ICANN: Master of the universe

Forty years to the day after the first packets passed on what was to become the modern Internet, the United States relinquished exclusive control over ICANN, the 11-year-old organization established to provide management of Internet names and numbers. It’s been a stormy ride, with ICANN making many questionable decisions and acting far too slowly in many cases, causing ripple effects that are still seen today.

ICANN’s most public efforts have been related to managing and creating new TLDs (top-level domains), such as “.com.” This might sound relatively simple — and it probably should be — but they’ve been slow to make changes when the time was ripe. The most glaring example was ICANN’s delay in establishing meaningful new TLDs beyond the generic group defined by the Department of Defense in 1985 (“.com,” “.net,” “.org,” “.gov,” “.edu,” and “.mil”).

[ U.S. lawmakers recently urged ICANN to back off on a plan to offer an unlimited number of new generic top-level domains. | Keep up on the latest networking news with our Technology: Networking newsletter. ]

This failure to act created an unhealthy obsession with “.com” as the TLD of the Web, resulting in an artificial scarcity of meaningful domains that damages commerce and general communications to this day. Most Internet users don’t even realize there’s anything beyond the original group. I’ve even heard users say that other TLDs are “hacker” or “virus” sites.

ICANN’s first addition was “.biz,” approved in 2001. Today, eight years after it was introduced, “.biz” is the 10th most popular TLD with a paltry 2 million domains. Instead of the nondescript “.biz,” imagine if ICANN had decided to introduce TLDs that provided a kind of taxonomy for the Web. Why not “.movie,” for example? Roughly 600 movies are released in the United States every year and thousands internationally. With “.movie,” we would be spared God-awful domain names like madagascar-themovie.com or theterminal-themovie.com.

At this point, it’s unclear whether internationalization of ICANN will make the organization nimbler and more transparent. Worst case, it could have the opposite effect and turn ICANN — an already sluggish organization — into a bureaucratic nightmare. In a world that relies more and more on the Internet — cloud computing, anyone? — that could be disastrous.

Make no mistake, a functional ICANN is critical to a stable, functional Internet. But remember, it’s not a technical organization, and in an increasingly complicated technical world that worries me. If there’s one place that the world cannot afford to have human nature screw everything up, it’s right there in Marina Del Rey, Calif.