The Next Net

I know the headline of this post sounds offensive. Every good Sunday paper editor-in-chief knows an intriguing headline is the best way to sell his stuff. Now that you are here, we can go on.

Ars technica has an interesting post on the so-called balkanization of the Internet. Many see this is the context of the DNS root. As Nate Anderson says, the balkanization of the Internet has already happened both on the content and the access side. In most of the Northern hemisphere, one can access the Internet by simply subscribing to an ISP. In other countries, one has to gain prior authorization from the authorities and will only be able to access those government approved sites.
Same for content. It is all well to say that the Net give you access to a lot of content outside your borders. If you are reading this post, I guess you understand English. But how often do you read pages written in Mandarin or Arabic ?

Coming back to the DNS root zone, the new agreement between the DoC and ICANN may convince some countries to remain patient and play the ICANN game in the hope that the DoC will finally give away its crown jewels one day.
This also requires that ICANN shows clearly that it cares about what is important for the users. I do not think it is of tremendous importance we get a bunch of new sTLDs. Surely, it would generate new income for ICANN. But ICANN should not primarily focus on increasing its income but rather on serving the Internet community.

It is important for billions of people to be able to type 中国 rather than .cn or جزيرة العربية rather than .ae in their browser. (caveat: I am not 100% sure these are the right characters/ideograms, but you get the idea).

One way to prevent the balkanization of the root is to once and for all stop with the supremacy of the Western world script and allow other scripts in the root zone. The current attitude is often interpreted as neo-colonialistic arrogance under the guise of “preserving the security and stability of the Internet”. If there are still real technical difficulties before achieving this, then a clear deadline should be decided by which it can be solved and implemented. The current attitude of the ICANN community, ie “Mañana”, is not the answer.