ICANN News: US to continue control of Internet
Some interesting and important developments related to the Internet
have been going on lately, but you won’t see this unless you follow the
tech-press or use non-U.S. sources.
The big news is that the US government “has said it intends to maintain
its role in overseeing how the internet is run” and “European internet
registries are preparing a fight-back.” See:
- US holds
onto key internet role. BBC News July 1, 2005 - US
govt interference is a big deal, says Europe.
By Kieren McCarthy. The Register, July 11, 2005
The BBC notes that the US had previously indicated that it would transfer this
responsibility to ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers) but had changed its policy “in response to growing security
threats and the importance of the internet for business.”
The BBC also says, “While most people will not notice any
difference when they use the internet, the declaration puts the Bush
administration at odds with those who want to reduce US influence on the
net.”
The Register article reports that, at a meeting of worldwide
top-level domain owners, half indicated that they wished to have the ability to make
changes to their own domains by themselves and none expressed a willingness
to let the US government authorise those changes on their behalf.
For backgound, see:
- ICANN (the official ICANN site)
- ICANNWatch (an independent site that
offers commentary and criticism)
ICANNWatch has a nice background
document on why this is important. It says
in part:
Despite being famously decentralized and un-hierarchical, the Internet
relies on an underlying centralized hierarchy built into the domain name
system (DNS). Domain names (such as “www.icannwatch.org”) are the unique
identifiers that people depend on to route e-mail, find web pages, and
connect to other Internet resources. The need to enforce uniqueness,
that is, to prevent two people from attempting to use the exact same
domain name, creates a need for some sort of body to monitor or allocate
naming. However, control over the DNS confers substantial power over the
Internet. Whoever controls the DNS decides what new families of
“top-level” domain names can exist (e.g., new suffixes like .xxx or
.union) and how names and essential routing numbers will be assigned to
websites and other Internet resources.