Verified
ICANN - Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is probably the most highly politically charged environment in the Internet. This is the organization that now administers the allocation of domain names and determines who gets to be the registry for top level domain names like .com, .net, .edu, etc. It also determines the national organization recognized as responsible for Country Codes, like .uk, .tv or .fr. There are two sources of politics in ICANN.
First, the management of domain names was under the US DoD. This was unacceptable to many outside the US who saw politics and conspiracy in every as aspect of the Internet. Transferring responsibility to the Dept of Commerce was only slightly better. There has been much controversy surrounding the administration of country codes and what the rest of the world sees as not having enough input into the process. Because the Internet was initially an academic endeavor, the responsibility for allocating domain names under a specific country code would be assigned to a major university or institute. For some less developed countries, it might be assigned to a professor or grad student not even resident in the country but at a University in the US or Europe! Needless to say, as the importance of the Internet grew, governments wanted to exert control over these and a number of crises developed. Furthermore, the use of domain names has ramifications in the world of trademarks. While in the trademark world there can be several companies with the same name this is not true with computers. When applying for a domain name, it was purely first-come-first-serve, no one checked as to whether you had rights to the name. It was possible for anyone to acquire the domain name for, say MacIntosh.com, whether you worked for Apple Computer or not. Who knows? They might represent the Washington Apple Growers Association or a raincoat manufacturer or a stereo amplifier maker! Now this involves the World Trade Organization. Of course, standing in the wings is the ITU saying we can do all of this. (Remember the ITU (and the PTTs) were antithetical and hosti le to the Internet ideas from the beginning.)
The second source of politics is, of course, money. During the height of the Internet bubble, a lunacy broke out that there should be "competition" in domain names. Clearly such a thing is absurd. There must be a single registry to ensure that the same domain name can not be allocated twice. But why was it being advocated?
To understand that one must understand how the domain name system had been set up. Initially, to ensure that someone would have sufficient funding to maintain the DNS root, IANA decided that the organization responsible for a top level domain (TLD) name could charge $6/year for use of the name. $6 was sufficiently small to not be onerous (today the price is smaller but the number of names is far larger) and with the number of users on the net sufficiently large to ensure sufficient funds to run the DNS root and administer the assignment of names. With the Web, the number of domain names has skyrocketed. Since, virtually the entire process of registering a new domain name and running the root domain servers is automated. Consider the revenue for .com, conservative estimates are 30M .com names allocated. That would translate to $180M/yr. It would be surprising if it cost more than a few million dollars a year to support the operation. Those are very good margins! Others wanted a piece of the action.
The demand for more top level domain names has been strong. In addition this led the small country of Tuvala to exploit its domain name as .tv. And few new TLDs have been defined: .museums, .aero, etc. But the one that was pure extortion was .biz justified as creating more name space beyond .com. But if you are even a modest company interested in protecting trademarks and brand names, it is easy to see that .biz creates no new space because 90% of those with .com names will see it in their best interest to acquire the same name in .biz to protect their claim.
Companies also find that it is necessary to not only acquire their company name and perhaps product names as domain names, but also all derogatory forms of the company name, such as shaftboeing.com or screwmicrosoft.com to protect the company name. So in the end, .biz does not really create much more name space, but it does generate more revenue. ICANN has been driven with the worst kinds of political machinations. Early in its history there was considerable doubt as whether it would survive. Many of these problems arise from there not being a clear definition of who should have a voice in ICANN. That problem arises directly out of the naïve organization of the IETF that did not recognize and incorporate major stakeholders into the process. While its future seems more assured now there are still major conflicts within the organization that must be resolved.