Nothing is ever actually new under the sun.
More than 5 billion additional people will connect to the Internet in the next 20 years, and most of the newcomers will not speak English. This next generation will use the Internet in ways we cannot imagine, and its innovations will change the world.
But if the debate in Washington over the creation of new domain names goes the wrong way, Internet policy won’t help the free flow of speech online. The U.S. can help by having the courage to stay the course.
What Bloomberg is talking about is the reprisal of an old fight, and one that I fought.
At issue is the Internet’s crabbed naming system. Right now there are only 16 possible addresses in cyberspace to the right of the dot -- so-called generic top-level domains such as .com and .net -- that don’t refer to countries or territories, such as .jp or .uk. They all use the Latin alphabet. For the last six years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has been working to address the need for additional top-level domains while protecting brands and consumers around the world. ICANN, a private, nonprofit organization with an international board, is finally ready to go ahead and add to the number of generic top-level domain names -- including more names in non-Latin characters. The program is scheduled to start next week.
But it’s not that simple. After the U.S. Senate and House hearings about new domain names last month, the Federal Trade Commission warned ICANN that its “dramatic introduction” of new names “poses significant risks to consumers” by increasing the risk of online fraud, and would result in greater costs for businesses to protect their brands online. A series of letters from members of Congress has flooded into ICANN, all predicting doom if its plan proceeds. What’s going on?
That's simple: Congress is CONning people again -- what it usually does.
But ICANN is not immune from criticism here.
Let's look at what Bloomberg says:
ICANN operates by consensus, like many other Internet standard-setting organizations. Its processes take awhile, but ICANN brings together government representatives, businesspeople, academics and individuals. (I was a member of ICANN’s board of directors from 2005 to 2008.) ICANN’s goal is to take into account everyone’s interests while not letting any one sector dominate the proceedings.
Yeah, well, these procedures are anything but driven by facts in many cases, and never have been.
Back in the 1990s there was a desire for a bunch of new top-level domains. A big part of the reason was that NSI, a government contractor, controlled the process of getting domains into the system and charged monopolistic prices. At the time the people running the joint made dire predictions that opening up the "root" (the first part of a domain reading from the right -- that is, ".com" or whatever) to lots of entrants would break the domain system.
This was silly in the extreme and in fact after a fairly simple examination of the problem I declared that to be an intentional lie promulgated by a handful of people interested in maintaining their stranglehold of control. To prove it I, along with others, set up a series of "root" domain servers and we allowed anyone who had the ability and desire to list a top-level prefix to do so, provided that they did not collide with any other existing prefix we knew about. In other words rather than try to restrict innovation and play "corporatist" we were instead "inclusionist."
ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 1997 -- The Enhanced Domain Name System (eDNS) today announced the consensus agreement for the development and implementation of an alternative infrastructure for creation of additional top level domains (TLDs) and the governance of name assignments within those TLDs. eDNS is comprised of a number of members of the Internet community who have assembled to augment the existing Internet Assigned Names Authority's (IANA) worldwide root servers with a faster infrastructure that eliminates barriers to open competition for the assignment of Internet domain names.
The announcement was made today by Karl Denninger, eDNS founder and president of Chicago-based ISP MCSNet, a party to today's agreement, and follows the presentation of and agreement to the eDNS operating charter by members at a meeting held yesterday in Atlanta. To foster worldwide support, the meeting was broadcast worldwide via the Internet. A copy of the eDNS operating charter can be found in HTML format at http//www.edns.net
eDNS was founded in January 1997 on the principle that no individual, organization or corporation has the right to monopolize the top-level domain namespace, either effectively through accumulation of market power or by edict. The goals at the establishment of eDNS were the creation and deployment of an alternative name server infrastructure to that established by IANA and the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC); the promotion of wide-spread buy in by the Internet community; and the continuing support of existing TLDs while opening the root of the DNS system to true competition.
A few months later the eDNS structure imploded when one of the founding entities decided to try to establish what amounted to a "tax" on placing entries in the root zone, creating a fractured root.
MCSNet left saying the following:
My quick analysis:
eDNS as a technical experiment was a success.
As a people experiment it was a failure.
Yep.
This all took place in the backdrop of the IANA/IAHC and what ultimately became ICANN's "birth."
The reason all of this took place in the 1990s is still present nearly 15 years later -- all that has changed is who wants to put their boot on your neck and extract a tithe of some sort.
You'd think that we'd learned something in the intervening 15 years.
You'd be wrong.
