Its task sounds boringly technical: keeping track of the Internet's names and numbers.
The Internet's naming system was designed in an atmosphere of idealism and naïveté, by technically minded people with no trademark lawyers on the payroll.
The DOTCOM Act would allow the U.S. government to transfer its power to oversee the Internet's naming and addressing system — what turns www.google.com into a viewable Web page — over to the international community.
And even as Icann and its authorized registrars take over administration of the Internet's naming system, a different problem nags at computer scientists: the finite number of underlying I.P. addresses.
When the panel that governs the Internet's naming system decided earlier this month to add seven new suffixes, it ended months of discussion and argument over how to relieve the pressure on the crowded.com domain.
Those and other provisions set off fierce opposition among Internet companies, technology investors and free speech advocates, who said the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment and even compromise national security by undermining the integrity of the Internet's naming system.
If the body cannot manage the 22 suffixes that it already oversees, what hope does it have with 100 times as many?A serious mess around the expansion will play into the hands of the repressive governments that want control of the internet's naming system to be handed to the UN's International Telecommunication Union.
Named to the post in the summer of 2012, Chehadé has seen his tenure marked by drama, from the impact of the Edward Snowden disclosures, to the ending of a U.S. Commerce Department contract for managing part of the Internet's naming system, to a debate over where -- at ICANN? the United Nations?
B9 BUSINESS DAY C1-18 New Dots for the Net Arguments over how to relieve the pressure on the crowded.com domain ended this month when the panel that governs the Internet's naming system decided to add seven new suffixes:.aero,.biz,.coop,.info,.museum,.name and.pro.
Priceline.com pcln, pioneer of the Internet's name-your-own-price ticketing, was priced at $16 per share in its initial public offering of 10 million shares.
