At around the time ICANN was created, I helped form the International Association of Top-Level Domains. Its aim was to assist local ccTLD operators against the predations of governments, who typically did not know anything about TLDs, but wanted control. At one point we had over 80 ccTLDs give their explicit support of our stand to honor RFC 1591 and to reject what seemed like ICANN's shift toward government control, embodied in ICANN's IPC-1. We stressed the performance of the ccTLD operator in serving the local Internet community, instead of focusing on "sovereignty" and "rights" as the Governmental Advisory Committee liked to do. (See, for instance, the third item in this 1998 news summary that I dug up: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~lao/laonews/old/111198.txt ) Over the years, we had some gains, and made comments on ICANN issues of the day that affected our members. See for instance http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/processes/process1/rfc/dns_comments/rfc3/0171.htm... . In the end, the governments asked for and received a greater role, but they also learned much better what that role should be, and understood that ICANN had a larger mandate than to do their bidding. Governments learned that TLDs are not like national telephone systems, which are run at a national level, typically as a monopoly. Instead, TLDs are a global resource with special responsibility for the local Internet community, and the Internet itself is a network of private networks, not a government installation. From my role in the IATLD and my other work on behalf of ccTLDs (and more recently, my observation from afar), I know first- and second- hand that ICANN does not always bend to the will of governments, especially when there is someone who is doing a good job running the TLD ICANN tries very hard to get the people in the dispute to work something out. They also understand that things change -- one political party ousts the other, and so the ccTLD operator who entered a good-faith agreement with the previous government might find themselves viewed as enemies by the new administration. In such a climate, and with ICANN's mandate to preserve stability and security, it would be silly (not to mention unfair) to redelegate constantly, and so they don't. ICANN does a decent job here under difficult circumstances. They make mistakes (the .PN redelegation was a joke), but on the whole they do not just jump when governments say jump. In answer to John's question, I know of several ccTLDs who survived government challenges to their authority -- check out the battles over .PH, for example. These things are typically delicate, so I'll let the ccTLD operators speak for themselves if they want to, but it's simply not true that ICANN is a lackey to arbitrary government action. There are lots of things to complain about in ICANN, and many areas that deserve more criticism than ICANN's relations with TLD operators, which have steadily improved since its founding. Antony Van Couvering On Oct 4, 2009, at 5:30 PM, John R. Levine wrote:
Why do you think governments have free reign over their ccTLDs?
Hmmn. Can you identify any occasion when ICANN or its predecessors ever refused to make a change a government wanted to make to the management of its TLD? (I don't know if they turned down changes that were technically impossible, e.g., DNS records with syntax errors or delegation to name servers that didn't exist, but we can ignore those if they happened.)
Jon Postel set that precedent for Haiti in 1997, and it hasn't changed since.
R's, John
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