NTIA will control the root name servers?

Sun Jul 3 02:18:43 UTC 2005

On 2 Jul 2005 11:56:07 -0000, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> 
> ICANN's leadership has long claimed and probably believed that the DOC
> would eventually cut them free. Of course other governments have never
> been thrilled that the root belongs to the US Gov't, but treatment of
> country domains has in practice carefully avoided antagonizing
> governments, dating back to the Haiti redelegation in the Postel era.
> 
> The DOC is merely saying "don't hold your breath."  Given ICANN's less
> than stellar record, nobody should be surprised.
> 

I at least kind of expected this.. and the language in that paper is
heavily geared towards "status quo".  So far what we have is a lot of
people who dont like icann, or perhaps have got disillusioned with it
for various reasons, sounding off on the IP list and elsewhere .. and
a lot of comment on various ops and public policy lists.

What worries me is the tendency among several governments to send in
submissions to the WSIS/WGIG process in support of greater government
involvement and/or oversight in the process (which is not necessarily
a bad thing) but quoting a lot of wrong reasons, and [conveniently?]
forgetting the difference domain names and IP addresses on a fairly
regular basis

However governments are going to sooner or later get themselves a
stake in this process - though hopefully not by the almost anarchical
means being suggested so far.   Will be very tough to fight that -
especially as the language in the paper also leaves the door open for
more government involvement, and recognizes the fact that for several
governments, ccTLD is [or has become, once this brouhaha started] a
sovereignity issue.

Someone have any idea for a workable compromise that bridges the
current ITU positions with the status quo?  Answers that wont work and
have been fairly freely bandied about -  "get rid of ICANN" and "damn
the ITU", or various more polite and diplomatic variants of those ..

-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)