ICANN's board will be meeting in Stockholm starting June 1, and this meeting has sparked a flurry of press releases, some supporting and others denouncing ICANN. VeriSign, U.S. government officials, and ICANN officials tend to be ICANN's biggest supporters, and everyone else seems to be a critic. A key issue will be how ICANN handles alternative root servers like Atlantic Root Network, which offers .biz domain name addresses that could conflict with ICANN's soon-to-be-introduced .biz addresses. Although ICANN claims it wants to maintain the Internet's stability, ICANN's decision to introduce the .biz top level domain conflicts with Atlantic Root Network's offering, and therefore ICANN's actions contradict its own ideals, according to critics. The .biz overlap "is proof that time and time again ICANN has been very inconsistent in their policies and at times show a logic that is not in accordance to the long-term safety and long-term procedures of this whole system," says ABC Namebank President Naseem Javed. Jason Higgs of Higgs Communications wrote two papers for the Internet Engineering Task Force that outline how to go about introducing a virtual inclusive root. One method would be to create a "super root," or a group of root servers, including ICANN, that would all be placed under an oversight body, while the other proposal suggests that ICANN endorse the alternative root servers. New.net suggests that "innovators" be allowed to come up with new TLDs, which ICANN would then place in its root server if they proved successful.
http://www.internetnews.com/wd-news/article/0,,10_775751,00.html
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