Critics charge that it is the De Beers of the Internet: an organization that, like the diamond cartel, has created an artificial scarcity to protect a few established players. Worse, they say, whatever claims this body once had to legitimacy were wiped away last year when its board voted to abolish elections.

This faceless power center is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. And its actions may jeopardize the future of the internet.

This company sets rules that govern the worldwide assignment of all-important domain names. Its rules are incorporated into contracts and passed on to anybody who gets a dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, or dot-info domain. The best-known of these rules is the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

Including more than this might upset the fine folks at the Technology Review. Subscribe and I guess you can get access to the archives. My subscription has itself elapsed. This article from Mar. 2003 is Simson Garfinkel's column, Net Effect, titled - The Net's Faltering Democracy

I notice the author also has a page.

The Browser Wars

According to the Web Standards Project (www.webstandards.org), founded by a coalition of top-flight designers disgusted with the increasing fragmentation of the Web, Web designers wasted an incredible 25% of their time devising workarounds for proprietary tags, writing multiple versions of pages to satisfy each browser, and simply educating their clients about the impossibility of creating certain effects for all browsers. It was a mess.

HTML For The World Wide Web - Elizabeth Castro