The organisation governing the Internet opens a meeting tomorrow in Montevideo amid debate over whether the potentially powerful group is adequately representing users of the Internet.
In what will surely be a contentious conference, members of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will try to come to some consensus over who will exert control over Internet addresses, also known as domain names (an example of a domain name is www.afp.com).
ICANN is a non-profit corporation charged with creating policies for the Internet address system. There are approximately 41 million people and corporations with rights to domain names, ICANN claims.
One ICANN committee is trying to come up with a system of electing "at large" members that decide address policies. The system is being seen as a way to tame domain names, which will be expanding to include such suffixes as .info and .shop to the already well-known tags such as .com and .org.
However, ICANN’s system has been derided by opponents who fear it is a first step towards putting the Internet address system into the hands of a few.
The Non-governmental Organisation and Academic ICANN Study Project, a coalition of public interest groups, says this weekend’s debate is more important than just names.
"Much here involves the future of ICANN," the group said in a report.
"Its potential authority is largely unbounded. Policy authority over the root server system and other central Internet functions make it possible for ICANN to exert much broader control over Internet activity.
"ICANN is likely to face increasing pressure from those seeking ways to control a range of behaviour online. The broader this pressure, the more sweeping the potential impact, and the greater the need for public participation and representation."
Also on tap for this weekend's conference is more discussions on creating a system of what ICANN is terming "internationalised domain names."
ICANN is trying to create a system that will allow users in other countries to enter addresses in characters from other languages. Currently, domain names largely use the ASCII character set, based on Western letters and numbers.
Currently, China and other Asian countries are experimenting with using Asian characters as domain names, and a US company, Verisign, is working on a system that will allow these non-ASCII addresses to be used around the world.
ICANN said it is concerned these experiments could create an address system that is incompatible with the rest of the Internet.
ICANN also wants to ensure that this new system will keep filter for duplicate Internet addresses, which could create cases of what's known as "cybersquatting" - when more than one entity uses the same Internet domain name.
The conference starts tomorrow in the Uruguay capital and runs until Monday.
AFP