Susan, ICANN is actually working on internationalised domain names and new TLDs right now (the issues have some overlap but aren’t quite the same). People have always been able to create different TLDs themselves at different levels (their own discrete network, or locally through an ISP and at the browser level) – nothing new there. But these applications have limited use because they lack universal resolvability. FWIW I tend to think of universal resolvability as a public good, with all that entails.

As to a public choice analysis of ICANN, Milton Mueller started with a 2004 book I linked to in the post above, using a fairly light-touch institutional economics approach. More recently, the part of ICANN I work for – the GNSO - has had a review done by the Government Dept. at LSE. I expect the report will bring at least some public choice analysis to bear on it. Otherwise, the field’s wide open…

e.g. one possible effect of adding .公司 as a TLD for Chinese commercial sites is that whoever is providing .公司 will gain a lot of registration fees from companies who want a domain name ending in .公司, and whoever is providing .com will loose a lot of registration fees from companies who don’t need a .com now that they have a .公司. So someone has a strong financial incentive to lobby ICANN against adding 公司, even if it’s in the “public interest”…

I’d argue that the really cool thing about the DNS is universial resolvability. Wherever you type in name.com, or name.co.uk, you’ll get to the same place.

Well, it’s supposed to work that way. And many Internet applications don’t work properly when it isn’t true. For example, when you click on a link in a web page, you’ld like to get the page that the author of the link intended you to get, not a completely unrelated page or an error message. For this to work, http://crookedtimber.org (for example) ought to resolve to the same thing both for the author of the page that contains it and for the viewer of the page.

To obtain this highly desirable property, you need some kind of committee to agree on what the top-level domains are and who they’ve been delegated to. (Second level domains like .uk can have a regional body to decide what goes in them etc). This is where ICANN comes in.

An important technical point: any end-user can reconfigure their computer to ignore ICANN’s top level domains and use an alternative set provided by whoever they feel like. Of course, because you want to see the same TLDs as everyone else, there’s little point in doing this on your own. More to the point, an ISP can reconfigure their DNS so that all their customers (by default) see a different set of top level domains.

So ICANN’s real source of authority is that sticking with them is less painful than switching to an alternative (for customers, and ISP who have to deal with customer complaints that “the Internet is broken”), and most national goverments have not required the ISPs in their country to use non-ICANN TLDs.

Unfortunately, ICANN’s decisions on which TLDs to add have upset sufficiently many major players that the consensus is starting to fall apart (or fail to come together in the first place), and major ISPs are adding new TLD’s without ICANN’s permission. Technically, they can do this, and ICANN has no ability to stop them. If enough of them do this, ICANN is toast.

For example: customers of Chinese ISPs get to see non-ICANN TLDs like .公司. Advantage of this: Chinese-speaking Internet users in China can enter URLs in their own language. Downside: links to these URLs are broken for Chinese-speaking users browsing the web from anywhere else. If ICANN had managed to agree on some Chinese-character TLDs we could have had Chinese-character URLs that work everywhere.

The Chinese TLD issue isn’t very visible for English speaking users in the US. US users would see the impact more if (for example) their ISPs started adding a .xxx domain for porn sites without ICANN approval.

Steve Murdoch has a good explanation of what the Chinese ISPs have done:

New Chinese TLDs
BBC article on new Chinese TLDs

But yes, one of the problems we have is that some countries think ICANN does a lot more than it actually does.

Jane, there are two types of top level domain; generic (e.g. .net) and country code (e.g. .uk). The US has its own country code, .us; it’s just not used as much in the US as generic TLDs are. There are a lot of good reasons for using cc’s. Some of them are legal; amazon in Europe only uses .uk, .de and .fr because it only wants to be captured by consumer protection legislation in those countries. Some are cultural/path dependent; .de in Germany and .uk in the UK are used by more businesses there than any generic TLDs are.

Nationality is almost never irrelevant, especially when you’re running a business with a defined market. I’d argue that the really cool thing about the DNS is universial resolvability. Wherever you type in name.com, or name.co.uk, you’ll get to the same place.

DSW

Well the attack has begun in the UK, as per a Guardian article published yesterday. I quite expected it.

DSW