Fergie's Tech Blog

U.S. Businesses Concerned About ICANN Changes

Grant Gross writes on PC World:

Some Internet-based businesses in the U.S. would support the splitting of the domain-name governance system instead of allowing an agreement between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the U.S. government to end later this year, the leader of a U.S. trade association said Wednesday.

When a ten-year-old agreement between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce expires in September, the organization will be vulnerable to outside takeover by other governments, said Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice, a trade group of online companies.

With other countries calling on ICANN to become more international, DelBianco suggested that the organization's traditional role be split up, with ICANN retaining responsibility for overseeing generic top-level domains (TLDs) like .com and .org and a new organization overseeing country-code TLDs like .uk and .br.

posted by Fergie @ 1/14/2009 08:19:00 PM