The group that holds the internet together

Tom, I'd like you to probe further on these issues rather than just take the geek perspective on this wholesale and reprint it. It seems to me there's more than a little anti-Americanism afoot here, and more than a little anarchic geek "received wisdom" about governance by governments that isn't at all self-evident and is just part of a tech culture that need not be imposed on a public issue in this manner.

We saw what happened when this concept of "it can't be a government and OHNOES it can't be the U.S." was applied to the IETF. And what did that bring us? Total lack of oversight by any body over this powerful forum deciding Internet standards, that decides them not through traditional governance structures ensuring transparency and democracy like "ability to vote yes or no on a proposition" but substitution of these democratic levers with "the tyranny of whomever shows up at the meeting" and "humming" instead of voting. (Yes, humming:
(http://www.ietf.org/tao.html#getting.things.done)

Maybe everybody thinks that's just dandy, but if you look into the future and see what they are up to with virtual worlds, further monetarization of the web, etc. than you have to ask how this governance will work fairly and justly.

We've also seen how nominally "free" and "non-governmental" bodies under the guise of being "open" and "endlessly editable" like Wikipedia, in fact install a list of heavily oppressive arcane editing rules and enable decision-making by a few cadres who make the judgement calls and decide who is to be removed from the editing process. Then this lovely concoction can't ever be investigated or regulated for good to make it in fact open as it claims it is.

A real democratic government like the U.S., as much as it is faulted by geeks who tend to loathe representative government (they think it's corrupt) actually contains a lot of checks and balances through regulatory agencies like the FCC or FTC or Congress or the judiciary. I think given that the U.S. in fact put ICANN on a long leash with minimal intervention, it's just fine to keep it the way it is.

By invoking this curious (xenophobic, even?) fear of Russia and China, in fact, you're actually helping Russia and China to take over by packing the meetings of a new non-governmental body with their own cadres of a nominally "independent" international agents (just like IBM packs the meetings of the nominally open IETF).

If it turns out that the Russian and Chinese websites, that contain languages that are not always easy to transfer and translate across platforms, are under their own ICANN structures, what of it? Then you could wait for the day when these countries democratize and stop their censorshop of the Internet and then ask them to join in a federation of ICANN like structures.

But building a washed-out compromised transnational structure to get out from "Amerikan imperialist opression" or whatever it is these geeks are whining about doesn't make sense, if you then run not only into the oppressive arms of Russian and Chinese Internet control, but worse, various factions formed of the hummers who show up to ram through standards.

I'd like to hear you parse out what is the downside of keeping it under U.S. control if you *don't* have this chimera of the other powers of the world making their own domains (I don't see it).

I'd also like to hear the argumentation for why there'd be such a horror in having a Eurasian or Russian China walled internet. The Internet is *already* walled by these countries blocking Live Journal accounts, YouTube, and opposition sites they don't like. You want that to spread? Why would their ability to hand out domain names within their own domains make it worse? Why would being in an international nominally non-governmental body *with* people representing in fact governments who have approved them (GONGOs) be better than remaining as ICANN is now?

This is a badly researched story. The claims that China "MAY" develop it's own root and Top-Level Domain (TLD) systems is in error. The facts are that China developed it's own system of national TLDs some five years ago.

Over 300 million people on a daily basis in China can surf in the Chinese language. Example the URL http://北京大学.中国 for Peking University works if your in China but not outside the great firewall of China.

The same applies to Russia which has already tested Cyrillic language URLs. In some parts of Russia visitors to the Kremlin can use the URL http://президент.орг to visit.

There are many other countries which have gone in the same direction. And the reason why this is happening is that ICANN has failed to "hold the Internet together".

If you readers want to test out the new Internet systems in China, Russia or the Arabic countries they can find further details here:

http://joebaptista.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/

I agree with other comments here. The value I expect from GP Passport membership rests in stories that go deeper and provide more insight than those reported by other "news" organizations. By that standard, this article fails to clear the bar.