Topic: Is Namecoin about to shine? Icann leaving the usa. (Read 522 times)

Four states' attorneys general have filed suit to prevent the transition of critical internet functions from the US government to non-profit ICANN this Friday.

The lawsuit from Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma and Nevada seeks a temporary restraining order that would prevent the IANA contract from expiring on September 30. (If or when it expires, IANA, which oversees the world's DNS and IP address allocations, will be completely under ICANN control.)

This legal challenge comes the day after an effort to get Congress to block the transition failed.

The lawsuit [PDF] has been filed in Texas and a judge is expected to rule on whether to put a hold on the transition later today. The US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has said it will not comment on the matter.

The attorneys general make five main claims:

The contract is US government property and requires explicit Congressional approval before it can be handed over.
The transition would violate the First Amendment.
The NTIA did not follow the correct public comment procedures.
The NTIA does not have the authority to hand over the contract.
The transition does not properly protect the .gov and .mil top-level domains.
As you would expect from a lawsuit lodged by states' top lawyers, the content and explanations within the lawsuit over how the internet works and the role of the NTIA and ICANN is largely accurate – a rarity in this area.

There are significant flaws in the arguments put forward, however.

The critical issue is likely to be what is allowed to happen to the .gov and .mil top-level domains, since this is the issue on which the attorneys general have hitched their right to sue.

The states rely heavily on the use of .gov domain names and argue that following the transition, "the States have no assurance that ICANN will not delete the .gov top-level domain name or otherwise increase costs for the States."

Is namecoin still maintained? I always thought that only litecoin and dogecoin are the only ones that are left of the old altcoins and that the development team of the others have moved on to make new coins.

The misguided call for the United States to exert unilateral control over ICANN does nothing to advance free speech because ICANN, in fact, has no power whatsoever over individual speech online," the pair wrote. "ICANN supervises domain names on the internet. The actual flow of traffic, and therefore speech, is up to individual network and platform operators."

Under the new ICANN regime, nations will be able to censor content “no more than they are now,” Jim Waldo, a professor and chief technology officer for Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, writes in an email. “These worries are more evidence that the people voicing them don’t understand how the technology works.”

In fact, moving away from US control may be able to preserve free speech by keeping the system free from government control.

I seen an off-topic post here about the changes in domain name control..
Is that what you are referring to ?
If so you should probably elaborate here for people that did not hear the news yet.

And it's time ? I dunno..

In one week, President Obama will allow what remains of the United States’ control over the Internet to pass to a California non-profit organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).  This is a reckless and dangerous decision that has serious national security consequences that have not been fully considered.

Analysts at The Heritage Foundation warn that governments will gain new influence over the internet, that its freedom will suffer, and that ICANN leadership (both CEO Göran Marby and staff) will continue its troubling pattern of ignoring bylaws without the community holding leadership accountable.