[discuss] American For-Profit at the Heart of Internet

[Pranesh Prakash]

Dear all,
I'm curious about the scope of NTIA's instructions to ICANN to come up 
with a transition proposal.

> As the first step, NTIA is asking the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to convene global stakeholders to develop a proposal to transition the current role played by NTIA in the coordination of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS).

A transition from NTIA's cooperative agreement with Verisign could mean 
two things:

  1. Verisign's counterpart in that agreement gets replaced.
  2. Verisign gets replaced as the root zone maintainer.

I'm unclear why Verisign, an American for-profit subject to the whims of 
ill-informed US lawmakers, should continue to hold on to its monopoly as 
the root zone maintainer.  But I'm also unclear whether (2) is within 
the scope of NTIA's instructions.

The root zone operators with their place of incorporation and for-profit 
status:

     Verisign (USA) (for profit)
     USC-ISI (USA) (non-profit)
     Cogent (USA) (for profit)
     UMD (USA) (non-profit)
     NASA-ARC (USA) (govt)
     ISC (USA) (non-profit)
     DOD-NIC (USA) (govt)
     ARL (USA) (govt)
     Netnod (Sweden) (non-profit)
     RIPE NCC (The Netherlands / Europe) (non-profit)
     ICANN (USA) (non-profit)
     WIDE (Japan) (non-profit)

Regards,
Pranesh

-- 
Pranesh Prakash
Policy Director, Centre for Internet and Society
T: +91 80 40926283 | W: http://cis-india.org
-------------------
Access to Knowledge Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School
M: +1 520 314 7147 | W: http://yaleisp.org
PGP ID: 0x1D5C5F07 | Twitter: https://twitter.com/pranesh_prakash

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