On 3 Dec 2003, Franck Martin wrote: > ITU is worried like hell, because the Internet is a process that escapes > the Telcos. The telcos in most of our world are in fact governments and > governments/ITU are saying dealing with country names is a thing of > national sovereignty. What they most of the time fail to see, is that > most registry are willing to hand it over to the governments provided > they DO understand the issues, and not use DNS to empower telcos in more > exclusive licencing power. I'm not sure that this is really the case with respect to assignment of ccTLD registries. Though I can't personally vouch for this, I think all of the ccTLD's have been handed to government designated representatives when the governments asked. So I dispute the implied assertion that there is present evidence of ICANN, IETF, or IANA involvement or interference in political or governmental controls. But of course, governments have the sovereign right to control the communications of their citizens, and if the governments choose, can 'use DNS to empower telcos in more exclusive licencing power'. If governments are concerned about information anarchy, they will undoubtedly bring it up through the UN and through the ITU. Or perhaps they will just employ national firewalls like China did to block unwanted information. --Dean