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In an effort to block Amazon from getting the top-level domain .amazon, Brazil may have put governments on a crash course with the private sector over control of the web.
In an aggressive and contradictory letter [PDF] on Wednesday to the overseer of the internet's domain name system, ICANN, Brazilian technology minister Benedicto Filho insisted the US non-profit not approve the creation of .amazon, and states strongly that governments have the final say on what should appear online.
As you may well know, Brazil is particularly enamored with the word Amazon, being the home of the Amazon Jungle. And it doesn't want some moneybags American retailer nabbing the top-level domain for the rainforest.
"It is the right and duty of governments – and not of Amazon the company, nor any panel constituted by three nationals of a single country in their individual capacity, nor even of the ICANN Board of Directors – to identify the public policy issues that may justify the Board to adopt certain decisions," Filho said.
He goes on to say that if ICANN was "required to substitute the views of governments and the GAC [Governmental Advisory Committee] for its own judgments ... it would be dealing a fatal blow to the multi-stakeholder governance model upon which ICANN is based."
In essence, Brazil says that unless ICANN does what it says – in this case not allow for the creation of the .amazon top-level domain for Jeff Bezos' Amazon – then the entire model of internet governance that the organization represents, where all parties including governments, the technical community and business have an equal say, is invalid.
That extraordinary contradiction – that an equitable decision-making process only exists so long as governments have the final say – is not the only one in the letter.
Filho goes on to insist that all governments agree with Brazil and Peru's position that .amazon not be added to the internet, but in making his case only cites meetings held in Brazil by Brazilian interests.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/27/brazil_dot_amazon_gtld/
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:31AM
I realized the ICANN weren't about technology and more about money years ago when I tried to get the ICANN to reserve .here for everyone to use privately (similar to RFC1918 but for domains e.g. MyNAS.here [1] ) but they were too busy approving YetMoreDotComs like .biz and .info.
Even back then to merely _apply_ to get a TLD from ICANN required an application fee of $185,000 or something like that.
[1] Basically .here was to be DNS equivalent of the RFC1918 IP address ranges - they shouldn't normally be seen on the public Internet, but OK for internal networks. And by reserving them for internal use you can be sure your internal FQDNs won't clash with something else the ICANN wants to make money from later. e.g. say people in South America were using .amazon internally and ICANN suddenly approves the public .amazon TLD.
Also tried with the IETF too: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yeoh-tldhere-01 [ietf.org]