EDUCAUSE | ICANN

ICANN fails (again)

StuartYeates — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:13:27 -0600

ICANN has failed, yet again, to remove VeriSign as a single point of failure for a huge portion of the DNS, thus adding weight to China's moves to create their own top level domains.

The DNS is the system used for mapping human-readable names such as "connect.educause.edu" into numeric addresses such as 69.33.160.71 which are used by routers and gateways to direct traffic over the Internet. The system is run by ICANN, which critics have long suggested is too American-centric and too Anglo-centric. In particular the ICANN has a long-standing and entrenched relationship with VeriSign to run the *.com namespace. VeriSign in turn has numerous classified and overt US Department of Defence contracts, which critics suggest give the US government too much sway over it.

Personally I think the current situation is broken, and unless ICANN can fix it (which it shows no sign of), then the current system needs to fall apart as fast as possible so we can build a better system. Most of the worlds Internet users don't live in America and don't speak English, so why should this country and language be privileged over any others, particularly in ways that are user-visible? I agree that URLs and email addresses are _much_ more convenient when composed of characters found on our keyboards. Unfortunately that also holds in Japan, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Tibet.

University of Michigan President comments on Google ...

mpasiewicz — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:54:00 -0600

C|NET has a nine and a half minute video of Mary Sue Coleman speaking about their library digitization project.
http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6036176.html

The transcript of her speech is available her:
http://www.umich.edu/pres/speeches/060206google.html

An Interview with ALA's Rick Weingarten

mpasiewicz — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 16:44:00 -0600

In this 32 minute recording, I join Rick Weingarten, Director of the ALA's Office of IT Policy, for a look inside the beltway. Join us as he shares a brief bit of background about the American Library Association and a fairly interesting discussion about privacy, the google print litigation, and internet governance.

Also of interest could be ACRL's blog entry noting a number of higher ed associations have released a guide to copyright. Oh, and don't forget resources from our own policy office ;)

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

An Interview with Mike Roberts about Internet Governance, Municipal Networks and Federal Policy

mpasiewicz — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 11:20:00 -0600

This 16 minute recording collects thoughts from Mike Roberts, Principal of the Darwin Group and former CEO of ICANN, about governance of the internet, icann, municipal networking, and the Internet2/NLR merger.