US Backing Down from Hegemony on One Front? Maybe not....
An alert friend of mine forwarded this to me. What I find so interesting is that this is the only case I can think of when the Bush Administration has appropriately realized (and even beyond the Bushies, for as far back as I can think all the way to the Marshall Plan) that it's not in the United States' best interests to maintain a hegemonic position on anything. Instead, this appears to be a more realistic appraisal of the situation: the realization that what's good for the community (in this case, the world) is actually in the long-term, best-interests of the United States.
If it's true that we're going to resist further strong-arming of ICANN--and there are reasons to think that the administration is back-tracking and paying attention to an issue that it had likely ignored (can you say "Iraq civil war"?) now that conservative voices are suggesting that we behave as if we do own the Internet--then it behooves us to discover why we've abandoned the status quo and wrong-headed common sense and taken a more subtle, statemanlike approach.
If it's true, then it speaks volumes. Somewhere in the decision making process that preceded the ICANN meeting, there was an intelligent analysis that came to a simple, but all-too-often missing, conclusion: in the long run the U.S. loses when it tries to maintain absolute control over a international body. You can be sure that this decision was made by an entirely different group of people than those who've used the Bush/Wolfowitz doctrines to justify absolute unilateralism in all things international.
Yes, there are problems with ICANN having representation from only English-speaking nations. No doubt. It still smacks of techno-colonialism, but it is a step in the right direction away from said colonialism.
For the time being, however, all your DNS are belong to US (yeah, I lifted it).