SCN: Usenet and ICANN

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

=========================

(Angela Gunn, Seattle Weekly)---Roaming the Gunn household there 
exist two cats called, when it amuses us to do so, ES and OS--
Endless Supply and Ongoing Shortage. (Yeah, really. My mom 
named a cat "Too" once. Deal with it.) Endless Supply is one of 
those perma-happy beasts who loves being petted, loves being 
picked up, loves being in your company, loves being. In ES' 
worldview there will always be enough of the important things-- 
attention, security, food. Ongoing Shortage, on the other hand, is so 
stressed you can't look at her without causing yowls of despair. Any 
unexpected move is an attempt to harm her. The food supply is 
under constant siege. And under no circumstances is it 
recommended that you attempt to pick up OS. 

They crack me up, the cats. They live in the same house with the 
same people, food, resources. But ES is convinced that there is 
plenty of everything to go around, while OS operates as if every day 
is a new threat. Poor kitty, but it's hard to take her misery seriously 
when ES is sitting there purring. 

And so it is with ICANN (the well-known Net governing body) and with 
those who would archive Usenet, that blow-by-blow transcript of the 
Net's contrary and chatty heart for lo these many years. They're two 
OSs, actually--both in a sort of crisis mode that's fake and 
unnecessary and stupid. And any reasonably smart Net citizen can 
tell that just by looking. 

Let's take ICANN first, since that body would have us believe they 
are first among equals in getting to say what is and isn't to be so for 
the Net. They've just released (and it sure took them long enough) 
the list of top-level domains (TLDs) that people have asked to 
create. Top-level domains, for those of you who momentarily 
mistook this space for the Pet Lady, are the "countries" of the Net--
.com and .org are two top-level domains. 

Shall we peek at the list? A number of folks want to be in charge of 
the .kids TLD. A number more want to handle .xxx or .sex. One 
enterprising Toronto outfit wants to handle both .kids and .xxx, 
which makes an odd biological kind of sense. The folks at 
Name.Space want a whopping 118 TLDs including .help, .war, and 
.soup (!). 

There's no technical reason that all these TLDs can't exist. (There's 
also no reason that ICANN charges companies wishing to apply for 
TLD rights a non-refundable $50K deposit--that's 50 large just for 
ICANN to take you seriously.) There's no reason that ICANN should 
limit the number of new TLDs to under half a dozen. 

But that's what's probably going to happen. 

Why? Artificial scarcity, baby. If there is less of something, it's more 
valuable. 

And if there are fewer TLDs, big corporations have to work less to 
register all the variations on their name--bigbiz.kids, bigbiz.sex, 
bigbiz.soup. But ICANN, we cry, shouldn't corporations be forbidden 
to snap up all those domains? Won't that make for another name 
shortage just like the one we're facing now, ICANN? 

Hey, quit bothering ICANN. They're busy. They'll get to that problem 
when the corporations who are pimping that so-called Net governing 
body say they're allowed to. (Don't look so shocked. In fact, get me 
drunk one of these days and I'll tell you off-the-record how Esther 
Dyson, the chair of ICANN, got her foot in the door at Ziff-Davis, the 
company that catapulted her to techish prominence.) 

And then there's Usenet, which owes its luxuriant growth to not 
having an ICANN in charge of it. Usenet discussions live forever, or 
at least as long as they're archived. In the past few years, various 
archives have sprung up, the most famous of which is probably 
Deja. Hey, guess what? Deja's not interested in that business 
anymore, and they "temporarily" took down their voluminous 
archive. Bets are that they're looking for a buyer, but there's a 
problem: They don't actually own that stuff. I own what I wrote, you 
own what you wrote, and if Deja's gonna sell they owe us a cut. 
(Copyright, remember?) And if no one wants to buy . . . bye! 

Sure it's a beast archive, terabytes of 1s and 0s. And I'm sorry they 
didn't make money in the gold rush. But you know what? One 
company's fortunes shouldn't determine the availability of our 
Nettish history as manifested in scary, silly, irreplaceable Usenet. 
You know what else? One whored-out "governing body" shouldn't be 
able to limit the Net's growth to make life easier for the corporations 
who'd turn it into their turf. 

Artificial, ongoing shortages. The feline OS has a brain the size of a 
walnut and is, in fact, a cat. What's these guys' excuse? 

Copyright 2000 Seattle Weekly





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