|
THE ODD COUPLE - PUBLIC POLICY MEETS THE INTERNET
16th October, 2003
After the dot com bubble popped in the late nineties many commentators wrote off the Internet as a dead duck. The seeming myriad of "we-sell-aardvarks2u.com" e-businesses gave it a bad name. The Internet wasn't considered a serious player in the global economy and therefore its legal setup, matters of policy and governance were consigned to the back-burner by mainstream business as something of little interest or concern.
Skip forward to 2003. The Internet is ubiquitous. The wheels of commerce are turned by it and yet we no longer talk of dot com businesses. Mainstream commercial activity has become dependent upon email and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the web. Ask yourself what it would be like to be without access to your favourite business websites and your corporate email, even just for a day. So what is all this resting on? The domain name system. Meanwhile, how that system is governed and operated, and by whom, has now become of vital importance - so gradually that perhaps this importance has been neglected by many of those who now rely on it daily.
Matters of Internet policy and governance are controlled by a diverse range of different organisations - some, like IANA, are concerned with purely technical matters of policy; others, like Nominet in the UK, have jurisdiction over a country's domain names; and other organisations are concerned with managing policy relating to generic top level domains like .com which affect all global Internet users.
Such is the lack of attention to Internet policy in general that the biggest recent story was Microsoft's decision to close down some of its chatroom services. Yet while the media decided to cover this largely irrelevant and public relations-induced announcement, a major fight was breaking out over actual control of the domain name system itself, following a fundamental change which had quietly been made to the entire Internet - affecting every browser and email client worldwide. This story, and one or two other current policy and governance developments, are covered below.
More details at: http://www.demys.net/news/2003/10/16_odd.htm
|
