March 8, 2002

8:34 AM

The president of ICANN, the organization that has been attempting to coordinate the Internet's domain name system, has suggested that the body virtually eliminate public participation and be more controlled by governments and corporations. If you're concerned, one thing you can do is join ICANN at Large.
posted by tranquileye (4 comments total)

I am not sure governments should handle the registry either. Look at the lost potential of the .us domain. India requires you to include numbers in a sub-domain of a top lever .ind.in domain name.
Who knows how important domains will be 5 years from now, but I do know that eliminating public participation is not the best thing to do.
posted by riffola at 9:56 AM on March 8, 2002

Oops that should be top level not top lever.
posted by riffola at 9:57 AM on March 8, 2002

While certainly not breaking news -- ICANN has been trying to maximize the commercialization of the DNS since its inception, following the trail blazed so well by Network Solutions when the NSF mandates expired -- I'll offer some resources for folks who are just now arriving at "the scene of the crime:"

ICANNWatch is a self-appointed watchdog, and has lots of useful information about what ICANN is up to.

The Register has plenty of reportage about ICANN, of varying veracity and bias. Most of it is fairly entertaining, though.

Rough Justice is a detailed assessment of one of the more controversial ICANN-related issues, the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy.

This opinion piece from ISP-Planet expresses somewhat coherently some of the concerns about ICANN and it's current direction.

While really good search is starting to diminish the importance of the DNS to the web, the web is just one portion of the net. It behooves us all to at least keep an eye on it.
posted by majick at 4:57 PM on March 8, 2002

In Australia, you have to have a registered business name (which costs about $130 every three years) or trademark before you can register a .com.au or .net.au domaine name (at about $125 a year) and nouns and/or generic words (like "butter" or "Windowscreen" or "Jonquil") have been totally off-limits until very recently when they were put in a stupid Auction which confuses everyone.

This is a little OT but I am making the point because it's so difficult to register a domain name in Australia, because they didn't want what happened in the US to happen here.

But if you are just a teenager with a weblog, you couldn't afford the process. They could have put out a name like .Oz which was for everyone but they seem to have no interest in doing that. The whole process is so stringent, it has held back the use of Australian Domains.
posted by lucien at 6:06 AM on March 13, 2002