[Infowarrior] - ICANN Renews Contract for DNS administration w/US DOC

[Richard Forno]

August 16, 2006
Agency That Supervises Internet Domain Names Renews Contract
By VICTORIA SHANNON
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/technology/16cnd-icann.html?pagewanted=pri
nt

The agency that supervises Internet domain names, Icann, has won a five-year
renewal of its contract with the United States Department of Commerce,
despite complaints that the relationship politicizes what should be a
neutral global computer network.

The existing contract for administering the technical infrastructure of the
Internet expires Sept. 30, and the United States government has said for
years that it wants the the agency, whose full name is the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to eventually run the system
without government oversight.

Now, though, that independence will not come at least until 2011.

Proponents of the renewal, which was finalized late Tuesday, testified at a
hearing in Washington late in July that Icann, with a staff of about 50 and
an annual budget of about $25 million, cannot be solely responsible for the
Internet¹s stability and security. But critics say the lingering government
ties will keep American influence preeminent over issues like whether to
allow a new class of domain names ending in .xxx, to denote pornography
sites.

Icann rejected that idea in May after the Commerce Department objected,
though both the government and the agency said the decision was not
political.

Last year, the United Nations convened a meeting in Tunisia aimed at
reaching a global consensus on how to run the Internet. At the end of a
stormy debate, delegates agreed that Icann had a legitimate and necessary
management function, implicitly leaving the United States government as the
overseer.

But they also condemned efforts to make Internet-name decisions political.

The United Nations will sponsor another forum on Internet governance in
Greece at the end of October.