Opening up ICANN
ICANN, the group that oversees the Internet, meets in Brazil this weekend. High on the agenda: making the bidding process for domain control more open and transparent. Brian Watt reports.
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SCOTT JAGOW: Internet domain names are big business. The company Verisign makes $6 dollars a year off every name ending in dot-com. There are 59 million of them. Yesterday Verisign signed another five-year deal with the government's Internet watchdog group. That group begins a week-long meeting in Brazil. Brian Watt has more.
BRIAN WATT: The group is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN.
Its agenda this week will include renewing the contracts on other popular domains like dot-org, dot-info, and dot-biz. ICANN's critics say the bidding process for those contracts should be more open.
University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin:
MICHAEL FROOMKIN: "ICANN and Transparency are kind of like oil and water. They just haven't mixed yet. It's a real shame, too"Froomkin says another issue on the agenda is customer privacy:
FROOMKIN:"Right now if you want to register a domain name, it is next to impossible to keep your contact information private. Which means people have been stalked. They get marketed to. They get junk mail. And that's a big concern for many people."ICANN will also discuss how to use characters from languages like Chinese and Arabic in Web addresses.
I'm Brian Watt for Marketplace.
