[governance] Fwd: [IP] Zittrain: The misguided freakout over ICANN

[Guru गुरु]

On 03/26/2014 05:19 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> FUD debunked
>
> --srs (iPad)
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>> No, Barack Obama Isn't Handing Control of the Internet Over to China
>> BY JONATHAN ZITTRAIN
>>
>> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117093/us-withdraws-icann-why-its-no-big-deal
>>
>> On March 14, the U.S. government announced that it would seek to 
>> relinquish a privileged role in the management of Internet names and 
>> numbers. An organization called ICANN—the non-profit Internet 
>> Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—is to continue doing what 
>> it’s doing without maintaining an ongoing contract with the 
>> Department of Commerce to do it.  And what does ICANN do?  It helps 
>> keep IP addresses in order, ensuring that each address—used to let 
>> parties on the Internet identify one another—is not assigned more 
>> than once.  And it facilitates the addition of “top level domains,” 
>> those suffixes like .com, .org, .uk, and more recently, .clothing, 
>> which, with a concatenation of names to their left, become the names 
>> for nearly all online destinations, including newrepublic.com 
>> <http://newrepublic.com>. A receding role for the U.S. government has 
>> been anticipated for over a decade, and the move is both wise and of 
>> little impact.  Some reaction has been surprisingly alarmist.
>>
>> A Wall Street Journal columnist described it as “America’s Internet 
>> surrender.” Said one member of Congress: “Giving up control of ICANN 
>> will allow countries like China and Russia, that don’t place the same 
>> value in freedom of speech, to better define how the internet looks 
>> and operates.”
>>

This is the natural consequence of the drama that USG and friends put up 
at WCIT, whose unstated aim was to debunk and stall the desire of 
developing countries for a democratic IG. The chickens are coming home 
to roost....
(I had raised this in my previous post as well).

Of course,  real democratisation of IG needs to go far far  beyond that 
of ICANN/CIR reform (which in itself is important),  it needs to address 
the core issues which provoked President Rousseff to cancel her US visit 
last year...

regards
Guru



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