US Govt Wants to Control ICANN?

blankmange writes "ZDNet is covering a new piece of legislation that may be introduced by Sen. Conrad Burns that would give the US government more control of ICANN - the independent corporation that controls the domain-naming system of the internet. 'In a statement released two days before a Senate subcommittee is scheduled to hold hearings on the global body, Burns said the change was necessary because ICANN has exceeded its authority, does not operate in an open fashion, and is dangerously unaccountable to Internet users, businesses and other key interest groups.'"

Re:Dilemma

[gorilla]

I don't think the government every really did it. Jon Postel did, and he was paid by the government to do so, but it was really just Jon doing the right thing, and the government not having any interest in it.

Re:That's the catch with ICANN

[marxmarv]

Check me if I'm wrong here, but I very clearly remember that when NSI started charging for domain names (I also still remember when they were free) they charged $35/year. Not $50.

Originally they charged $50 per year, $15 of which was deposited into the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund for the use of the National Science Foundation. That $15 was found an unauthorized tax in 1998 in Thomas v. Network Solutions [aira.org].

-jhp

Re:dumbass americans

[neocon]

There are two problems with this post:

First off the popular vote `in most areas' didn't go for Gore, or he would have had more electoral votes. The total popular vote was very slightly more for Gore than for Bush, but this was because some of the very populous states, such as California went for Gore.

And this brings us to the actual reason for the Electoral College, which is very different from what you suggest in your post. The founders were quite rightly worried that a few large states would be able to control federal elections in such a way that smaller states would have no voice at all, so they reached a compromise. The existence of the Electoral College requires that a presidential candidate build a broad base of support accross a range of states, thus ensuring that he better represents the entire nation.

In the absence of the Electoral College, no presidential candidate would ever have incentive to listen to any but a few of the largest states -- and would be much more the president of New Yorkifornia than of the United States.

Re:"more control"?

[po8]

Nah. My DNS service right now is being provided by OpenNIC [unrated.net], which uses the standard technique: it resolves addresses that it owns first, and then falls back to looking things up in the standard root servers. Works fine, zero problems over many months so far. Were enough people to move to this or something like it, we could kill ICANN no prob.

Re:Internet isn't part of the US

[fatbastard10101]

Not only does this americanize the "Internet", but the corporate registry becomes insulated from "unacceptable" lawsuits.

The U.S. federal government (or any of its agencies, presumably including the Dept. of ICANN) cannot be sued unless they consent to it.

The same goes for any of the Sovereign States. That's the nature of sovereignity.

If you think there's little accountability now, wait until it's federalized.

Remember, access to your elected pol is cheap and a good investment. Prices start at $10k worth of free speech campaign contributions...

Re:Dubious

[n3bulous]

Good ideas. My only comments are:

1) Define Customer. If you are only going to get one domain, it requires you to exist as separate org entities. The domain name defines you, so something like mozilla.org under your plan would be mozilla.netscape.com. Mozilla.org would be owned by someone else and confusion would arise because people would go to mozilla.org looking for a browser.

(Mozilla.org was originally registered by JWZ, but I don't know if he did it in his name or Netscape's. He also had jwz.org at that point which would have prevented him from doing this.)

2) dove.com should be required to provide a list of alternate sites (name, brief description) the user may have been looking for, within reason. E.G., dove ice cream bars could could get listed at dove.com as an alternate by just asking.

3) Your renewal rule makes sense, but w/o renewal, who will maintain the domain databases? It costs too much money to maintain large, important servers for a company to be responsible for without some means to pay for the service.

Personally, I feel the gov't should have continued to maintain them in the public's interest. However, certain laws would need to be put in place to make sure other countries get fair and equal treatment.