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ICANN Wars
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addressing
This page looks at addressing:
identification of websites and other locations on the
network.
As Christine Borgman notes in From Gutenberg to
the Global Information Infrastructure: Access To
Information in the Networked World (Cambridge, MIT
Press 00), if you can't find information it - for
practical purposes - doesn't exist. While there's been
much talk of the web as a global digital library, access
to the sites that comprise that library or to people is
dependent on agreement about identification of entities on
the network.
Determination of rules for identification, in particular
the structure of the Domain Name System (DNS) and the
allocation of names, is thus particularly contentious.
Globally and in Australia there's debate about the
operation of bodies such ICANN and ownership of addresses
or the network. Should names be allocated on a 'first
come, first served' basis or to those bodies that 'own'
the name offline? And how do we resolve disputes?
ICANN and the DNS
The Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN)
is the non-profit private sector body formed in 1998 to
assume responsibility from the US government for four key
Internet functions: management of the domain name system,
allocation of IP address space, assignment of protocol
parameters (the 'http' you see in web addresses is a
protocol) and management of the root server system.
Its determination of the
global rules for what a web site can be called and how
that site can be found has significant ramifications.
As a result it's been described by Dan Schiller - author
of Digital Capitalism (Cambridge, MIT Press 00) -
as the "unelected parliament of the Web" and by
Karl Auerbach and Milton Mueller
as "now essentially an organ of the
trademark lobby", setting policies that will
significantly affect free expression and privacy by
favouring commercial interests.
ICANN's currently
coming to grips with widespread, although
often unfair, criticism. We've explored the 'ICANN
Wars' in a more detailed profile.
Debate is unlikely to be settled
following the 2000 elections to ICANN's board (Auerbach's now a
Director) and
Esther Dyson's
move from the chair.
Within Australia there's similar debate about the move to
industry self-regulation of the Australian domain space.
We've examined that debate later in this guide.
ENUM
ENUM
is the acronym adopted by the Internet Engineering Task
Force's (IETF) telephone numbering working group to
describe use of the DNS to relate E.164 numbers to URLs.
E.164 is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
standard identifying telephone number formats.
Potential use of ENUM is wide-ranging. It might, for
example allow a a single contact identifier for individuals. Digital
business cards could comprise a single
number rather than a long list of addresses for the
owner's email address, mobile phone, home
phone, business phone and fax, with services using the net
to translate that
one number into specific addresses.
ENUM remains contentious at both a technical and political
level.
Discussions in December
concluded without the expected agreement and the process
of achieving a global standard may be protracted. The
ramifications of
ENUM are uncertain. Proponents argue that like the web, a
range of business models and software applications will
evolve once there's agreement on standards. Privacy
advocates such as the US Electronic Privacy Information
Center (EPIC)
have expressed concern about potential misuse of ENUM as a
unique global identifier, accordingly organising a campaign,
to "Just Say ENO to ENUM"
Anthony Rutkowski's
September 2000 column
ENUM:
the Internet's Glueball infrastructure is a short introduction.
There's more detail at the ITU's ENUM page
and the Washington Internet Project's page.
other resource identification schemes
We've explored URNs, PURLs and other digital resource
locator schemes in our metadata
profile.
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