andy,
ICANN won't expel someone for raising issues in a thoughtful way - your message
is certainly to the point of one complex area of discourse. There are several
scenarios that would lead to a .eu - an obvious one being the adoption of .eu
on the 3166-1 list by the ISO committee that maintains 3166.
vint
At 06:35 PM 8/12/2000 +0100, Andy Fletcher wrote:
As a non-US person I get very concerned about lobby groups attempting to
influence address space assignments. The only reason for IANA (and ICANN) to
exist is to co-ordinate the address space, protocol numbering and name space
assignments for ENGINEERING purposes.
If US based lobby organisations have an impact on number or naming assignments
then it is nothing less that an attempt to coerce the rest of the world into
North-American ldeals, morals and prejudices.
IANA and ICANN only have power through the consent of the other users of the
Internet. If they play political games then they will very quickly lose
credibility and other bodies may try to perform the same functions.
Consider the present situation with top level domains. There is argument with
the EU TLD. Officially ICANN has no position on the matter because as of March
there was no formal application but it would appear that ICANN would oppose
this citing the reason that the EU is not an ISO country. Who gives them the
right to do this? - themselves. It also appears that the US Department of
Commerce still controls the root servers, hardly an independent body.
If the EU Council of Ministers get annoyed enough with the situation there is
no reason why they couldn't run their own root servers and issue a directive
that all EU based organisations should add a line to the DNS cache. Initially
there would be chaos in this name space but eventually all the major ISPs
around the world would add the .EU servers to their cache records.
This action would weaken overnight the control ICANN has on the name space
especially when other registries realise that they no longer have to pay money
to ICANN to maintain root servers (another bone of contention at the moment).
Other TLDs will only come into being if they can get their records added into
a good proportion of the name servers.
I am not sure if this would be a good thing to happen. It would certainly make
the net an interesting place in which the sites you could find would depend on
the DNS servers you used and you could get two different sites with the same
name. On the other hand it would reduce the power of any single country to
control the system.
I suppose ICANN will expel me from the At-Large membership now.
Andy
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