[LINK] Fwd: ICANN Alert

[Adam Todd]

>Date:         Fri, 13 Oct 2000 02:34:26 -0400
>From: Jay Fenello <Jay@FENELLO.COM>
>Subject:      ICANN Alert
>
>ICANN Alert
>
>The battle lines are being drawn. International
>organizations, dominated by business interests, are
>already hard at work on new protocols and rules to
>rationalize and tame the Web. Writer Steven Hill asks,
>"How many people have ever heard of ICANN, the
>Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers?
>Depending on whose description you read, ICANN is
>either an innocuous nonprofit with a narrow technical
>mandate, or the first step in corralling the Internet for
>commercial and other purposes."
>
>ICANN is a nonprofit corporation that was chartered by
>the U.S. Department of Commerce in November 1999 to
>oversee a select set of Internet technical-management
>functions previously managed by the U.S. government.
>In theory a nonprofit can do the job as well as the
>government, but not if it's dominated by private interests
>and lacks accountability and transparency. Notes Hill,
>"These functions include fostering competition in the
>domain-name registration market (i.e. the selling of
>.com, .net and .org suffixes) and settling disputes over
>"cyber squatting" (the intentional buying of domain
>names like McDonalds.com for later resale at exorbitant
>prices to the corporation)."
>
>Sound benign? Except that ICANN has operated
>secretly, with its very existence a secret to most
>Internet users. The reason is simple: It is not being
>covered by the media.
>
>Read the rest at:
>
>http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/webreform.shtml
>
>+++
>
>Jay Fenello,
>New Media Strategies