ICANN to be turned over to EU?

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

I'm not really certain how the Internet works regarding domain names and registrations and such. But the EU is rather disappointed that this function is controlled by ICANN, a US based non-profit organization. EU is basically saying it should have more say over the Internet, but the article also goes on to say that the EU tends to control the minutia of companies under it province; so I think I'm against this move. The Internet seems to be functioning well under the current ICANN set-up, but I don't know the details and I don't know that this is a free market solution anyhow.

Any thoughts on this proposal or how ICANN permits domain names?

One thing the article said was that the EU wants there to be a .xxx domain designation for pornography, but that ICANN and Americans are too prudish to let that happen.

[Jake_Ellison]

ICANN has the authority (granted to them mainly by the US government, but with the complicity of many others), to approve top level domain names (like .com, .eu, .info etc.), apparently for a fee of 185,000$ each (according to the wiki). That's obviously wrong.

Ideally, there would be a court system under the jurisdiction of which disputes regarding website addresses could be easily settled, leaving no need for a bureaucracy such as ICANN. That's obviously impossible, given the state of the World today.

Realistically, the US and other freedom minded governments should simply push for a system in which all top level domain names are distributed on a first come first served bases, getting rid of all the restrictions on top level domain names. So, for instance, if I want to own the ".dummy", I would have my application approved in exchange for the costs of processing it (and some evidence that I actually have a use for it) the same way the EU got ".eu" approved, and from then on, people would come to me if they wanted websites ending in .dummy. And, if after a set period I fail to actually use that top level domain name (by creating a reasonable amount of content-i.e. more than just the web-page Obama.dummy with his head photo-shopped on a donkey), as creative as that is, I lose my rights to it.

[Capitalism Forever]

Actually, top-level domains are subdomains of the root domain, which means that whoever owns the root domain gets to assign the top-level domains. If the Internet had been developed by an entirely private organization or individual, as it should have been, then the TLDs would be up to be that organization or individual--and if the Eurocrats didn't like his choices, he could just tell them to go XXX themselves.