Re: NTIA will control the root name servers?

["John Palmer (NANOG Acct)" <nanog () adns net>]

Already entire nations are dropping ICANN. China for one and now
Turkey.


Istanbul, June 23, 2005

A Top Level Domain (TLD) system has been launched in Turkey as the result of an alliance between the Turkish 
Informatics Association
(TBD) and Unified Identity Technology (UNIDT), officials announced on Wednesday.

Top Level Domain is the portion of a traditional domain name that comes after the dot. The generic Top Level Domains 
(gTLDs) are:
.com, .net and .org, the other type of TLDs include the country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD), which are assigned to 
all countries
and their dependencies such as .tr for Turkey.

Top Level Domains (TLD) will be put up for sale by Turkish Internet service providers, Turkish Informatics Association 
Chairman
Turhan Mentes said.

Mentes said the deal with UNIDT might offer new possibilities for Turkish corporations, as they will be free to use 
their own names
as domain names on the Internet.

Access to TLDs is supported by a federation called Public-Root, which emerged due to shortcomings in the existing 
Internet
infrastructure and monopolistic tendencies, Mentes said.

TLDs also single out search results, instead of hundreds or thousands of results one gets when using the search engines 
on ordinary
servers.

Mentes said Public-Root supports the existing Internet domains and one of the 13 root servers worldwide is located in 
Ankara.

Taken from http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=16484
(Registration required to access full article)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <ops.lists () gmail com>
To: "John Levine" <johnl () iecc com>
Cc: <nanog () nanog org>; <deepak () ai net>
Sent: Saturday, July 02, 2005 9:18 PM
Subject: Re: NTIA will control the root name servers?



On 2 Jul 2005 11:56:07 -0000, John Levine <johnl () iecc com> wrote:
> ICANN's leadership has long claimed and probably believed that the DOC
> would eventually cut them free. Of course other governments have never
> been thrilled that the root belongs to the US Gov't, but treatment of
> country domains has in practice carefully avoided antagonizing
> governments, dating back to the Haiti redelegation in the Postel era.
>
> The DOC is merely saying "don't hold your breath."  Given ICANN's less
> than stellar record, nobody should be surprised.

I at least kind of expected this.. and the language in that paper is
heavily geared towards "status quo".  So far what we have is a lot of
people who dont like icann, or perhaps have got disillusioned with it
for various reasons, sounding off on the IP list and elsewhere .. and
a lot of comment on various ops and public policy lists.

What worries me is the tendency among several governments to send in
submissions to the WSIS/WGIG process in support of greater government
involvement and/or oversight in the process (which is not necessarily
a bad thing) but quoting a lot of wrong reasons, and [conveniently?]
forgetting the difference domain names and IP addresses on a fairly
regular basis

However governments are going to sooner or later get themselves a
stake in this process - though hopefully not by the almost anarchical
means being suggested so far.   Will be very tough to fight that -
especially as the language in the paper also leaves the door open for
more government involvement, and recognizes the fact that for several
governments, ccTLD is [or has become, once this brouhaha started] a
sovereignity issue.

Someone have any idea for a workable compromise that bridges the
current ITU positions with the status quo?  Answers that wont work and
have been fairly freely bandied about -  "get rid of ICANN" and "damn
the ITU", or various more polite and diplomatic variants of those ..

-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists () gmail com)