ICANN fails (again)

Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on March 6, 2006

ICANN has failed, yet again, to remove VeriSign as a single point of failure for a huge portion of the DNS, thus adding weight to China's moves to create their own top level domains.

The DNS is the system used for mapping human-readable names such as "connect.educause.edu" into numeric addresses such as 69.33.160.71 which are used by routers and gateways to direct traffic over the Internet. The system is run by ICANN, which critics have long suggested is too American-centric and too Anglo-centric. In particular the ICANN has a long-standing and entrenched relationship with VeriSign to run the *.com namespace. VeriSign in turn has numerous classified and overt US Department of Defence contracts, which critics suggest give the US government too much sway over it.

Personally I think the current situation is broken, and unless ICANN can fix it (which it shows no sign of), then the current system needs to fall apart as fast as possible so we can build a better system. Most of the worlds Internet users don't live in America and don't speak English, so why should this country and language be privileged over any others, particularly in ways that are user-visible? I agree that URLs and email addresses are _much_ more convenient when composed of characters found on our keyboards. Unfortunately that also holds in Japan, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Tibet.

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		ICANN fails (again) Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on March 6, 2006 ICANN has failed, yet again, to remove VeriSign as a single point of failure for a huge portion of the DNS, thus adding weight to China's moves to create their own top level domains. The DNS is the system used for mapping human-readable names such as "connect.educause.edu" into numeric addresses such as 69.33.160.71 which are used by routers and gateways to direct traffic over the Internet. The system is run by ICANN, which critics have long suggested is too American-centric and too Anglo-centric. In particular the ICANN has a long-standing and entrenched relationship with VeriSign to run the *.com namespace. VeriSign in turn has numerous classified and overt US Department of Defence contracts, which critics suggest give the US government too much sway over it. Personally I think the current situation is broken, and unless ICANN can fix it (which it shows no sign of), then the current system needs to fall apart as fast as possible so we can build a better system. Most of the worlds Internet users don't live in America and don't speak English, so why should this country and language be privileged over any others, particularly in ways that are user-visible? I agree that URLs and email addresses are _much_ more convenient when composed of characters found on our keyboards. Unfortunately that also holds in Japan, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Tibet. china \| Domain Name System (DNS) \| ICANN \| Japan \| Russia \| VeriSign Stuart's blog Login or register to post comments 3616 reads
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