Word: icann
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Harvard community should pay close attention this week to an election that will have wide-ranging consequences worldwide--and it isn't the U.S. presidency. Instead, a select body of voters will have the chance to correct a serious problem affecting the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Haven't heard of it? That's the problem...
...ICANN is a private, non-profit corporation which is charged with the oversight of domain name registration, the system by which Internet users are able to receive names such as harvard.edu or amazon.com. Formerly controlled by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the domain-name registry was transferred several years ago to a for-profit corporation, Network Solutions, whose high profits and monopoly control prompted the government to transfer control once again to ICANN. In coming years, the group will decide on the creation of new, publicly available top-level domain names to augment the familiar .com, .net and .gov. However...
...Although ICANN exercises government-like powers over one of the foundational structures of the Internet, it is run by an unelected board of directors and is not accountable to the public in the same way that governmental bodies must be. The directors may be very qualified; they include former Radcliffe President Linda S. Wilson, and the board is led by Esther Dyson, a respected thinker on Internet issues. However, qualification is not the same as democratic choice. Although the corporation claims to exercise no governmental authority, given its position as a standards-setting organization in an area in which governments...
...severe lack of democratic participation in ICANN is obvious from the numbers. There are an estimated 370 million Internet users worldwide, of which 160 million are in the United States and Canada. Yet ICANN's ill-publicized membership drive from February 25 to July 31 garnered a meager 158,000 applications. Due in substantial part to ICANN's delays in mailing out passwords and PIN numbers, only 76,000 individuals worldwide, of whom 10,000 were from North America, were able to activate their memberships in time to gain voting rights. Thus, the body setting the standards for the world...
...real danger created by this dispute is that the IOC has chosen to fight in the U.S. courts rather than in the international tribunals which have been adjudicating these disputes. ICANN and WIPO have been slowly developing the competence and collecting the precedents necessary to create a truly global arbitration process worthy of the World Wide Web. If any organization should understand the importance of global cooperation it should be the IOC. But the ancient Greek proscription against engaging in warfare during the Olympic games apparently is lost on these modern defenders of something even more important than the Olympic...