andy,
ICANN won't expel someone for raising issues in a thoughtful way - your message
is certainly to the point of one complex area of discourse. There are several
scenarios that would lead to a .eu - an obvious one being the adoption of .eu
on the 3166-1 list by the ISO committee that maintains 3166.
vint
At 06:35 PM 8/12/2000 +0100, Andy Fletcher wrote:
>As a non-US person I get very concerned about lobby groups attempting to influence
>address space assignments. The only reason for IANA (and ICANN) to exist is to
>co-ordinate the address space, protocol numbering and name space assignments for
>ENGINEERING purposes.
>
>If US based lobby organisations have an impact on number or naming assignments then
>it is nothing less that an attempt to coerce the rest of the world into
>North-American ldeals, morals and prejudices.
>
>IANA and ICANN only have power through the consent of the other users of the
>Internet. If they play political games then they will very quickly lose credibility
>and other bodies may try to perform the same functions.
>
>Consider the present situation with top level domains. There is argument with the EU
>TLD. Officially ICANN has no position on the matter because as of March there was no
>formal application but it would appear that ICANN would oppose this citing the reason
>that the EU is not an ISO country. Who gives them the right to do this? - themselves.
>It also appears that the US Department of Commerce still controls the root servers,
>hardly an independent body.
>
>If the EU Council of Ministers get annoyed enough with the situation there is no
>reason why they couldn't run their own root servers and issue a directive that all EU
>based organisations should add a line to the DNS cache. Initially there would be
>chaos in this name space but eventually all the major ISPs around the world would add
>the .EU servers to their cache records.
>
>This action would weaken overnight the control ICANN has on the name space especially
>when other registries realise that they no longer have to pay money to ICANN to
>maintain root servers (another bone of contention at the moment). Other TLDs will
>only come into being if they can get their records added into a good proportion of
>the name servers.
>
>I am not sure if this would be a good thing to happen. It would certainly make the
>net an interesting place in which the sites you could find would depend on the DNS
>servers you used and you could get two different sites with the same name. On the
>other hand it would reduce the power of any single country to control the system.
>
>I suppose ICANN will expel me from the At-Large membership now.
>
>Andy
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