I understand ICANN is having management problems. Now the governments of the world want a international ICANN. Can anyone tell me in basic simple english what ICANN problems are and who can really help settle them? PLJAMES

From what I understand the ICANN is under US control and other countries don't like this fact. They want an independent body, possibly under the control of the UN.

If this dispute doesn't get resolved other countries might want to set up their own domain name systems, resulting in a split of the internet.

ICANN is basically a regulatory body for the world's DNS servers. They approve all the big decisions such as adding new TLDs and also handle things like complaints and registrant issues. Their problem? Well, it's simple - there's just too much red tape. You have committies for every single decision and all sorts of other bureaucratic stuff. Not to mention the recent .net fiasco (which, in my opinion, was only partially ICANN's fault but still ridiculous).

 

I should probably point out that ICANN doesn't have juristiction over every registrar on the internet. Not every registrar joined ICANN when they were set up - Nominet (the .uk registrar), for instance, is completely independent of ICANN and is about a million times better run.