Obama administration joins critics of U.S. nonprofit group that oversees Internet

[cory777]

Source: Washington Post

The California nonprofit organization that operates the Internet's levers has always been a target for such global heavies as Russia and China that prefer the United Nations to be in charge of the Web. But these days, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is fending off attacks from a seemingly unlikely source: the Obama administration.

Concerned about the growing movement to cede oversight to the U.N., the U.S. government, which helped create ICANN in 1998, has been reprimanding the nonprofit group to give foreign nations more say over the Web's operations.

The battle has come at a sensitive time for ICANN, which this month is meeting with foreign governments as it pulls off the biggest expansion ever of Web suffixes - including .gay, .muslim and .nazi. Also this fall, the nonprofit organization is seeking to hold on to its federal contract to oversee the Web's master database of addresses - a sweeping power that governments fear could be used to shut down foreign domains that the United States finds unsavory.

"There's a deeper question of how the world is reacting to a small company - even a nonprofit - completely in charge of a key part of the Internet. Is that acceptable? There's no 100 percent comfortable solution here," said Steve Crocker, ICANN's vice chairman, who lives in Bethesda and is the chief executive of Shinkuro, a technology company.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022806472.html

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Activist News http://activistnews.blogspot.com

[Democat]

1. Just don't let pro-censorship countries get ahold of this group.

The laws of some countries would require banning any website that offends any religion, for example.

[joshcryer]

2. .nazi? Seriously?!

[Posteritatis]

4. That one's just WaPo deciding to stir up a ragestorm over not much

Just look at the examples they pulled up; the only reason they'd namedrop those three out of the scores that exist or are planned to exist is because they know they'll get reactions from them.

There's lots of top-level domains at this point, rather more than most people are aware of, with talks about making it easier to set more up as needed or wanted. That's befoer getting into the fact that URLs no longer need to be in the Latin alphabet (which also stirred up some outraged panic for some reason).

[joshcryer]

5. Yeah, I see it now, it's proposals and you have to dump a crapload of money to own them.

.nazi probably wouldn't even get accepted. This is just ICANN just trying to make boatloads of money by forcing domain squatters to purchase every varient they can find of a good domain. :D

[LAIEN]

3. true !!

There's no 100 percent comfortable solution here !!!