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
