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ICANN (pronounced "I can") is the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers. It is a California-based non-profit corporation consisting
largely of Internet Society members, and was created on September 18, 1998 in
order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed
directly on behalf of the U.S. Government by other organizations, notably IANA.
The contract for ICANN came from the US Department of Commerce and was "sole
sourced", which means no-one else (such as the Open Root Server Confederation
which was also formed at the time to bid on the contract) was able to submit a
bid to perform the task. These tasks include managing the assignment of domain
names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction
of seven new generic top-level domains.
Paul Twomey is the President/CEO of ICANN, since March 27, 2003.
On March 14, 2002, in a public meeting in Accra, in Ghana, ICANN decided to
reduce direct public ("at large") participation.
One of a few publicly elected board members, Karl Auerbach, sued ICANN in
Superior Court in California in order to see accounting records. The records
were ultimately released to the public in August 2002.
ICANN holds its periodic public meetings for the expressed purpose of staying in
touch with its membership. Critics note that the locations of these meetings are
often in countries with disproportionally small Internet access and far away
from locations that the majority of the Internet-using public can afford to
reach, thus making public input or participation less likely. Minutes of the
meetings are sometimes kept secret. Supporters reply that ICANN has a worldwide
remit and a key part of its mission is to build Internet use where it is weak.
Consequently it should minimally hold its meetings in each of the continents in
turn. Others criticize ICANN as being too subservient to US interests, given
that the Internet is a worldwide resource and its formation was created through
contributions from world-wide scientists.
In September and October 2003 ICANN played a crucial role in the conflict over
VeriSign and its "wildcard" DNS service Site Finder. After an open letter from
ICANN issuing an ultimatum to VeriSign, the company voluntarily shut down the
service on October 4 2003. Following this step VeriSign filed a lawsuit against
ICANN on February 27, 2004, claiming that ICANN had overstepped its authority,
seeking through the suit to reduce ambiguity over ICANN's authority. The
anti-trust component of Verisign's claim was dismissed in August 2004.
VeriSign's broader challenge that ICANN overstepped its contractual rights is
currently outstanding, although a proposed settlement would drop VeriSign's
challenge to ICANN in exchange for the right to increase pricing on .COM
domains.
At the meeting of ICANN in Rome taking place from March 2 to March 6, 2004,
ICANN agreed to ask approval of the US Department of Commerce for the Waiting
List Service of VeriSign.
On 17 May 2004, ICANN published a proposed budget for the year 2004-05. It
included proposals to increase the openness and professionalism of its
operations, and greatly increased its proposed spending, from US $8.27m to
$15.83m. The increase was to be funded by the introduction of new top-level
domains, charges to all Domain Registries, and a fee for all domain name
registrations, renewals and transfers (initially 20¢ US for all domains within a
country-code top-level domain, and 25¢ for all others). The Council of European
National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR), which represents the Internet
registries of 39 countries, has rejected the increase, accusing ICANN of a lack
of financial prudence and criticising what it describes as ICANN's "unrealistic
political and operational targets". Despite the criticism, the registry
agreement for the top-level domains .JOBS and .TRAVEL includes a US $2 fee on
every domain the licensed companies sell or renew.
Along with the successful negotiations of the .TRAVEL and .JOBS namespace, .XXX,
.MOBI, and .CAT are some of the new applicants in front of ICANN. The recent
introduction of the .EU Top Level Domain to the root, and the currently proposed
.ASIA multiregional suffix are developments to watch.
In May of 2005, ICANN participated in the Domain Roundtable Conference in
Seattle. They are, however, under fire from the United Nations' Working Group on
Internet Governance.
Meanwhile, ICANN is seeking to privatize itself, withdrawing from its
connections to the US Government and the US Department of Commerce. Support from
these National Top Level Domain Internet registries is a missing critical
milestone within the commitments that ICANN has made to the US Department of
Commerce.
The World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in November 2005 agreed
not to get involved in the day-to-day and technical operations of ICANN. However
it also agreed to set up an international Internet Governance Forum, with a
consultative role on the future governance of the internet.
Icann
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