CNN.com is reporting on the recent completion of a taxpayer-funded study of “Internet addresses and trademarks” by the National Academy of Sciences. The hitch? This study was supposed to be completed in 1999, and now may be considered obselete given the marked changes in the Internet marketplace since the end of the last century. Don’t worry–they only spent about $1 million!
Ironically (and thankfully), this study recommended that control of Domain Name Servers remain in private hands, rather than in those of the government. Good advice, given the dynamic nature of the “e-market” and the inevitable foot-dragging of fat-cat bureaucrats.
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Don’t rejoice too much. ICANN is a de-facto arm of the State, enforcing trademark laws and violating property rights. Domain Name Servers (DNS’) are servers around the world that store a list of IP-addresses, matched to websites. This way, people don’t have to remember http://195.155.0.0.1, and instead can type in a url-address. Now, what ICANN does is it violates the private property rights of those who own the DNS’, preventing them from assigning http://www.nissan.com to a private computer-dealer, because of the trademarks of Nissan Motors.
For information on ICANN, a good place to visit is ICANNWatch.
Fortunately, there are alternatives to ICANN: namely, OpenNIC. Unfortuantely, people are already arguing that the State should bring alternate domain name authorities under regulation, or eliminate them. One justification used for this is that these alternatives may create “collisions” with ICANN, where they create a .com domain-name that collides with ICANN’s .com domain-name. That is, under OpenNIC, nissan.com would point to one place, but under ICANN, nissan.com would point to another place. This, it is argued, would create problems for hyperlinking and real-world communication of websites. However, so-far, ICANN has created collisions, by (for example) creating a .biz domain-name, even though there was already a .biz under OpenNIC.
You see, it is the defacto arm of the State that creates standards-problems, because it tries to bulldoze over everything else. We do not need a centralized State to create standards. HTTP is a standard, despite the fact that there is no central enforcing authority.
David, you do know that the UN wants to take over the ICANN functions, due to the “global” nature of internet addressing and naming?
Be afraid.
Curt, I wasn’t saying I think the State (certainly not the EU) should take over ICANN’s functions. Rather, I think there should be no ICANN, nor any central organization like it designated by the State. DNS’ are private property, and the important issue of how to avoid collisions between domain-name registrations should be handled privately. ICANN is only a private organization in name. If it were free-market, DNS’ wouldn’t have the legal obligation to abide by its decisions.
I couldn’t agree more. I just wanted to let you know it’s getting worse rather than better.
Interested in what was said about DNS being private property. Could someone elaborate on that? My comment comes from a point of ignorance about the internet and who “owns” the words that make up a site name. Anyone interested and knowledgable about these things, please reply.
This is just a guess, but I’d say that they’re trying to keep cyber-squatters from registering trademarked names/phrases as DNS-parsed IP addresses. Their thinking, I think, is that if DNS is considered private property, then trademark protection applies to domain name registration as well.
No more “haveityourway.com” or “builtfordtough.com”
I can see that angle.
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