Dyson on ICANN

NeuroUk writes "THere is another article on open democracy with Esther Dyson about ICANN - and where it all went wrong. ;-)"

Wont work

[Quicksilver31337]

People are inheritly far to opinionated for any democracy to truly exist.

To elaborate...

[Quicksilver31337]

According to Esther Dyson,
"The net is rule-governed space as well as dynamic technology and business medium. But who wrote the rules? An ICANN pioneer tells the story of how the net community harnessed political imagination to create its own forms of governance, and asks: can a global civil society now emerge, with political parties to help make that governance accountable?"

Re:To elaborate...

[The Rogue86]

There really are no rules on the internet. Just look at the issue of honeypots or how about hackback? the internet is the underworld that everyone can see it is a place where laws are broken and rewritten..... there is no law. we make our own rules and ignore them......

the net is chaos

link location shows bias

[oyenstikker]

Why is the link on "where it all went wrong" and not on "article"?

All this strife over mere names

[DLWormwood]

Why do we even need domain names anymore since it's clear there's too much vested interest in what organizations name themselves? The current namespace is too confused to have much underlying meaning for the companies and people who currently hold them. (Read: you can no longer guess the name of a website.) For years, companies were content to have numbers for faxes and phone calls, why not just use IP numbers for websites?

Re:All this strife over mere names

[mr_teem]

The vested interest is not going to go away. I think the more interesting question is how flexible ICANN and the registrars have to be in order to accomodate the vested interest in a certain domain name. It's an artifically valuable commodity. (And one which they really can't profit from in an ethical way.)

Even phone numbers can be vitally important to some companies because of their mnemonic value. There's a mattress company that floods drive-time news radio in my area with a jingle singing their mnemonic toll-free number. (I sat on a U.S. standards committee in the late 80s when it received an earnest request from a pizzeria to standardize the location of the "Z" key on the telephone keypad to "0" so that he could have advertisae his toll-free phone number as 800-##-PIZZA. I am NOT making this up.) The telephone companies can't really profit from assignment of phone numbers, either, but they can handle requests and wait-lists for neat ones without too much hassle.

Marketing telephone numbers is a game of mnemonics or repetition ("That's 555-3770. Remember: 555-3770.") What I think is missing is what you need when you somehow ("Don't forget: 555-3770") the telephone number: the telephone directory. If I somehow forget the phone number of the local automobile glass repair shop ("Call 555-3770" now!) I can look it up in the telephone book.

How do I get to the web site for my local automobile glass repair shop? I'm very likely to forget what it was called--unless it's nice and simple--without having to spend time looking it up with limited search tools or directories. This is why domain names are so valuable for web-enabled companies.

[I also think opening up the TLD space more quickly would help--but that's another topic.]

Decentralized - Centralized roots

[haplo21112]

The solution to the problem is the answer to the problem, the way out ois the way in in otherwards....

Ok, it probably doesn't make much sense, but it should. ICANN's job should be to manage the rootm servers end of story. Is the power on? Yes, good we did our job today. They should be a non-profit organization paid by domain registration fees to keep the power on. Then the registration should be openned up so anyone can act as a registrar of domain names or any and every common TLD, with perhaps the exception of ccTLD's the managers of which should act as mini-Icann's for their country. DNS management should be combined with domain name registration management, and route publishing as well. A simple web interface mansged by ICANN could ben be used to check or the existance of a name, registration of a name, attaching DNS servers to that domain, and then the DNS server does the rest. Domain disputes...gone I got it first I keep it...