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)