ICANN Meets Annan

CypherOz writes "The Australian reports a meeting between ICANN chief Twomey and Kofi Annan and the role the UN may play in the naming game. " We've talked about this before as well.

Re:Cite Your Sources

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not the original poster, but this is a big deal. The Iraqi oil-for-food program was by far the largest amount of money that the UN had ever handled. It dwarfed the rest of the UN's budget.

(That said, I doubt Putin or Chirac were bribed. Like Bush, they had their own strong interests in the matter of Iraq and its government.)

Here are a few references. You can find plenty more on news.google.com :

'Massive scam' in Iraqi oil program [news.com.au]

Get to heart of UN role in Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal [newsday.com]

Annan Pushes UN Council Members on Iraq Oil Scandal [reuters.com]

3,000 UN Staffers Probed [nypost.com]

Bulgaria's President Questioned over Iraq Oil Scandal [212.91.166.50]

Re:Where have we heard this before

[Fastolfe]

The rightful code for Britain should be GB. But the British snatched UK, which should have gone to Ukraine.

To be fair, these codes are defined by ISO at a level that has nothing to do with the Internet. DNS merely exposes those country codes in the DNS for use by those ISO-defined entities.

Re:Funny Quote

[pe1rxq]

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ [zakon.org]

The internet has been international since 1973.
During the seventies and eighties a whole bunch of non military networks was interconnected that were not sponsored by the US.

The internet we came to know has very little to do with the original ARPA project besides its start and name.

Jeroen

Re:Grumble

[C10H14N2]

Last I checked, the United Nations never forced German law on anyone. It's just a complete misreading of the UN to view it as imposing one nation's laws on another. It's a negotiating table and all parties must assent. That's the whole reason the Kyoto protocol and the whole UNFCCC has had such difficulties. There's no such thing as the UN foisting anyone's idea of anything on anyone unless they agree to it. Peacekeepers must be invited. Weapons Inspectors must be given permission. All of the enforcement tools the UN has are only as strong as the member states who choose to participate in those actions. The U.N. is not a superstate. That's it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness.

That said, there is a great similarity between the structure of ICANN and that of, say, the security council. Leadership is rotational on an international scale. ICANN is not just some static cabal hiding away behind LAX machinating on world domination. That common portrayal seems to come from those who wouldn't recognize ICANN if they were standing on the corner of Mindanao and Admiralty facing north and looking upward 50 feet.