NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] ICANN Financial incentives?
In its strategic plan
(http://www.icann.org/en/strategic-plan/draft-strategic-plan-2011-2014-27nov10-en.pdf)
ICANN claims that its mission is to "ensure the stable and secure
operation of the Internet's unique identifier system".
Yet with the introduction of new TLDs it is doing just the opposite.
Ten years ago I posted http://rmf.vc/DNSSafeHaven suggesting that we
provide at least an option for stable identifiers. During that period
the importance of the DNS names themselves has decreased. As I
(http://rmf.vc/NNTLDs) and others (such as Esther Dyson on NPR) have
noted the unified search bar in newer browsers has shifted the focus
from using the DNS name to searching using human cues.
Today the idea of maintaining a table of a trillion stable identifiers
seems very doable. So why don't we have an option of owning our own
identifies in the DNS?
We need to examine the finances and ask whether the large sums of
money made by forcing us to lease our own names has had a corrupting
influence on ICANN. Charging $185K for TLDs and garnering additional
sums as large corporations are forced to pay any price asked to
protect their trademark in the new TLDs provides more incentive to
profit from instability.
This is not entirely ICANNs fault as its policies reflect implicit
assumptions. For example the phrase "Internet's unique identifier
system" represents an architectural choice and not a necessary choice.
We tend to confuse network routing identifiers with identifiers we use
as humans. It's as if you couldn't have "John Smith" as a name because
JohnSmith.name wouldn't be unique. This is part of the larger
confusion I write about in http://rmf.vc/InternetLostInTranslation.
This confusion is even more reason to be concerned about ICANN's
incentives. We can start by asking whether ICANN, as a non-profit, is
more loyal to its income stream than to society's need for an Internet
that isn't designed to unravel.
[ Bob, I would add one technical point to your discussion, which is
that any alternative identifier system must also of course
support non-browser applications (e.g. email). Proposed
alternatives such as IDONS ( http://j.mp/h7T2gF [Lauren's Blog] )
recognize this explicitly. But clearly the fundamental issue is
identifiers themselves and why, given the technology we now have
available, we should be forced to funnel potentially billions of
dollars to "domainer" middlemen -- and the rest of the
domain-industrial complex -- when systems directly leveraging
completely distributed environments, peer-to-peer capabilities,
and search engine ubiquity, can now be designed that would give
Internet users direct control over their primary addressing
identifier functions, eliminating both the costs and risks
associated with the current environment.
-- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ]