We’re a little closer to the day when .com, .org., .net and other well-known Internet address suffixes get some long-needed company. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, announced on Thursday that it’ll begin taking applications next month from organizations that want to create new top-level domains, as those suffixes are known.
We’re also a little closer to the semi-popular election of members of the organization’s board of directors. An ICANN nominating committee made public a slate of nominees this week, and one is Stanford’s newest celebrity law professor, ex-Harvard Prof. Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is widely respected in the cyber-community.
ICANN, which administers the domain-name system that lets computers on the Net find each other, said it’ll be taking applications for the new domains from Sept. 5 through Oct. 2. The public will have exactly two weeks to comment — that seems awfully quick to me — before the staff formally begins pondering which domains to allow. No one knows how many ICANN will approve, but it could be anywhere from one to 10 or so. (Two or three now seems like the most probable number, based on debate and comment at ICANN’s board meeting last month in Japan.)
The $50,000 application fee still strikes me as excessive. Given that winning the right to adminster one of these new domains is likely to be extremely profitable, it seems more fair to charge the winners a much larger fee. Of course, that might lead to an excessive number of applications, too many for ICANN’s staff to handle.
Five at-large directors will be elected later this year by the new at-large ICANN membership, people worldwide who managed to sign up on the organization’s grossly underperforming computers. I was able to sign up, but only after multiple attempts over many days.
ICANN claims it was surprised by the number of people who registered, but the computers severely restricted the numbers. It all raises serious questions about the entire process. (I’ll be following up on those questions in coming weeks.)
The public members will be able to nominate candidates for the board seats. I’ll be watching closely to see who else from North America — voters can only cast ballots for people from their own regions of the globe — surfaces as a possible candidate.
At the moment, it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone better than Lessig will turn up. I’ve been critical of ICANN’s ways of doing business, but Lessig’s nomination is a positive sign.
John Gilmore on Napster, DeCSS and Copyright
My recent Music Industry Can’t Win column about the Napster battle prompted an e-mail exchange with the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s John Gilmore during the past few days.
I’ve posted a slightly edited version of John’s most recent note, which I found especially thought-provoking.
Saving Money, but at What Cost?
An insurance company that goes by the name of “Progressive” is offering lower rates to people who drive less during off-peak hours and in safer areas. How does the company know customers are doing this? By putting a spy device inside the car (MSNBC).
Fittingly, this is available only in Texas at the moment. But it’s an abomination. You have to wonder whether the people who are opting to save a few bucks realize what they’re buying — a device that could be used to track their every movement.
Many people who do this will shrug, figuring they have nothing to hide. I wonder how they’ll feel when their driving records are subpoenaed by divorce lawyers, employers, insurance companies, police and anyone else who wants a look.
I am increasingly frightened by the willingness of people to surrender their fundamental liberties, won at enormous cost by brave people over the decades and centuries, for such short-term gains. This country is heading toward becoming a surveillance society, and not enough people understand the consequences.
If you believe that privacy is meaningless, go ahead and buy insurance from “Progressive” when it’s offered in your state. But if you believe privacy and personal liberty don’t matter, consider the consequences.
A nation that values neither privacy nor liberty is ultimately a nation that stifles personal initiative. Don’t imagine for a minute that a free market can exist in an unfree society.
Anti-Spammers: Too Much Power
I consider spammers slightly below cockroaches on the evolutionary scale. But there’s something just a little too arbitrary about the way the the Mail Abuse Prevention Service, or MAPS, operates. Entire domains find their e-mail cut off from much of the Internet if MAPS decides spammers are using those domains.
Now the Harris polling operation has sued MAPS subscribers (AP), including America Online and several large Internet service providers, for blocking access to millions of e-mail customers.
I don’t know the details of this suit. But it’s clear enough that MAPS has a lot of power that goes largely unscrutinized.