As previously reported here on DomainNews, for years there has been a back and forth on the issue of privatisation and internationalisation of the DNS core resource management, also known as ICANN. The topic nearly led to a failure of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) because of demands by governments from the Arab world, Asia and Europe to end the privileged oversight role held by the United States.

In an interesting article posted by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch website today, she states that the United States has no intention of giving up control over ICANN, the Internet's Domain Name System.

Ermert writes "In a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) clearly knocked down plans presented by the ICANN President’s Strategy Committee at the organisation’s June meeting in Paris for a full privatisation of ICANN." Unfortunately, the link to the copy of that letter no longer works. Someone must have decided to remove the letter for obvious political reasons.Ermert went on to write, "In Paris, ICANN Board Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush explained ICANN’s intention to streamline this relationship (with the U.S. government) by taking over distribution of the root zone file to the root zone server operators." NTIA reacted immediately by denying any intention to take VeriSign out of the game.

This is repeated in the new statement sent to ICANN: “The department believes strongly,” the NTIA letter reads, “that it is important to clarify that we are not in discussions with either party to change the respective roles of the department, ICANN or VeriSign regarding the management of the authoritative root zone file, nor do we have any plans to undertake such discussions.”

So even if ICANN, which has also presented plans to set up a second legal entity in another region, becomes a completely privatised body governed by its so-called multi-stakeholder structure, the heart of the DNS would stay where it is."

As it stand today, the US government, which established ICANN, still has to give its blessing to every change in the root zone file which not only includes the introduction of new top level domains (TLDs), such as .com, but also possible changes of the so-called country code TLDs, from .us to .fr for France, .cn for China or .ir for Iran."

This story is far from over and it will be interesting to follow its development in the months and years to come...  we believe that the United States will face increasing pressure from the international community on this subject and that eventually ICANN will become an independent entity, but time will tell...

Source: Article by Monica Ermert - August 18th, 2008 - Posted by Roland G. Buck - Chief Editor