Stop ICANN's Plans for Closed Generic Domains

As I noted recently in the context of the BBC inexplicably supporting the introduction of DRM into the HTML5 specification, openness lies at the heart of the Web and the Internet. One of the problems with true openness is that it has to be at every level: if any part of a system is closed, it interferes with the openness of the whole.

On Open Enterprise blog.

ICANN Continues to Prove It Can't

I have been writing about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, since its birth in 1998 (see the ICANN entry on Wikipedia for a good summary of how that came about, and the evolution of the organisation since then.) That move was contentious at the time, since it saw the running of the Internet's basic infrastructure taken out of the hands of the geeks, personified by Jon Postel, and put in the hands of the business world. As a fully intended side-effect of that move, it also placed the system fully under the control of the US, rather than allowing a more distributed, global approach to evolve.

On Techdirt.

India Wants UN Body To Run The Internet: Would That Be Such A Bad Thing?

The Internet is under attack – but not, as politicians would have us believe, from hordes of cyber criminals, but from the politicians themselves. Alongside national legislation like E-PARASITE and international treaties such as ACTA, there is this proposal that a UN body should take over the running of the whole system: 

On Techdirt.

Time to Get Rid of ICANN

ICANN has always been something of a disaster area, showing scant understanding of what the Internet really is, contemptuous of its users, and largely indifferent to ICANN's responsibilities as guardian of a key part of its infrastructure. Here's the latest proof that ICANN is not fit for its purpose:

The familiar .com, .net, .org and 18 other suffixes — officially "generic top-level domains" — could be joined by a seemingly endless stream of new ones next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web's address system.

Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop.

"Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history."

Got that? This change is purely about "marketing and branding opportunities"...the fact that it will fragment the Internet, sow confusion among hundreds of millions of users everywhere, and lead to the biggest explosion of speculative domain squatting and hoarding by parasites who see the Internet purely as a system to be gamed, is apparently a matter of supreme indifference to those behind ICANN: the main thing is that it's a juicy business opportunity.

Time to sack the lot, and put control of the domain name system where it belongs: in the hands of engineers who care.

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

ICANN Goes .bonkers

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Battle for the Soul of WHOIS

I am sufficiently long in the Internet tooth to remember the blissful days before ICANN existed. I say blissful, because from where I sit practically every change it has wrought has led to a degradation of the Internet's naming system: it is more driven by financial rather than technical concerns, more subject to lobbying, and generally more of a mess than it was ten years ago.

And now it looks like ICANN is up to yet more of the same, according to this post by Doc Searls about the battle for the soul of WHOIS (and doncha just the Beowulf references?):

Raise your hand if you use whois every day. Even if your hand isn't up, and you just regard whois as am essential sysadmin tool, this post is for you.

Because if you're interested in keeping whois working for the those it was made for in the first place, you need to visit the battlefield where whois' future is being determined right now. That is, you must be Beowulf to the Grendel that is the Intellectual Property Community. Worse, you must confront him in the vast cave that is ICANN.

Except ICANN is more like Grendel's cave, only a helluva lot bigger, and far more boring. It's easy for an outsider to be daunted by ICANN's labyrinthine bureaucracy, its complex processes, its mountain of documents, the galactic scale of its influence, the ecclesiology of its high-level gatherings and its near-countless topics of concern.

The real problem is summarised thus:

the intellectual property folks see whois as their enforcement database, and are working toward making that its primary purpose. Those two purposes are at odds, and that's what the debate is all about. Except so far the public comments have come mostly from just one side.

This is largely because of the completely opaque way in which ICANN operates. If I had my way, we'd get rid of it entirely, and start again; but given the vested interests at play, that's not exactly likely to happen.

Why ICANN Is Evil, Part 58697

I've been tracking the goings-on at ICANN, which oversees domain names and many other crucial aspects of the Internet, for many years now, and I've yet to see anything good come out of the organisation. Here's someone else who has problems with them:

In this Article, I challenge the prevailing idea that ICANN's governance of the Internet's infrastructure does not threaten free speech and that ICANN's governance of the Internet therefore need not embody special protections for free speech. I argue that ICANN's authority over the Internet's infrastructure empowers it to enact regulations affecting speech within the most powerful forum for expression ever developed. ICANN cannot remain true to the democratic norms it was designed to embody unless it adopts policies to protect freedom of expression. While ICANN's recent self-evaluation and proposed reforms are intended to ensure compliance with its obligations under its governance agreement, these proposed reforms will render it less able to embody the norms of liberal democracy and less capable of protecting individuals' fundamental rights. Unless ICANN reforms its governance structure to render it consistent with the procedural and substantive norms of democracy articulated herein, ICANN should be stripped of its decision-making authority over the Internet's infrastructure.

Strip, strip, strip. (Via IGP blog.)

Virtual World, Real Lawyers

Lawyers thrive on complication and ambiguity. Things don't get more complicated or ambiguous than in cyberspace - it's no coincidence that Larry Lessig rose to prominence as one of the first to wield the machete of his fine legal mind on this thicket.

Things are even more complicated in virtual worlds, because they are inherently richer. Here's a nice round-up of some of the legal issues involved. Two paragraphs in particular caught my eye:

One complicating factor is jurisdiction. Linden currently operates under California and U.S. law. British IP attorney Cooper says that virtual worlds like Second Life need a form of international arbitration. "If I get ... an Australian operating a business in Second Life, asking me, a U.K. attorney, how he can best protect his business within Second Life, how do I answer him?" he says, citing one query that he has received. But Cooper sees a model in the uniform dispute resolution policy (UDRP) for Internet domain names. Created in 1999 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in cooperation with the World Intellectual Property Organization, the UDRP created an international solution to issues like cybersquatting of domain names that were difficult or impossible to resolve in regional courts.

Cooper, Lieberman and other interested avatars, including the Second Life Bar Association and many non-lawyers, are now working together to formalize online arbitration as a required first step to handle Second Life disputes, without resort to real courts and their costs. Together they are lobbying Linden to include arbitration in its terms of service agreement. Meanwhile, Lieberman's group is introducing its proposed arbitration into the virtual world, hoping that other users will try it out and find it fair and useful.

(Via Second Life Herald.)

Can ICANN Open Up?

I've been fairly hard on ICANN on this blog - hard but fair, given it's pretty appalling track record in terms of openness. But lo! two glimmers of light on the horizon. ICANN has suddenly got intelligent, and appointed the fine UK hack Kieren McCarthy as General Manager, Public Participation (sounds so grand). It also seems to have sprouted a blog. Here's hoping.

Kudos to Kocoras and ICANN

Looks like I was overly pessimistic about the Spamhaus case:

On 19 October 2006, United States District Court Judge Charles P. Kocoras, presiding over the e360Insight v. The Spamhaus Project matter in the Northern District of Illinois, issued an order denying e360Insight's ("e360") motion asking the Court to, among other things, suspend www.spamhaus.org. The Court explained that the relief e360 sought was too broad to be warranted under the circumstances. First, the Court noted that since there is no indication that ICANN or Tucows acted in concert with Spamhaus, the Court could not conclude that either party could be brought within the ambit of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(d), which states that an order granting an injunction is "binding only upon the parties to the action, their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys, and upon those persons in active concert or participation with them." Second, the Court stated that a suspension of www.spamhaus.org would cut off all lawful online activities of Spamhaus, not just those that are in contravention of the injunction the Court previously issued against Spamhaus.

Kudos to Kocoras for his intelligence, and to ICANN for not rolling over as I feared they would.

Mouth, Meet Crow; Crow Meet Mouth

It looks like I was, er, wrong: ICANN has refused to pull the plug on Spamhaus. I'm impressed - and duly chastened.

They Can Because ICANN

The court case against Spamhaus is outrageous on plenty of levels:

A lawsuit filed in an Illinois court by David Linhardt (aka e360 Insight LLC) against The Spamhaus Project Ltd., a British-based organisation over which the Illinois court had no jurisdiction, went predictably to default judgement when Spamhaus did not accept U.S. jurisdiction.

To get the 'SLAPP' lawsuit case accepted in Illinois, David Linhardt fabricated, under oath, that Spamhaus "operates business in Illinois". Illinois District Court Judge Charles Kocoras, although being aware Spamhaus was a UK non-profit organization, did not require any proof before ruling the UK organization to be in Illinois jurisdiction. Spamhaus in fact operates no business in the United States, has no U.S. office, agents or employees in Illinois or any other U.S. state.

The default judgement awards Linhardt, a one-man bulk email marketing outfit based in Chicago, compensatory damages totaling $11,715,000.00, orders Spamhaus to permanently remove Linhardt's ROKSO record, orders Spamhaus to lie by posting a notice stating that Linhardt is "not a spammer" and orders Spamhaus to cease blocking spam sent by Linhardt.

But one point which has only been mentioned in passing is that the latest threat of being suspended by ICANN is only possible because the latter is subject to US jurisdiction.

Which means that effectively US law is being imposed on the Internet, wherever people may be located. Which, in its turn, is yet another argument why ICANN needs to be pulled out of the US and situated somewhere less likely to be at the beck and call of courts in countries with histories of rampant litigation.

And no, I don't have any good suggestions where that location might be: any ideas?

At Last! Opening Up the ICANN of Worms

I have been writing about the Internet since 1994, and about ICANN, the body that oversees the domain name system, since 1999. Unfortunately, in those seven years, ICANN has confirmed the fears of myself and many other observers about the stultifying effect it would have on the functioning of the Internet.

Given that ICANN was backed by the US Government, which is not known for its sensitivity to the views of others, especially mere foreigners, I had largely resigned myself to this sorry state of affairs. But miraculously, something seems to have happened:

In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet.

Having been the internet's instigator and, since 1998, its voluntary taskmaster, the US government finally agreed to transition its control over not-for-profit internet overseeing organisation ICANN, making the organisation a more international body.

For me, the main thing to come out of this is the hope that ICANN might finally be forced to open up its totally inappropriate secrecy, and as a result that maybe - just maybe - it will start serving the Internet community in the way it was supposed to all those years ago.