Hello:
I hate to break it to you, but IANA now holds 100% control of the gTLDs as well as the nTLDs.
Pardon, this is wrong (for nTLDs), IMHO. What do you mean by 'control'? They can sell them? Or remove?
ISI/USC/Jon Postel (aka IANA) was hired by the US Government to take care of numeric assignments for protocols, IP address distribution, etc. Most recently the funding and direction comes from the FNC (Federal Networking Council) which is under the CCIC (Committee on Computing, Information, and Communications) which is under the NSTC (National Science and Technology Council) which is under the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Taking care of doesn't mean controlling. I think coordination is the better word here...
If the FNC hired "ISI/USC/Jon Postel (aka IANA)" to take care of iTLDs and their insertion into the root, etc, then it follows that the FNC/US Government owns the root and the iTLDs. They invented it, and at the very least they took on the responsibility of managing the numbers and the top of DNS up to now. And they funded it. For over a year their Advisory Committee has recommended that the FNC/NSF get out of the domain name business and transfer "responsibility from NSF to an appropriate entity."
These are widely known facts, but it doesn't mean that if "they funded" it it is their property or something like. I think regular terms used in pre-Internet business and law are somewhat confusing when used in Internet context. Only the absence of jurisdiction (as understood by lawyers), not speaking about other things, makes this issue very difficult.
As I see it, the US Government has always had control over the root and thus DNS and the creation of all TLDs. They may decide that they should not maintain control, but they are reviewing that issue in detail before doing something to screw things up. As NSI's proposal suggested, I would expect an orderly transition to be made to an appropriate, legal, international organization. Who, what and how has to be decided very carefully - not by the IANA.
Agreed. Don't you think that one of the best alternatives is the ITU? Thank you, Edgar AM NIC -------- Logged at Mon Sep 22 18:03:36 MET DST 1997 ---------