[menog] .asia landrush

[Jim Mercer]

Kim Davies wrote:
> 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.

as an organization tasked simply with the task of maintaining a 
phonebook, and just the index pages at that, it is already a behemoth.

yes, its a simplification, but the bulk of ICANN is relative to policy 
and bureaucracy, the operational side is fairly static.

i see the growth of more TLDs as more a mechanism of entrenching ICANN's 
  existence and providing more "product" for the registries/registrars 
than satiating the actual needs of the end users of the system.

true enough, my rant about enforcement was off target, but i still feel 
that ICANN spends more of its time catering to the expansion of the 
namespace which creates insecurity and instability.

ICANN should have more focus on discouraging domain speculation, which 
would make the namespace more accessible to the end-users, rather than 
just adding more virtual real estate for the speculators to hold hostage 
to those that want it.