Two US organizations – a non-profit and a corporation – are planning to “quietly” give governments around the world the right to seize domain names by means of canceling, redirecting, or transferring control.
This is based on the “Proposed Renewal of the Registry Agreement for .NET” – recently published by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and Verisign.
Verisign is in charge of operating .COM and .NET TLDs (top-level domains, and while what critically-minded observers say the controversial paper now aims to change relates only to the .NET domain names, the fear is that the world is in for a slippery slope, that could eventually – as it comes up on the agenda of contract renewal – affect .COM the same way.
