As a non-US person I get very concerned about lobby
groups attempting to influence address space assignments.
Why? The U.S. knows which moral standards are best for you, after all.
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.
So what else is new?
IANA and ICANN only have power through the consent
of the other users of the Internet.
The "other users of the Internet" are a small minority outside the U.S.
If they play political games then they will very
quickly lose credibility and other bodies may try
to perform the same functions.
How well would the Internet run with the U.S. chunk cut out of the picture?
Consider the present situation with top level domains.
The TLD issue is a joke.
I have a solution for that, too (surprised?): Set up a maximum of 676 TLDs
with names like .xaa, .xab, .xac, etc., and hash the second-level names to
one of the TLDs. Result: domain names are spread over nearly 700 TLDs,
instead of just two or three, and since any second-level name always hashes
to the same TLD, it is no longer necessary to specify the TLD explicitly.
The TLD has no real purpose from a logical standpoint, so why not just
eliminate it? It would be a lot easier to type just "disney" (which would
hash to disney.xdy) and "ibm" (which would hash to ibm.xim), than disney.com
and ibm.com.
There is argument with the EU TLD.
Europeans spend most of their time arguing, which is why they are
continually steamrollered by the U.S., which is busy implementing instead.
It also appears that the US Department of Commerce
still controls the root servers, hardly an independent body.
Maybe, but at least it keeps the servers stable. I shudder to think what
the Internet would be like if Italy were managing one server and Switzerland
another and Greece still another. Half the Internet would be inaccessible
half the time.
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.
There's no reason why Europe as a whole cannot become the leading economic
superpower in the world, what with 600 million skilled workers--but it never
seems to happen. They all spend too much time arguing to ever act
coherently as a group. And so the U.S. does it for them. At least someone
is doing it.
Initially there would be chaos in this name space ...
Initially meaning 50-70 years. Meanwhile the U.S. would be settled in six
months, and would squash the European initiative entirely decades before it
stabilized.
... but eventually all the major ISPs around the world
would add the .EU servers to their cache records.
Why? Almost all the sites they want to access are in the U.S. Europe is a
land of Net consumers, not Net producers.
This action would weaken overnight the control ICANN
has on the name space ...
That's what worries me.
I am not sure if this would be a good thing to happen.
It would not be a good thing. Can you use the same electrical plug in any
receptable in Europe yet? Hmm. The same currency? OK. How about the same
language? I give up.
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.
I have trouble with that already. And it would be great for censorship.
On the other hand it would reduce the power of any
single country to control the system.
Yes ... instead, twenty different countries would be controlling the system,
and you would get whatever managed to pass through all of their filters
still working--that is to say, nothing at all.