| At Large Membership and Civil Society Participation in ICANN |
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Questioning Innovation with Bob Parsons
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The main article makes the clam that ICANN was created: "to make sure that the domain name system and the various registries operate fair and equitably"
That was not ICANN's purpose at all - ICANN was to provide technical coordination in order to ensure that certain aspects of the internet (such as the upper layers of DNS and IP address allocation) operated in a stable and dependable way.
ICANN was never intended (except in the minds of a few focused business interests) as a means to impose particular business models and modes of business that favor a few selected "stakeholders" at the expense of those majority of internet users who were never permitted to be "stakeholders" at all
The idea that ICANN has introduced "free enterprise" into the business of buying and selling names does not stand even the most mild scrutiny - ICANN has imposed a particular business model and the only free enterprise is for those who are willing to conform their practices to that model, all other business models are excluded. That's not "free enterprise" any more than were the Soviet 5 Year Plans of the 1930's.
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There are genuine issues with domain names longer than 3 letters -- not with the Internet infrastructure itself, but with clueless people who write programs that "validate" e-mail or Web addresses (e.g., when they're input into a registration form on a Web site or software program) and insist that they're incorrect if you try to use an address with .name, .info, etc. This would seem to call for "tech evangelism" of such developers, similar to that which the Mozilla browser developers do with clueless developers who turn away anybody using their browser.
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ICANN has to a large extent preserved and entrenched the Versign dominance rather than mitigating it.
As for registrars - they are largly nothing more than resellers. One could argue in the same vein, and with the same ultimate fultility, that lots of gasoline stations on many street corners reduces the dominance of the few oil companies.
ICANN has institutionalized a $6 per name per year cash flow into Verisign - even though that amount bears no resemblance to actual costs, and the ICANN contract has no provisions that allow economic or other pressures to drive down that fee.
So, to say that ICANN has "broken up" NSI or Verisign is rather a misnomer.
In addition - what gives ICANN the authority to say who may and who may not enter the top level domain business - that kind of power is usually found in close proximity to the phrase "restraint of trade". The US Dept of Commerce, which is trying to create ever more distance between itself and ICANN, has not been forthcoming about where it finds the legal authority to confer upon ICANN the right to restrain trade.
It takes a Procrustean kind of bending and pulling to fit ICANN's regulation of DNS business practices into the phrase "technical coordination".
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"Second hand reports"?
I trip over javascript and php based restrictions on domain names and e-mail address on web forms all the time.
When I was on the board I pointed out to the board several times that there is lots of deployed code out there in the net that impairs the use TLDs of more than three characters.
So I am surprised that ICANN finds this issue to be a surprise.
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Can you (or anyone) point to some existing .travel concerns? BTW, how does one 'register' one's domain name with the USPTO? I get the new.net press releases (which show up about once every three months) so I know that StarGate has joined new.net's very slowly growing list of resellers. If it's not too much trouble could you please also show me where I can find registerfly on the ICANN accredited list [icann.org]? Otherwise I guess I (or anyone) could become xegisterfly and become the subject of new.net's next press release. -g
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