bucy wrote:
Is all this fuss just about the root zone or is there more to it?

There is a lot more to it, but a ton of people, like that author in Foreign Affairs I linked back on the 4th, seem to be under the impression that you can solve global problems with spam, computer security, inappropriate speech, hunger, and weapons poliferation by controlling the root zone. They basically have no fucking clue what they are talking about.

There are substantive international issues, but almost none of them is controversial. The only meaty ones are:

Whois privacy (something ICANN should never have stuck it's damn nose into in the first place).
Concerns about the nomenclature of the non-cc-tlds.
Concerns about internationalization/language support issues.
Concerns about monopolistic registrar practices and pricing (see Sitefinder).

The international community is involved in all of these discussions and no one who is talking about control of the root zone is concerned about any of these issues.

Thats it. Any sort of policy which outsteps this boundary is likely to be too coercive and will fragment the system. They very nearly did that with their inexplicable whois policy. Verisign very nearly did it with Sitefinder. You can rest assured that if the US pulled Iran's TLD the root servers would get a giant break on their transit bills that month. Any political or power oriented play in this space will break the system if it is successful. DNS can only function if it has nearly unanimous consent.

RE: Other Nations Hope to Loosen U.S. Grip on Internet