectly happy to have the ITU (which is a UN agency) in charge of international telephone calls, and we freak out when the US or any corporation tries to take control. But we're also perfectly happy to have ICANN (an unaccountable private corporation based in the US) in charge of domain names, and we freak out when the UN tries to take control.

Huh? Is it just a matter of knee-jerk response and "all change is bad," or is there something more to it than that?

For what it's worth, I think ICANN has been a disaster and something like ITU, or a new UN-sponsored agency, would be much better. We need a negotiated Internet equivalent of the ITRs, rather than the ad-hoc mess we have now.