It's no longer merely an academic question

Since 1998, responsibility for overseeing domain names and addresses has rested with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit group based in Marina Del Ray, Calif. ICANN has enjoyed notable successes in the last six years. It has created a way to resolve domain name disputes, formalized some ad hoc arrangements the U.S. government created and approved a handful of top-level domains like .aero and .museum. In between, ICANN has weathered outbreaks of congressional enmity and, occasionally, outright hostility from foreign governments. But now, the governance structure of the Internet may have reached an inflection point. ICANN is being assailed domestically by VeriSign, which filed a federal lawsuit last month, complaining that it has been repeatedly thwarted in trying to make money off its government-granted right to run the master .com and .net database. Internationally, ICANN is fending off a power grab from the United Nations, which has wanted more involvement with the Internet, ever since one of its agencies in 1999 proposed a tax of 1 cent per every 100 e-mail messages. In charge of ICANN during this tumultuous period is Chairman Vint Cerf, who is better known as one of the fathers of the Internet and co-designer of the Internet's workhorse, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. He said: "Not too long ago, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began working on an idea that now goes by the term ENUM. That represented a very significant addition to the functionality of the domain name system (DNS), because it introduced this concept of the naming authority pointer, which is a very general idea.It is a new record type that has to be implemented, but it does not have any impact on any pre-existing services. So there is an example of a very substantial increase in functionality and a very innovative way of using the DNS on which ICANN worked very closely with others, including the International Telecommunication Union and the Internet Architecture Board, to get the mechanisms in place for doing ENUM."