Sorting out the mess
After months of discussion and debate, ICANN and the ccTLD operators say they have made some progress, particularly after ICANN's meeting last month in Melbourne. However, many ccTLD administrators say they still have significant issues to settle, including resolving what role governments will play in managing ccTLD names; how much funding the ccTLDs will provide ICANN; and whether the ccTLDs should have a say in how ICANN is run.
Like many aspects of the DNS, the delegation of the ccTLDs has its origins in the efforts of Postel, one of the Internet's founding engineers. To expand the Internet's reach, Postel delegated country-code domains to people he knew around the globe willing to manage them--often other academics--and gave them guidance through a memo stressing that ccTLD managers are trustees of their delegated domains and have a "duty to serve the community."
But as the Internet has grown, so has the diversity of the operators of the ccTLDs. Some are run by government agencies, others by nonprofit organisations. A few are controlled by for-profit businesses, which are marketing ccTLDs globally; for example, The .tv Corp., a Los Angeles company, runs the ccTLD for Tuvalu, a tiny island nation in the South Pacific.
Andrew McLaughlin, ICANN's chief policy officer, says reaching more formal agreements with the ccTLD operators is important to its mission to ensure the stability of the DNS.
But those agreements afford other critical benefits as well. The US Commerce Department has said ICANN must secure agreements with the ccTLDs before the agency considers transferring control of the Internet's root server system to ICANN. In addition, ICANN is counting on the ccTLDs to fund about 30 percent of its US$5 million budget for the current fiscal year.
For the ccTLD operators, an agreement would give them a greater guarantee of some recourse if there were a breakdown in DNS services. It would also provide them with official recognition as the designated managers of their country-code domains.
"It would at least set in stone what the rights and obligations of each party are. At the moment, it's squishy," says James Ross, vice president for business affairs at The .tv Corp.
Still, some ccTLD managers question what benefits they would get from establishing a more formal relationship with ICANN--and many do not participate in the process at all.
"There are over 100 [country codes] with which we don't have any contact," says Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the Internet Society of New Zealand, which operates the dot-nz ccTLD.
At the same time, governments worldwide want to ensure they have a more formal say in how their country's domain name is run. One of the thorniest issues facing ccTLDs is determining what relationship, if any, the domain-name operators should have with their local governments.
