US Relaxes Control Over ICANN 230
An anonymous reader tips news that the US Dept. of Commerce has signed an agreement with ICANN to end their current oversight responsibilities and allow more input from the global community. "The move comes after European regulators and other critics have said the US government could wield too much influence over a system used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Those critics have complained, among other things, about the slow rollout of Internet addresses entirely in languages other than English." The US will still be involved; every three years, ICANN's work will be evaluated by a committee, one member of which will be from the Dept. of Commerce.
Re:Can anyone tell me... (Score:5, Informative)
It is 4k to apply for a registrars license, then 2500 a year (USD). Then it is .20 cents a domain. Your company must have 70k in working capital and I believe 500k in assets to become a registrar.
Re:So who is ICANN accountable to? (Score:4, Informative)
ICANN is an organization composed of human beings, sooner or later it will do something that is evil.
Too late. They have already agreed to sell gTLDs. As if the spam enforcement wasn't horrendous enough (it terms of registrar obligations), it is about to get a lot worse since with the gTLDs will go the registrar TOS.
In other words, for some time ICANN hasn't cared about not doing "evil", as long as it makes money.
UN slow? (Score:3, Informative)
Is the UN really that slow?
Look at UNHCR which are just about the quickest set of people to react when a disaster strikes
Look at the Climate Change pieces which brought together the whole world and came to an agreement (sans one little country called the US)
Now what you might mean is that it takes the UN a long time to crack down on other countries who do things that your country doesn't like, that is certainly true. These are the people after all who refused to rush into Iraq, the slow-coaches.
The UN is an organisation that works by getting people to agree. ICANN should be the same. Having ICANN as an extension of US policy doesn't mean that things happen quicker (look how long its taken for the US to get a decent health service or a policy on climate change that makes sense) but it does mean that they are open to accusations of prejudice.
The UN does a good job, having people like Bolton, Bush and Cheney knocking it alongside people like Qadaffi complaining about it really just underlines what a good job it is doing. If it can piss off Cheney AND Qadaffi it must be doing it right.
ICANN still isn't following its own rules (Score:3, Informative)
Re:other countries too (Score:2, Informative)
There are more internet users in China than there are people in the US. QED.
Re:Can anyone tell me... (Score:3, Informative)
The registrars' profit margin is quite thin.
Source: http://www.verisign.com/domain-name-services/become-registrar/com-net-registrar/index.html [verisign.com]
Re:other countries too (Score:2, Informative)
He's right. The European Union (established by the Treaty of Maastricht on November 1, 1993) hasn't existed as long as the United States (July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence).
Re:other countries too (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe the UN would do a better job (Score:5, Informative)
The UN already has the Universal Postal Union [upu.int] and the International Telecommunications Union [itu.int], which do for post offices, telephony, and radio roughly what ICANN does for the Internet. The ITU does a decent job, assigning country codes, negotiating the rules which interconnect phone systems across borders, and keeping radio broadcasters from conflicting. Nobody thinks about the Universal Postal Union much, but the fact that you can mail a letter to almost any country on earth didn't happen by accident.
Much of what the UN really does is to act as an umbrella organization for the dull and boring mechanics of infrastructure coordination. The diplomatic level gets all the attention, but there's necessary grunt work going on in the background.
Re:Other languages (Score:4, Informative)
Re:other countries too (Score:1, Informative)
ITU [wikipedia.org] and IPU [wikipedia.org].
They manage quite well regardless of those countries you mention. (And I don't know why you think that the USA is so wonderful.)