Government keeps control of Web domain group ICANN
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The U.S. Commerce Department said on  Friday it would retain oversight for three more years of the  company that manages Internet domain names, renewing an  agreement that was scheduled to expire this weekend.
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The contenets of the site, whose goal is to discourage âunethical behaviorâ by corporations and governments, can still be found on âmirror sitesâ around the internet.
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The US Interior Department can keep its computers connected to the Internet despite the fact that hackers could manipulate royalty payments owed to American Indians
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The new transfer policy for inter-registrar domain names went into effect on Friday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said.
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Despite complaints of secrecy and biased decision making leveled against the organization that handles domain name policies, the U.S. Commerce Department says ICANN works and renews its oversight agreement.
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This month, the overseer of the Internet's addressing system will begin deciding what company will run the .net domain. The stakes are high, and so is the responsibility. -washingtonpost.com
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The U.S. Commerce Department said on  Wednesday it would renew its authority over the company that  manages Internet domain names beyond September 30, when the  U.S. government had been expected to permanently cede control.
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An Australian company that manages Internet domain name registrations acknowledged that it was partially responsible for a Web domain hijacking that left Public Access Networks (Panix), a New York Internet hosting company, without an Internet address over the weekend.
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VeriSignlost another round in its battle against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) last week when a US federal judge dismissed the company&#39;s antitrust claims, filed in an amended complaint.
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&quot;The US federal court&#39;s decision serves as another important affirmation of ICANN&#39;s multistakeholder participatory model, and reaffirms the ICANN structure,&quot; stated John Jeffrey, ICANN&#39;s General Counsel.
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) met in Sao Paolo this week and made progress on a project to expand domain names to more languages and alphabets. ICANN had a "very, very busy and very productive week," ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf said during a press conference he led Friday with Chief Executive Officer and President Paul Twomey. The group made progress on technical issues related to Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). The IDN project is meant to revamp the DNS (Domain Name System) so that it supports domain names from different languages and alphabets, such as Arabic and Chinese, that can't be rendered in the ASCII character set. The nonprofit group that oversees Internet governance also signed what its officials call a "historic agreement" with 22 Internet user groups in Latin America and Caribbean. The Latin America-Caribbean Regional At-Large Organization, or RALO, has the goal of providing individual user input to ICANN. This is the first RALO agreement ICANN has reached. ICANN further announced that it approved registry agreements for the .biz, .info and .org domains, with a restriction that traffic data cannot be used to disclose domain name registrant, end-user information or other personal data. Traffic data can be used to determine problems with the Internet, including points of failure, attacks on networks, compromised networks and the like. The agreements also put a 10 percent cap on price increases charged by registry operators. ICANN members also agreed to a three-year strategic plan that calls for a focus on "organizational excellence" in operations and policy development, as well as an increase in international participation. Top priorities for action in the plan include improvement and automation of the ICANN-controlled Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA), which manages master domain lists; deployment of the IDNs as top-level domains; and implementing best practices for "accountability, transparency and governance." Also at the meeting, ICANN signed a contract with DotAsia Organisation Ltd., in Hong Kong, to establish a .asia top-level domain. Companies and organizations in Asia looking beyond their local markets, as well as multinationals with subsidiaries that are based in one country but serve all of Asia, would benefit from the regional domain name, the company said. Working with ICANN, DotAsia plans to gradually introduce IDN services in the future. The text of resolutions adopted in Sao Paulo, along with IDN laboratory testing design plans, agreements and matters for which ICANN is seeking public comment can be found at the ICANN Web site.
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(InfoWorld) - Participants made good progress discussing changes to Internet governance during an ICANN meeting in Puerto Rico that closed on Friday, leaders of the organization said. One topic that leaders worked on was the future enablement of non-Latin characters in domain names. ICANN hopes to support Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, and other characters in the future, but that's easier said than done. In 2003, ICANN made an attempt to widen the acceptable characters but found that its rules were too permissive, said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman. "There could be confusion between similar registrations that might mislead users," he said during a conference call to discuss the meeting. One potential source of confusion is that some characters in different alphabets might look similar but mean different things. For example, in Cyrillic, the word for "restaurant" looks in the Latin alphabet like "pectopaht." That opens the door for users to register domains in different languages in a way that could confuse users. ICANN hopes to develop rules that will prevent such confusion. ICANN plans to be able to test the use of international domain names live on the Internet by November. The test will include a mechanism to take them out instantly if they create a problem, Cerf said. The group has already tested the process in the lab. "We are confident that none of the infrastructure is likely to encounter problems, but you never really know until it's in that live environment," he said. The meeting also included a discussion on continuing to encourage IPv6 use. That's particularly important now because ICANN has determined the current system, supported by IPv4, for allocating the numerical address space will exhaust available numbers around 2011 or 2012, Cerf said. The wide adoption of IPv6 will support the continued addition of new numerical addresses. Cerf said there was significant progress in efforts to enable digital signatures to help authenticate the match between domain names and Internet addresses. The digital signature would validate that the Internet address associated with a domain name wasn't corrupted, either maliciously or accidentally. "This is a significant change in the core architecture of DNS," he said. The group also worked on developing a more regular process for allowing the introduction of additional generic top-level domains. ICANN worked on such policies in 2000 and 2003 and will take those experiences and try to establish a more regular practice for making additional domain names available, Cerf said. ICANN is on track for the introduction of new domains by the middle of 2008.
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ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, on Friday flipped the switch on a new URL transfer policy, which aims to simplify the way domain names can be moved between registrars.
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InfoWorld - The U.S. government still needs to block or impose conditions on Google&#39;s acquisition of online advertising server DoubleClick, despite Google&#39;s call for global privacy standards, three privacy groups said Monday.
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Myanmar's Internet shutdown shows how governments control the Web--and when they can't.
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The security and stability of the internet has once again come to the forefront of the domain name space, as companies spar to get the best deals out of the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers and the US government.
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(InfoWorld) - Internet governance experts remain divided overÂ last week's decision to extend the U.S. government's oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), with some calling it appropriate and others portraying it as unwise. The strong sentiments on either side reflect a chronic, troubling tension that has enveloped ICANN since 1998, when it was formed to progressively absorb Internet management functions until then handled fully by the U.S. government. Often accused of lacking transparency in its decision-making process and of responding disproportionately to U.S. interests, ICANN carries on its shoulders the critical responsibility of ensuring the security and stability of the Internet. With so much at stake in matters of global communications and business, it's no surprise that governments and private-sector enterprises have high expectations and deep concerns about ICANN. Those supporting the continued U.S. supervision say ICANN isn't yet ready to manage the Internet's domain name system by itself, and note that ICANN, a private, nonprofit company in California, has to improve how it makes decisions and establishes policies. By contrast, the other camp argues that while ICANN is far from perfect, the U.S. involvement creates political friction with other countries and delays ICANN's development. Over the years in a series of memorandums of understanding (MOUs), the U.S. Commerce Department has been ceding tasks to ICANN, with the goal of eventually giving ICANN full autonomy. Last week, the MOU got extended for three more years, and increased ICANN's autonomy. However, the Commerce Department continues helping ICANN increase transparency and accountability and overseeing the security and operation of root name servers. "Extending the MOU was the only reasonable course of action at this point," said David McGuire, director of communications at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), in a phone interview. "ICANN has to improve its accountability and transparency and openness. ICANN needs to address that before we can have a meaningful conversation about it standing alone," McGuire said. The CDT is a Washington, D.C., nonprofit think tank focused on Internet public policy issues. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) in Arlington, Virginia, also supported the decision, calling it, in a statement, "a necessary and important step" toward full autonomy, while noting also that ICANN must improve its transparency. Meanwhile, the Internet Society, a nonprofit education and policy group in Reston, Virginia, said in a statement that the new agreement moves beyond an oversight model, gives ICANN more flexibility and assigns the U.S. government "a more discrete role." However, some predict the continued U.S. oversight will do more harm than good. Ian Peter, senior partner at Ian Peter & Assoc. and founder of the Internet Mark 2 Project in Australia, said via e-mail that ICANN needs a healthier dose of internationalism. "The oversight role for ICANN should be global and multistakeholder -- not a single government," wrote Peter, whose Internet Mark 2 Project analyzes issues affecting Internet governance. Oscar Robles-Garay, general manager of Mexico's Internet NIC (network information center) for the .mx domain, feels pessimistic about last week's decision. "Three years from now we'll have the same problem as today, exacerbated by even more strident criticism from some governments against ICANN and the Commerce Department," Robles-Garay wrote in an e-mail interview. Milton Mueller, professor of information studies at Syracuse University in New York, agrees that international resentment will grow as a result of last week's decision. "The U.S. government is a big part of the problem with ICANN's accountability and process. U.S. government involvement sets up a privileged 'back channel' for influencing ICANN decisions so that powerful interests ... can get their way while bypassing the procedures everyone else has to use," heÂ said in anÂ e-mail. Â