Can World Governments Veto Your Domain Name? 177
AugstWest writes "There's been talk recently of the Obama administration wanting the right to shoot down possible TLDs, but it looks like things may be going even a step further — According to this article by Laura Stotler, 'the NTIA is asking for the power to object to any proposed Internet address for any reason.' What happens if, say, the government of Germany decides they don't like your domain name? ICANN's had its share of bureaucratic nightmares, what happens when world governments also have a say?"
Veto Them All (Score:3, Interesting)
We don't need any more TLDs. We should be phasing out some of the existing ones, not creating new ones. The .mil and .gov TLDs should be transitioned to reside under .us, and .net and .edu should be transition to reside under the appropriate country. Everything else other than .com, .org, and country TLDs should be phased out.
A competing DNS, that's what happens (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no law that says there can be only one DNS root. If the Governments start censoring domain names, a competing DNS structure will arise, e.g. based from OpenDNS or some other entity.
TLD Silliness (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone else thing it's rather silly that ICANN is seriously considering new, highly-specific TLDs?
For example, a .nyc TLD is rather silly, as one can already get example.ny.us domains. If one has a New York office for their company, why not simply set up a subdomain of nyc.example.com? That way the organizational hierarchy is preserved without needing additional TLDs.
The article also mentions that the dotGAY Initiative and the .GAY Alliance are looking to get a .gay TLD. Why? Why not get gayalliance.org, assuming they don't already have it?
I'm curious as to the utilization of the less-common TLDs like .info, .jobs, .museum, and so on. I can't imagine they're terribly useful; why would a company buy example.jobs rather than simply use jobs.example.com?
Sure, ICANN wants to make money and trademark holders would need to re-purchase their names in different TLDs, so I see the financial motivation to create new TLDs, but it still seems like a bad idea for the internet as a whole.
Re:Not News (Score:4, Interesting)
No single country can veto something, it takes a majority to agree to the veto.
No single country can veto something, if a majority disagrees with the veto. It's more than semantics, nobody needs to confirm a veto. In practice it probably means each country do their own thing and unless someone starts blocking "global" terms you won't be able to raise enough shit about it to make the rest of the world intervene.