[IP] ICANN
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 11:44:15 +0000
From: Goncalo <goncalo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: ICANN
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Hello.
I believe this is good reading for IPers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34883.html
Regards
Goncalo
Haiti kisses ICANN ring, rewarded with control over own domain
By <mailto:kieren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>Kieren McCarthy
Posted: 14/01/2004 at 21:52 GMT
<http://forms.theregister.co.uk/tmr/>Get The Reg wherever you are, with The
Mobile Register
In Geneva recently, the world's governments got together in the first ever
meeting dedicated to discussing the effect of the Internet on the world.
It very nearly fell apart after a huge split over who should be running the
Net - the semi-autonomous private Californian company still beholden to the
US government, ICANN, or the international standards body responsible for
telecommunications across the globe, ITU.
The arguments were complex and the issue cleverly put on the backburner.
But if there is one point that the committee set up to debate the issue and
report back next year ought to focus on it is the issue of the redelegation
of country code top-level domains.
This issue - where the overall control of all the domains for a particular
country (like .uk for Great Britain or .de for Germany) is given to a
completely different entity - is really a microcosm of what is happening
across the entire Internet and raises points that simply cannot be ignored.
And as luck would have it, another one has
<http://www.iana.org/reports/ht-report-13jan04.htm>just popped up.
Enter Haiti
Control over the entire .ht domain, representing the Caribbean island of
Haiti, is to be given to the government-supported consortium FDS/RDDH. The
existing owner, Hintelfocus, is said to be happy with this arrangement. And
so it shall be done.
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this. In the early days of the
Internet, few people had the know-how to run a country's registry so
control of them was handed out by Jon Postel personally to individuals he
felt could be trusted to do a good job. It was inevitable that as the Net
grew, these individuals would be replaced by big companies and that the
country's government would take a great interest in who was running its
domain names.
In fact, it is reasonable to assume that a government would have final say
over who ran its domain names. They do represent the country and the
government are the people that run the country. ICANN agrees. "In general."
This is what the private company based in California reckons about the
world having control of its own domains: "In general, [we] recognize that
each government has the ultimate responsibility within its territory for
its national public-policy objectives, but also that ICANN has the
responsibility for ensuring that the Internet domain name system continues
to provide an effective and interoperable global naming system."
The longer or shorter of it is that countries have been held to ransom by
ICANN over their own domain names until they agree to ICANN's terms. And
those terms are always that the government swears loyalty to ICANN. And
signs a contract to that effect.
The Haiti government indicated back in May 2002 that it wanted FDS/RDDH to
take over its .ht domain. Yet it has taken nearly two years for this to
happen. The redelegation of the .af domain for Afghanistan took just three
weeks. Three weeks after the US had invaded and taken over the country.
Why the discrepancy? Almost certainly because the Haiti government refused
to agree to ICANN's terms. But once it realised that ICANN can stall any
redelegation forever and that ICANN was almost certainly going to survive
as Internet overseer, it had no choice but to acquiesce.
Want proof?
That's just conspiracy stuff you say. If only it were.
There have been 17 redelegations of ccTLDs over time. Two don't count.
Zaire's .zr domain was not so much redelegated as a removed in June 2001
when the country renamed itself the Democratic Republic of the Congo and it
changed its domain to .cd. And .ps was freshly created for the Occupied
Palestinian Territory in March 2000.
As for the rest, with the singular exception of Canada (which in Internet
terms maintains the strange relationship with the US that the two countries
do), every one has done something extraordinary - signed a contractual
agreement with ICANN, written by ICANN, in which the country recognises
ICANN as the ultimate authority in domain name issues.
This is the same contract that many other countries have pointedly refused
to ever sign and even threatened to bypass ICANN altogether (setting up an
alternative Internet) if it continued to pressure them by delaying and
blocking vital administrative changes to the Internet's code foundation,
the DNS.
Yet in the IANA report in the
<http://www.iana.org/reports/ky-report-30jun03.htm>Cayman islands
redelegation of .ky, you will find the sentence: "In June 2003, ICTA
expressed its desire to execute the appropriate ccTLD Sponsorship Agreement
with ICANN, and on 2 June 2003 the ICANN Board authorized the entry of such
an agreement with ICTA."
In Tajikstan's IANA redelegation
<http://www.iana.org/reports/tj-report-30jun03.htm>report the same month,
you will find: "In June 2003, ITC expressed its desire to execute the
appropriate ccTLD Sponsorship Agreement with ICANN, and on 2 June 2003 the
ICANN Board authorized the entry of such an agreement with ITC."
In Uzbekistan's IANA
<http://www.iana.org/reports/uz-report-10apr03.htm>report, you will find:
"In November 2002, Uzinfocom expressed its desire to execute the
appropriate ccTLD Sponsorship Agreement with ICANN, and on 2 December 2002
the ICANN Board authorized the entry of such an agreement with Uzinfocom."
In Palau's IANA <http://www.iana.org/reports/pw-report-30jun03.htm>report,
you will find: "In June 2003, MIDCORP expressed its desire to execute the
appropriate ccTLD Sponsorship Agreement with ICANN, and on 2 June 2003 the
ICANN Board authorized the entry of such an agreement with MIDCORP."
Do you see a pattern emerging? In fact, many of the "reports" are virtual
carbon copies of one another with just the names and dates changed.
There a few redelegations that stand out. Afghanistan's for example. The
.af domain was handed over almost as soon as US forces had taken over the
country to a company run by the US-created government. Incredibly, the
former owner appeared from nowhere having been missing for months, signed a
piece of paper saying he agreed to the transfer and promptly vanished from
the face of the earth again.
The Australian redelegation was highly controversial but of huge importance
to ICANN since most of the big Internet countries - Britain, France,
Germany - had point-blank refused to play along with ICANN. It is perhaps
no coincidence that this valuable ally is the homeland of the new ICANN
head Paul Twomey. You can read how the rules were broken, the existing
owner completely ignored and an entire country's Internet governance handed
over to a company that had done a secret deal with ICANN
<http://dnsaction.terminus.net.au/dnsarticle.html>here.
Burundi, Japan, Kenya, Laos, Malawi, Pitcairn Island, Sudan and Taiwan make
up the remainder. Each has signed ICANN's contract.
The deal to the governments of the world is: If you want control of your
own Internet domains, you have to pledge your ever-lasting loyalty. Kiss
the emperor's ring and he will give you control over your own lands. Is it
any wonder that all those countries refusing to sign away their sovereignty
to nothing but a private US company want to see ICANN removed from the throne?
Ivory towers
In ICANN's recently rewritten
<http://www.icann.org/general/background.htm>biography of itself, it has
removed some of the more eyebrow-raising comments about its decisions being
made from the bottom up but nevertheless contains this statement: "All
decisions of substance are preceded by prior notice and a full opportunity
for public comment."
It is safe to say that with the exception of Australia and Japan - where a
second report was needed due to the occasional problems ICANN's Board has
in handing over a chunk of the Internet to someone it has secretly struck a
deal with - none of the redelegations has had anything approaching "prior
notice" and certainly no "full opportunity for public comment".
Would you agree that handing over an entire country's domains to someone
was a "decision of substance"? If so, how does the fact that no one outside
the actual discussions knew of Haiti's upcoming redelegation until the
report announcing IANA's decision was released yesterday, 13 January 2004,
square with ICANN's official policy?
This is something that everyone, including ICANN, but especially the United
Nations' committee into Internet governance, should reflect long and hard.
Further reading
Don't take our word for it. Here are two links to in-depth studies of this
issue.
<http://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/workshop/cctld/cctld012.pdf>Sovereign
Domains - A Declaration of Independence of ccTLDs from Foreign Control [pdf]
<http://home.uchicago.edu/~mferzige/ccTLDs.pdf>The Neverending ccTLD story
[pdf]
Related link
<http://dnsaction.terminus.net.au/dnsarticle.html>The Australian
redelegation fiasco
<http://www.iana.org/reports/ht-report-13jan04.htm>Haiti's IANA report
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