US Government Withdraws IANA Contract From ICANN

mbone writes "The 'no cost' contract between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN over hosting the Internet Assigned Names and Number Authority (IANA) was supposed to be re-let this March. Now, it has been withdrawn, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) says that 'we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community.' This is a pretty stunning vote of no confidence in ICANN by the U.S. government, on the eve of the 43rd ICANN meeting in Costa Rica. Speculation is that this is related to the attempts of the ITU-T to take over Internet governance, but it also could be over the new global top level domains. I am sure we will be hearing a lot more about this in the weeks to come."

Comments

ICANN's corruption finally has consequences

[Arrogant-Bastard]

ICANN has been rolling out TLDs in order to profit its core constituency: the registrars.

Nobody needed .xxx -- except the registrar who pushed it and is now using extortion tactics to pressure people into buying domains in it, e.g. "get yours...before someone else does".

Nobody needed .info -- what, domains in other TLDs don't contain "information"? (Well...alright...spammers needed it, and quickly overran it. It's been a best practice in anti-spam engineering to block *.info and whitelist what you need for many years.) But registrars stood to profit, especially from the spammers buying domains by the thousands, so it was created.

Nobody needed .biz -- because we already had .com. But it was a chance to sell the same thing twice, always a great business opportunity for registrars, so ICANN made it happen.

And nobody needs hundreds of additional TLDs, either. There is no clamor of voices among the billion people on the Internet for .pepsi or .google or .dell.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the majority of domains in existence today are used for abusive purposes: spam, phishing, typosquatting, search engine manipulation, etc. Yet ICANN wants to do whatever it can to explode the number, to keep the cash registers ringing at the registrars.

What ICANN could be doing -- but isn't -- is to reign in the epidemic abuses. There are registrars that are owned by known spammers, for example. Another thing it could be tackling are domain confiscations (by the USG) without due process: ICANN can and should push back hard against that. But none of this will happen: ICANN is corrupt to the bone, a textbook example of regulatory capture, therefore it will do whatever maximizes the profits of its masters.