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.ly Mess: The Wages of Obsessive Secrecy
posted by michael on Friday April 16 2004, @10:45AM
In Dr Hosni Tayeb and the case of the disappearing Internet, The Register's Kieren McCarthy sheds as much light as there seems to be to shed on the murky, murky situation surrounding the vanishing .ly domain.
After recounting what he was able to find out -- it reads like about half a spy story, with the good bits missing -- Mr. McCarthy persuasively concludes that the .ly affair is due in part to the behavior of the managers and would-be managers of .ly, and in part ot IANA's secretive ways"
So where do we stand? It's impossible to tell. Dr Tayeb appears to have a legitimate claim to the Libyan domain but the organisation in charge - IANA - is known to be talking to another party. However, IANA refused to change the .ly nameservers for that company because of the Catch-22 situation that it is not registered as the official owner - the official owner being a company that no longer exists.
Mr Luheshi is refusing to answer questions left on his phone and sent through email. Dr Tayeb has equally not responded to emails and his phone contact numbers do not work. Meanwhile, ICANN and IANA refuse to disclose any details of the redelegation or even if they are willing to step in to end the impasse.
In short, it is a complete mess and should raise some very serious questions over how authority in the Internet's infrastructure is decided. It is also, again, a damning indictment against ICANN culture of secrecy which has meant that no one - not even those that are claiming ownership of the domain - know what is going on.
Should a squabble between owners lead to an entire country's Internet presence disappearing? Clearly not. And once the problem has finally been resolved, ICANN would do well to make space at its next meeting to discuss what lessons can be learnt from this whole sorry saga.
I'd say, begin by officially docketing every redelegation request, noting date and source. What possible harm could this do?
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.ly Mess: The Wages of Obsessive Secrecy
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As far as I could tell during the time I was on ICANN's board ICANN had no objective process, no objective procedures, and no objective criteria to deal with ccTLD redelegations. Rather, it appeared to be highly subjective and seemingly based on personal contacts made by ICANN's travel-loving "staff".
ICANN - or is it IANA? - which is a private California Corporation, is standing in loco parentis over ccTLD matters that seem to most observers to have some relationship to national sovereigns.
Except of course for the United States, which simply walked around ICANN - or is it IANA? - with regard to the redelegation of .us.
These redelegation decisions amount to e-recognition of sovereign countries. That's not something that ICANN is equipped to do.
Nor is the US Department of Commerce, from whom ICANN has the purchase order to perform "the IANA function" an appropriate body to engage in e-recognition of countries. That job in the US more appropriately belongs to the US Department of State - and ICANN has no contract with that body.
ICANN's gobbledygook language about how ccTLDs are to be run for the interest of local communitys is nothing but a NewSpeak phrase that says that ICANN - or is it IANA? - gets to say who on the internet gets to be a country.
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