ICANN still rules the Internet roost

• Tags:
• Internet Governance Forum,
• Bush Administration,
• WSIS,
• Copy-restriction

John McCormick

Published: 23 Nov 2005 13:20 GMT

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) received a last-minute reprieve at the World Summit on the Information Society, when the Bush administration agreed to the creation of a new UN-based discussion group. Meanwhile, SonyBMG continues to try to weather the fallout from its surreptitious copy-restriction rootkit, as conditions grow more stormy with the emergence of a Trojan horse that uses that rootkit to take over PCs.

Details
A last-minute compromise proves that the US government understands the vital importance of keeping the Internet as free as possible. That agreement, signed by the Bush administration last week, took ICANN off the auction block at the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Tunisia last week.

While ICANN will continue its role of approving new top-level domains (TLDs), setting minimum prices for domain names and overseeing a dispute-resolution process for domain names, the agreement also calls for the creation of a UN "Internet Governance Forum." The new UN will have no regulatory powers — instead, it will serve as a forum for ongoing discussions about Internet management.

Early reports are a bit confusing because a UN organisation with a very similar name is far from new, but the important point is that ICANN is still standing — for now. The last compromise, which occurred three years ago, put off discussions until this year's conference.

This is a very big deal, if not particularly unexpected — the Bush administration, and therefore the US State Department, had vowed to fight the growing international demand that ICANN give up control of the Internet. Not surprisingly, Microsoft, Google and other high-tech companies backed the administration's position.

In addition to the very real fears of censorship, many had major concerns that the cost of registering a URL would rise. (I currently pay $16 (£9) a year, including URL forwarding and more.) Certainly, having the UN in charge would not have made new registrations easier.

One reason the US simply can't ignore the demands for changes — including a move from Latin-alphabet-only TLDs — is that countries such as China could elect to...

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