Blame for Internet sewage comes ever closer to ICANN
If you know how the Internet works, you know that ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - has been the fox in charge of the domain name hen house almost since the beginning.
There's an old saying that he who pays the piper calls the tune. ICANN gets its funding - and it's significant - from the domain name registrars it supposedly manages.
Want to know what's behind the persistent drives to add new top level domains (TLDs) to the good old dot com? TLDs like .xxx and .m0bi and .sex? Money. The more domain names that are available, the more the registrars make.
First of all, it was always a little bit USA-centric. Most countries use a top level domain that reflects their nationhood: .ca for Canada, .uk for the United Kingdom, .de for Germany (think Deutchland...) except the USA which got there first and set up .com, .net, .org, .edu and .gov. And ICANN.
ICANN was supposed to manage these names within a set of fairly simple principles: .com was for commercial enterprises, .net was for networks such as ISPs, .org was for non-commercial / non-government organizations, .edu was for educational institutions, and .gov was for the various levels of government within the United States.
Within months, all but .gov and .edu were polluted or cross-pollinated or whatever you want to call it: when the early registrars such as Network Solutions figured out that the domain name registration system was going to begin pumping enormous amounts of cash, the barriers came down. Which is pretty much the way it's been ever since.
As as the registrars got rich, ICANN's own funding ballooned. And for nearly 15 years, as spam and other malicious online behaviour went from annoying to a criminally driven enterprise that threatens to destroy the Internet, ICANN has blithely taken the money and claimed that it's not to blame, that there's nothing it can do. Criminals need domain names, registrars need customers. While the registrars and ICANN benefit from the increased sale of domains - rogue and otherwise - ICANN says it should share none of the blame.
ICANN has also argued in favour of hiding the identities of the people and companies that register rogue domains, claiming that's only providing protection against identify theft. Oddly enough, the domain name registrations you're most likely to encounter with hidden ownership information are involved in some sort of nefarious online activity.
But ICANN and the registrars it 'polices' aren't the only silent partners of the criminal gangs who lurk online. They have the help of credit card companies and wire transfer firms.
And if it can be proven that ICANN, the registrars and the online financial transaction enablers are, in fact, knowingly assist organized crime by keeping their domain names and online credit card accounts in operation, then how exactly do they differ from the criminals? Would they not be co-conspirators?
For some related food for thought, here's Garth Bruen's blog entry about what's driving spam and what part ICANN and the domain name registrars could - but aren't - playing to help curb it.
-G
