Previous Politech message: http://www.politechbot.com/2005/07/13/will-the-un/ --- POST ANONYMOUSLY ICANN's most useful contributions are the assignment of IP addresses, DNS domains, and other numbers as specified by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) in its RFCs. When Jon Postel ran it from his office, everything was fine. Now ICANN is an unregulated bureaucracy focusing on increasing its status and revenues by approving more expensive top level domains and charging more for existing domains. Because they share so many goals, a hostile takeover of ICANN by the U.N. is a perfect move, and sure to doom all of us to even worse governance. (I won't bother to go through the complete failure of ICANN to stick with its promised democratic reforms, or its inability to respect its own elected officials). The IETF can put a stop to much of this through technical means. For example, develop an alternate domain resolution algorithm (much like Google's "I'm feeling lucky"), so that when you type in Mary, the browser may go to Mary Kay, the Catholic Church, or your friend Mary's home page, or when you copy links from your browser to your e-mail program to send to your friends, the domain name is displayed however the webmaster may want. Once domain names become invisible bits like IP addresses, then there will be no point in fighting about them. Also, the IETF should end concerns about IP shortages by working to expand NAT implementations and the use of IPv6, with its effectively infinite number of IP addresses, into the real world (perhaps IPv4 with NAT at the client end where needed with a mostly IPv6 Internet core). Finally, the IETF should stop giving IANA and ICANN new duties in its RFCs. Where unique numbers must be assigned (e.g. well known TCP and UDP ports), technical means should be used to assign those numbers (e.g. a simple web based registration form), rather than going through IANA and ICANN. -- Anonymous _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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