USA will NOT give up control of internet domain name root zone

This is no surprise!

I just read on “Intellectual Property Watch” that United States government will not give up its oversight of the internet domain name root zone.

The Bush administration has no intention of giving up United States oversight role of the management of the central root zone of the internet domain name system (DNS), the essential database storing information on how to reach domain names on the global internet…………

The US government, which established ICANN, still has to give its blessing to every change in the root zone file which not only includes the introduction of new top level domains (TLDs), such as .com, but also possible changes of the so-called country code TLDs, from .us to .fr for France, .cn for China or .ir for Iran.

ip-watch.org

Now I am generally for all sorts of freedom but in this case I think we should all fully support US government. If I ever favor anyone else running the internet affairs, then it can only be UNO.

Otherwise we are better protected under US than any other country or ICANN itself.

Given ICANN’s track record, I am happy that ICANN has been denied full control.

We all know that ICANN has not achieved much in so many years of its operation. ICANN is like an elephant which takes forever to get-up and get-going even on small issues that it can fix quickly.

Lets see what are some of the issues that ICANN has failed to deal with so far:

- ICANN took forever to give green light to IDNs. In fact Internationalized-Domain-Names are still not fully functional for majority of countries.

- ICANN has still not fully secured the internet DNS from hackers.

- ICANN has awarded a virtual monopoly to registries especially to dot-com registry thus killing all open competition. It was rumored that ICANN did it to settle lawsuits.

- Domain registration prices have gone considerably higher under ICANN. ICANN let the dot-com registry raise prices by almost 30% over a 6 year period over the original price when it renewed the registry contract. Now thats a blunder! Who else can do it except the mighty ICANN?

- ICANN has created a barrier to internet growth from poor developing countries as people in those countries can’t afford high domain-registration prices.

- ICANN let domain tasting and domain kiting flourish for so many years. Only recently ICANN has started moving to control these issues.

Unless ICANN starts looking after the interests of all the stake holders (especially domain registrants), it will eventually realize that it doesn’t have many backers. ICANN can not turn its back on the very domain registrants that it is supposed to serve and protect. ICANN is funded by fees paid by domain registrants and it’s unfortunate that those domain registrants have suffered at its hands in the form of outrageously higher fees.

We urge ICANN to look after the interests of domain registrants. Encourage open competition to lower domain registration prices, and fix the important issues quickly.

In the meantime, domain registrants are better served when US controls the domain name root zone system.