IP: Internet name body set for landmark vote this week (include $.25 tax?? )

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

    --------------------------------------------------------------
    This story was printed from Tech Update,
    located at http://techupdate.zdnet.com.
    --------------------------------------------------------------
    
Internet name body set for landmark vote this week
By Bernhard Warner, Reuters
June 25, 2002 6:51 AM PT


LONDON (Reuters) - The organization that oversees the Internet's vast
domain-name system is looking to face down grass-roots protesters at its
annual meeting in Bucharest this week as it tries to gain greater
government-level acceptance.

Starting on Wednesday in the Romanian capital, the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will chart its future, one that could see
individual Net users getting squeezed out in favor of politicians and
businessmen. 

The focus on ICANN, which decides how domain names such as www.reuters.com
get doled out to individuals and businesses, has grown immensely in the past
two years as the global Internet population has grown to more than 425
million by some estimates.

A controversial proposal floated by ICANN Chief Executive Stuart Lynn is due
for a vote on Thursday that could end the appointment of representatives of
technical and citizens groups to the ICANN board and limit board members to
representatives of business and government.

Lynn has said the inclusion of politicians could give the body more
authority with national governments and improve its ability to raise funds.

A separate, equally controversial, motion would impose a direct 25-cent tax
on all new domain-name registrations to fund the organization.

Caught in a tug-of-war
Grass-roots activists argue that limiting the role of private users will
tilt an already lopsided balance of power that favors Western government and
business interests.

"I don't think governments are needed (in the ICANN process), nor at this
time are they organized in a manner that would make their representation
easy," said Michael Froomkin, an outspoken ICANN critic and professor at the
University of Miami School of Law.

"The officials who turn up to ICANN meetings are the ones who heard about
the Internet first, not necessarily the people who make, or should make,
Internet policy." 

Politicians, particularly in Europe and South Africa, are clamoring for more
control of the body, suggesting they would be more fit to assign domain
names to individuals and businesses just as they did with telephone numbers
in days gone by. 

Another source of pressure on ICANN is the U.S. Congress. U.S. lawmakers,
led by Senator Conrad Burns, have promised heightened oversight of the
organization before it decides on whether to give ICANN full control of the
Internet's domain-name system.

EU weighs in
One of ICANN's most vocal critics, the European Union, insists ICANN must
remain a technical, standards-setting body and keep out of public policy
issues regarding the Internet.

"Governments are responsible for public policy, not ICANN," the EU
Telecommunications Council said in a recent white paper.

EU officials also said they would prefer that the U.S. Department of
Commerce, the government body that spawned ICANN in 1998, relinquish control
of the root-server system, a master control database of Internet sites that
ensures Internet traffic gets to its intended destination.

The fear is that in the wrong hands the enormous database could be mined to
determine all comings and goings on the Internet.

Although there is no evidence that this has happened, the issue has
attracted added attention in recent months as law enforcement officials seek
to shore up defenses against feared acts of cyber-terrorism.

In need of dot-org-anisation
The wrangling over who will run ICANN is impeding progress with other vital
ongoing issues needed to make the Internet a truly global medium, critics
say. 

For years, ICANN has been grappling with how to institute official standards
for non-Arabic numbers and non-Latin letters to enable them to be accessed
by any type of browser. The failure to resolve the matter has drawn further
complaints that ICANN's cumbersome bureaucracy penalizes its under-served,
non-Western constituents.

"I really think it's time to broaden the input of different stakeholders.
It's time to include other, non-Western parts of the world in the process,"
said Maurice Wessling, director of Dutch cyber advocacy group Bits of
Freedom. 

Also on the agenda this week is a competitive run-off for the right to
manage the global dot-org domains for non-commercial organizations.

Eleven companies, all from the U.S. and Europe, are vying for the lucrative
business, which currently involves oversight of a database for more than 2.5
million organizations.

"It is a profitable business," said Stuart Marsden, technical director of
Unity Registry, a Zurich-based bidder.

The European applicants are confident that ICANN, wishing to suppress
earlier criticisms that it is too U.S.-centric, will be more likely to award
a non-U.S. business the contract.

Andrew Tsai, chief executive officer of London-based Global Name Registry,
said the company would play up its international roots as well as its track
record in administering the dot-name global domain.

"There is a shift at ICANN toward true global representation. That's a huge
advantage for us," Tsai said.

ICANN is expected to award the contract at the end of August, officials
said. 

For archives see:
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/