Hundreds of representatives, from Internet interest groups to companies that register domain names, have flown in from all over the world to attend ICANN's quarterly meeting.
Order or chaos is at stake, and the Internet's top naming authority is set to defend its uncompromising stance against those who question the US organisation's self-imposed mandate.
ICANN may have hoped the meeting in Sweden would choose to celebrate the launch of the first of seven new domain names it had authorised in November, giving the virtual world new suffixes such as ".name" and ".biz" alongside familar ones such as ".com" and ".org", but many in the Internet world want more.
How much more they want is made clear by U.S.-based New.net which introduced 20 new top-level domain names which are not authorised by ICANN and can be ".car", ".kids" or ".xxx".
New.net is just one of the organisations that bypass ICANN's name registry, including those in countries using non-alphabetic scripts which have not been included in the ICANN alphabetic registry.
ICANN's chief executive Stuart Lynn dismissed the initiative to launch "alternate roots" as potentially harmful to the Internet, because the public could end up at websites they did not want to visit.
"Your email may even end up with the wrong person. There is no order if anyone can set up a Top Level Domain name (such as ".com" or ".kids")," ICANN chairman Vint Cerf agrees with the chief executive of his organisation.
Authority questioned
ICANN's view has already caused concern among those who claim the organisation is too bureaucratic and moves too slowly, but also question its authority.
ICANN is by some perceived to be a vehicle of the US government, and indeed has to answer for its actions to the US Department of Commerce after it was put in place by a US government task force in 1998.
Even within ICANN some disagree with the organisation's claim that chaos will break out unless there is one single routing authority run by ICANN.
"Competing roots are no threat," said Karl Auerbach, an ICANN board member with a long professional background in data network architecture. He has relied on alternate roots himself for the past four years, and despite the potential problems "they don't occur in practice," he told Reuters.
"ICANN uses the threat of Internet destability to scare people away (from alternate roots). But in practice it is not in the interest of competing root companies to give the wrong answers and guide people to the wrong places on the Web," Auerbach added.
Cerf rebutts that Auerbach is right only if all companies that issue new Internet addresses work closely together.
"The reason there are no conflicts just yet is that the alterate root companies rely on the ICANN framework and build something on top. It's all smoke and mirrors."
Those who want to use alternate roots and visit websites that end with suffixes not authorised by ICANN will have to change network settings on their computer, a cumbersome exercise that prevents most users doing so.
