ICANN Meeting Passes on .com, .xxx decisions 110
Rob writes "As the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers wound up its annual meeting in
Vancouver yesterday it was inactions that were still causing all the controversy. Major
decisions on the .com and .xxx domains had been postponed until next year, as the domain
name management body seeks to balance the interests of governments
and commercial domain name organizations."
christmas present xxx (Score:2, Informative)
The real reason (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, and since it's getting slow already, here's the article:
ICANN meeting passes on .com, .xxx decisions
5th December 2005
By Kevin Murphy in Vancouver
As the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers wound up its annual meeting in Vancouver yesterday it was inactions that were still causing all the controversy.
Major decisions on the .com and .xxx domains had been postponed until next year, as the domain name management body seeks to balance the interests of governments and commercial domain name organizations.
During a public forum on Saturday, domain registrars voiced concerns over the proposed settlement between ICANN and VeriSign Inc, which would give VeriSign a five-year extension to its .com registry contract and the ability to raise prices 7% a year.
And proponents of the .xxx domain said their proposals to launch a porn-only address has been turned into a political football by ICANN's governmental advisors, a charge not being strenuously denied by ICANN or governments.
"The very few governments that have written to ICANN, with the possible exception of the US, are not opposed to our proposal on substantive grounds," said Stuart Lawley, president of would-be .xxx operator ICM Registry Inc.
"The ICM application is being held hostage in a dispute between ICANN and the GAC," he added, referring to ICANN's Government Advisory Committee, which has members from dozens of international governments.
Lawley had arrived here working on the assumption that ICANN's board would approve .xxx on Sunday. However, it was pulled from the agenda at the eleventh hour after the GAC asked for more time to review the .xxx proposal.
"Some governments are concerned with the content of .xxx itself, then there are those concerned about process," GAC chair Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, a senior Malaysian telecommunications regulator, said in an interview with ComputerWire.
Members of the GAC "are just trying to understand the processes ICANN took" he said. Some had assumed that because a proposal to offer .xxx from ICM was rejected in 2000, that it would also be thrown out this time, he said.
There's a bigger political picture too. Following the recent World Summit on the Information Society, a UN meeting on internet governance, governmental interest in the ICANN process has been reignited.
"In some respects, this discussion about .xxx is a proxy for the renewed attention governments are paying to ICANN," ICANN president Paul Twomey told us.
WSIS created a document called the Tunis Agenda, which promised to leave existing internet management bodies including ICANN essentially untouched, while also recognizing the roles government can play.
"It's not unimaginable that some governments went into this GAC meeting with their own interpretation of Tunis Agenda," Tarmizi said. "There were those who saw the Tunis Agenda being a statement of political will for change to take place, there were some who said it just reaffirmed what we had already being saying."
While Tarmizi would not be drawn on which governments are demanding the extra scrutiny of
So, let's review... (Score:5, Informative)
No, wait, we don't want ICANN to be run -like- the United Nations. Okay.
So, ICANN has already passed decisions on the major resolutions of interest until next year, and instead is now the subject of political tugs of war, so much so that nothing is being accomplished except idle banter between politicians, committees and private industry.
I'd say that it's already being run like the UN! =)
Re:Seeking to balance the interests of who? (Score:3, Informative)
ICANN also has the money to market themselves as necessary, whereas I don't have the money to market that they really aren't necessary. This is why I work slowly trying to convince individuals, who as a group are more powerful than the wealthiest advertiser. That is the free market at work
Domains cannot be influenced by the free market, as you would either have so many domains that you would have search google every time you wanted to find a website, or everyone would be so lazy that there would only be one. It is important that there are some rules determining what a domain can represent, and that there is a collection of people who are willing to debate propriety of creating or redefining a new domain.
Interesting -- I already use Google more than I use the address bar. In between those two I use my bookmarks. Google has blown up in popularity because there are ALREADY too many domain names to recall them. If you want someone to remember your domain name, you either ask them to bookmark it (online) or you print the proper one on your business card. The person doing EITHER action doesn't care if you are
If it was left up to the free market, the chances are that any rules that may be created would be haphazard or confusing, or we would be left with a chaotic mess without any rules at all.
How so? Why would ANY company want chaos and confusion? In my experience, companies do what they do in order to increase their profit, and that means getting along with what consumers desire. I don't see how ICANN reduces confusion in any way. If a bunch of ISPs wanted to offer domain names that others don't want, then the market will make the decision to run those ISPs out of business. In fact, this has already occurred.
You cannot expect the free market to sort out the problems of the pensions crisis in Britain, or to regulate the monopoly of only-just-privatised companies like National Rail, Royal Mail or BT.
Actually, the pensions crises in every country comes from the fact that the currency they are based in is being debased, and that the companies that invested in the pensions are finding themselves uncompetitive because of those pensions. Let the individual decide how to save for the future, don't mandate it through social security or "force the employer to offer pensions." In fact, the pensions of private businesses came out of the desire to avoid taxes, not out of a competitive atmosphere.
If they don't regulate it, then who will? And who would enforce all of these newly determined free-market solutions? I certainly can't be bothered to spend my Sunday afternoons on the problem.
Yet your purchases regulate the free-market solution. If you like something, you buy it. If you don't, you don't buy it. Companies that provide a solution you like, and offer it at a competitive price, and service and support it in the long run are generally the ones that last the longer. Companies that try for rock bottom prices and offer terrible service get run out of business.
The big fear for many is that one company, such as AOL or Microsoft, could all of a sudden control the majority of the Internet and start shutting out smaller ISPs and businesses. Yet the way the Internet is built -- millions of subnetworks tied together, sometimes with two or three backbones -- makes it virtual
.xxx already exists (Score:3, Informative)
The ICRA [icra.org] (formerly know as RSAC) defines a meta tag that allows a web site to indicate the level of violence, nudity, etc. that is on a page, or a site, or a directory of a site. It is easy, unbiased, and self-reporting. Internet Explorer [icra.org] supports it. I don't know if any other browsers do. All of the off-the-shelf parental control programs support it. But I don't see any sites adding these labels to their pages. Why not?
Maybe I should email the search engines and ask them to support it in their searches. Google already has a safety setting in the image search.