[Ecommerce] Another way of thinking about ICANN and what is wrong

[James Love]

Today someone gave me an interesting take on why ICANN is such a mess.  He
said, suppose that we allowed mobile phone operators to manage the
allocation of wireless specturm.    Wouldn't that result in an anti-consumer
cartel, and wouldn't the public lose the economic benefits of the resource?

This is in fact part of the story of how the DNS is managed under ICANN.  It
is a registrar/registry cartel, blocking new entrants and ripping people off
who just want to use their own domain names.   I have to pay $1,000 to buy
UPD.Org, for a new NGO, because it is owned now by a speculator, and ICANN
won't expand the name space.

The other part of the ICANN story is how IPR interests want to use ICANN to
enforce IPR rights all over the world.   The problem is, who will decide
what those rights are?   The businesses running ICANN?

An interesting example of a consumer protection issue is what happened to
the OECD, when the ocde.org domain was mistakenly given to a porno site,
which pointed to a porno service, and kept it from December 17, 2001 to Feb
11, 2002. http://www.oecd.org/pdf/M00027000/M00027316.pdf.     When this
type of thing happens (the fault of the registar in this case), the email is
diverted too.

Jamie

--------------------------------
James Love mailto:james.love@cptech.org
http://www.cptech.org +1.202.387.8030 mobile +1.202.361.3040