ICANN Accepted IOD's .WEB Application...they
cashed the $50,000 check, didn't they ? They did not send the Application back with
the money, as Jon Postel did with the original application and check.ICANN then
chose not to recommend IOD's .WEB for inclusion in the U.S. Government controlled
root servers. Several other root server
clusters do include IOD's .WEB, and more
importantly, ISPs can choose
to point directly at IOD's .WEB TLD servers, without
consulting any root servers. There is no notion of .WEB being "uploaded". It is a
situation where servers "point" or "refer".
The U.S. Government could chose
to have .WEB references added at
any time. This would be like adding a company
to some preferred
vendor list. Because of recent events in the U.S., it seems
unlikely
that the U.S. Government will be adding more TLDs. If anything,
they
will likely remove some, especially the ccTLDs for people they
do not know. Why
should some unknown person half-way around the
world be allowed to have a TLD
referenced, when a U.S. company,
like IOD, does not get a referral ?
Even if
the U.S. Government chooses to prune the TLD listing,
ISPs will be free to make
up their own list. If they do that, then
the ISP may lose the label of being a
public ISP, and become a
private network operator. There appears to be a growing
movement
to define a public ISP to be a company that uses the U.S. Government's
root
servers. That makes the ISP subject to all of the old and
new laws related to
public ISPs.
Consumers may have to start being told, which are the public ISPs
and
which are private network providers. Since ICANN is essentially
a U.S. Government
contractor, ICANN is clearly part of the public
ISP solution. In the old days,
it was harder to tell what parts of
the Internet were public infrastructure and
what parts are private.
That may now become more distinct.