[menog] .asia landrush

[Kim Davies]

Hi Jim,

On 27/02/08 6:09 AM, "jim.mercer at viszo.com" <jim.mercer at viszo.com> wrote:
>
> ICANN should be focusing more of its energies on encouraging or enforcing
> adherence to the standards that make the internet go, rather spending so much
> of its time and energy on domains.

To enforce standards, one needs to have compliance mechanisms. The only
place where ICANN arguably has compliance mechanisms is with domains (with
which it has some contractual relationship).

I see ICANN's mandate quite narrowly, to ensure the uniqueness of Internet
protocol identifiers. Of course, with that comes the necessary
administrative overhead of deciding and confirming who or what is allocated
which protocol identifier, and on what basis -- a matter sometimes of
political or commercial dispute.

> SPAM is a huge global issue that effects the entire internet, but as the
> governing body of the internet, i see almost no real contribution to the
> solution to SPAM from ICANN.

I fear a problem is that people see ICANN as the governing body of the
Internet, which it is not. It is a coordinator of certain aspects. If ICANN
was to be a supreme Internet body, that dealt with all manner of Internet
issues, it would truly be a behemoth.

kim