Who owns and controls the fundamental resources of the Internet is still important, but at the time it seemed like there was an opportunity for it to turn out better than it has.
An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Sun Jan 7th, 2001 at 08:32:56 AM EST”.
AfterNIC, a news site whose name still confuses me (After what? In what way are they a Network Information Center?), has an interview with Esther Dyson (posted on 2001-01-04). For those of you unaware of various DNS controversies and arguments over Net management, she was until recently the Chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the U.S. government sponsored corporation which manages the legacy Domain Name System.
It’s an interesting interview in which she claims to support the existence of the alternative DNS roots, but at the same time states that ICANN should not cooperate with them. She also states that it is inappropriate for either a single entity, or the U.S., to control the DNS, but still supports ICANN (a single, U’S. government sponsored entity) as the legitimate controller.
Needless to say, she also continues with the claim that ICANN reprsents a consensus on how the Net should be run despite the fact that much of the interview focuses on conflicts between ICANN and other factions on the Net. 😉
The interview, really, highlights the controversies that marked Esther’s tenure as ICANN’s Chair and raises the possibility that these controversies were not only never resolved at ICANN (much less on the Net in general), but that they were never resolved in her own mind either.
