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oct 27 2005:
here's some more background on this.
my summary of the background (I'm not totally sure about all this):
Before: DNS is one of the few centralized things about the internet so everyone wants to control it. ICANN was created under questionable circumstances and since then has been accused many times of lack of transparency and of being controlled by large corporate interests [1]. The US government also has had final veto power over ICANN's decisions. According to a memorandum of understanding between the US and ICANN, the US was supposed to hand over the reins to ICANN in Sep 2006.
Recently: the US government influenced the .xxx domain decision of ICANN at the behest of US voters. Then, going back on the previous plan, the US government recently announced that we had decided not to relinquish control to ICANN. The international community decided that it doesn't trust the U.S. to run DNS perpetually, and now they're having a meeting to discuss this.
details:
another article about this with more background:
also note that many people were pretty upset about this:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1833928,00.asp
this guy knows more about it than me:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1833928,00.asp
my recommendations: I don't know what to recommend. Sounds like both ICANN and the U.S. are abusing their power. The U.S. probably should have let other internet community institutions control DNS rather than accepting ICANN in the first place. Barring that, it should have not interfered with ICANN and should have kept to the plan of reliquishing control. Since the U.S. has shown it's willingness to use any power it is given in a unilateral way, I think the rest of the world would be foolish to let this slide -- something must be done. However, I think the concerns that the U.N. would take this opportunity to regulate further are also justified.
Luckily, despite DNS quasi-centralization, any individual can instruct their computer to obey alternate DNS registries rather than the ICANN-endorsed ones. So if we really all get fed up we can do that. My bet's on http://www.opennic.unrated.net/.
Summary:
ICANN has abused people's trust. The U.S. government abused people's trust. The world is correct in not standing for this. The U.N. might overregulate. Yay for opennic.
[1] see for example http://www.icannwatch.org/icann4beginners.shtml results from a few years ago from Google:site:slashdot.org+ICANN, for example http://slashdot.org/yro/02/03/18/191255.shtml?tid=95 and http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/06/17/171217.shtml?tid=126&tid=95.
