Monday 2 July 2007

Total Domain Name

via BoingBoing, Aging the Internet Prematurely, One PDP at a Time by Wendy Seltzer

The paragraph picked by Cory Doctorow in BB is

To trust the market, ICANN must be willing to let new TLDs fail. Instead of insisting that every new business have a 100-year plan, we should prepare the businesses and their stakeholders for contingency. Ensuring the "stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems" should mean developing predictable responses to failure, not demanding impracticable guarantees of perpetual success. Escrow, clear consumer information, streamlined processes, and flexible responses to the expected unanticipated, can all protect the end-users better than the dubious foresight of ICANN's central regulators. These same regulators, bear in mind, didn't foresee that a five-day add-grace period would swell the ranks of domains with "tasters" gaming the loophole with ad-based parking pages.


I see two different points one from the post and another from the comment.

From the post:
Yet that's what it's doing by bureaucratizing the addition of new domain names: Asserting that no further experiments are possible; that the "show me the code" mode that built the Internet can no longer build enhancements to it. ICANN is unnecessarily ossifying the Internet's DNS at version 1.0, setting in stone a cumbersome model of registries and registrars, a pay-per-database-listing, semantic attachments to character strings, and limited competition for the lot.


Some one has said that intelligence is at the edge of the network. The initial "show me the code" attitude has created a global phenomenum which changes every aspects of our modern life. Killing this "show me the code" attitude will slow progress if not stop the innovation.

From the comment:
With the existing model, it would be nice if I could have clifford.eu. Can I have it? No? Is it because the reverend Alan Clifford in Norwich has it? No. Is it because another namesake, Alan Clifford, the BBC broadcaster in Nottingham has it? No. It is because it has been registered by Direct Electronics Inc which appears to be an American company. I wouldn't even mind this except that neither clifford.eu nor www.clifford.eu appears in DNS. So an American company is stopping me, an EU citizen, from obtaining the domain name I want, apparently not using it, and this is with the connivence of the registry authorised by the European commission. The whole thing stinks.


Internet has grown beyond just a USA property. It is time to hand over the ICANN to UN and let the global netizens figure out how we can use the Internet for the better of humankind.

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