Re: <nettime> What do you think about .art?

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

rob@robmyers.org (Sat 03/10/12 at 06:25 PM +0000):

> Also, I demand a .marx domain.

The question's moot now because NTIA just announced that it was canceling 
the RFP for IANA:

     https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=e90ec616702fd6c52c91c0e67ccbf501&_cview=0

In plainspeak, that means the US government was unhappy enough with ICANN 
to deny it the power to enter new gTLDs into the root. This will undermine
ICANN's legitimacy, maybe terminally. Once the IANA function is unbundled
from ICANN, what's left? An expensive, contoversial, and incompetent pseudo-
regulatory Californian legal entity masquerading as wannabe multilateral 
organization. 

For dyed-in-the-wool ICANN haters such as myself, this is good news. ICANN
was, as they say, an epic fail. However, I think this is also very bad news
because it comes at a time when many ostensibly 'liberal' states have made
it clear they think it's time to rein in the net. I wouldn't say that ICANN
was an effective agent in staving off those forces; but its existence was a 
token of a slightly more genteel balance. Those days are over. It'll be very
interesting to see what fig leaf the USG adopts in its domination of DNS 
through IANA.

Oh, and Andreas's analysis was superb. I don't know the specifics of the 
.berlin proposal, but the dynamics and issues are pretty generic. With all
due respect to Desiree's suggestion, DNS is a hierarchical power structure.
You can dress it up however you like, but *any* entity that took control 
of the gTLD .art would be forced, in effect, to propose a more or less 
explicit definition of art. I don't have any problem with that -- people
do it all the time. The problem comes when you tie it to a structure that 
propagates that definition globally. 

Cheers,
T


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