The Obama administration today called for improvements in the mechanisms used to oversee Internet domain names, saying changes are needed to make the process more "accountable" and "transparent."
Larry Strickling, a Commerce Department assistant secretary, said that the California nonprofit group created in 1998 to oversee these functions--the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN--"needs" to do more to explain the reasoning for its decisions and to heed the advice of national governments.
"We still have work to do to make the reality of ICANN meet the vision," said Strickling, who heads the department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). In some areas, he said ICANN's efforts "remain incomplete."
Strickling's comments follow a rare and unprecedented public rift between ICANN and national governments over the rules for approving new top-level domain names. Hundreds of applications for these suffixes are expected later this year, once the process has been finalized, including bids for .car, .love, .movie, .web, and .win.
More here.
No comments:
Post a Comment