ICANN CEO Wants To Make Progress On Leaving US Control 73
itwbennett writes: ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé hopes to make progress on preparations to take over running the world's central DNS servers from the U.S. government's National Telecommunications and Information Agency when the organization meets in London next week. 'I think this is a meeting where the ICANN community has to deal with the fact, the good fact, that its relationship with the U.S. government, which characterized its birth, its existence and growth, has now run its course,' Chehadé said.
Re:ICANN screwed up with the "at-large" board memb (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole thing doesn't make any sense at all. Let each country do it's own DNS as it sees fit and via treaty and alliances align those DNS records as they see fit. As long as the IP address work the DNS is nothing more than simplifying address entry with a gross corporatised delusion of economic value (marketing, marketing and more marketing, brand names, squatters, sex sells, hell it even sells domain names). At the end of the day it is still up to the individual user where the hell they point the browser in domain name lookup and the major ISPs haven't even started playing the DNS name game by forcefully pointing their customers at internal DNS servers with a new for sale yet again Domain name.
Re:ICANN screwed up with the "at-large" board memb (Score:3, Interesting)
Each country could.... which is sort of the reason for the country TLD code. There is even a ".us" domain for American addresses (not that it is used much, but it does exist). I suppose a country could have its DNS servers ignore .com or .mil TLD codes in favor of stuff done in its own borders, but then it wouldn't really be the internet either, would it? One way to accomplish that is to redirect .com to .com.us as is sometimes done with some other countries like .co.uk as the top level domain for UK-based businesses. It would make things confusing if it was unevenly implemented, but that is sort of the nature of the internet in the first place.
Besides, this whole thing isn't about domain names, but rather the allocation of IPv4 addresses and the big issue of IPv6 allocation. The USA got the lion share of IPV4 addresses because many American companies got them first, and back when nobody thought that there could possibly be more than four billion computers and devices on the internet, they were a whole lot more free with the allocation of the address space (like the local university where I live has a full Class-B IP block allocation... although I'm sure they've "given" a few Class-C blocks back to ICANN over the years). They don't even refer to them as Class-A, B, or C blocks any more either but rather in how many bits are in the "header", as in a /16 or a /24 block. IPv6 does the same thing.
If IP address allocation was done on a country by country basis, it would be pure confusion when computers try to connect to each other (also confusion if countries each implemented DNS records differently, but I digress on that point). The crazy thing is that the U.S. government was originally responsible for allocating both the IP addresses as well as domain names, which is how ICANN inherited the job.... as an organ of the U.S. federal government and later a California-based non-profit corporation. Other countries could invent their own version of the internet, but they wouldn't be participating on this particular network you are currently using to read this message.
If your country (presumably not the USA) wants to change that relationship, have its diplomats and political leaders negotiate something different with the U.S. government. It really is that simple, and I guess what this guy wants to do in this case too. America could give up the control it currently has in this regard, but when have you ever heard of a politician giving up political control over somebody else?