This week, the changes didn't wait until I got home.  I left for Dallas on Monday, and by Tuesday the Public Interest Registry announced that they'd signed the .org zone on an experimental basis.  Theirs is the first "open" generic top-level domain to be signed, as well as the largest signed zone.  That's obviously great if you run a subdomain of .org and are keen to sign it, but it's even good for folks with subdomains of other gTLDs, since it'll put pressure on their registries to sign those zones, too.

Then on Wednesday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce that has responsibility for oversight of the root zone, announced that they'd work with ICANN and VeriSign to sign the root by the end of the year.

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Ariel Rabkin (of my alma mater, Berkeley) wrote an interesting, thoughtful article on Internet governance recently.  It argues that U.S. government control of the root zone, through the Department of Commerce's oversight of IANA, perhaps isn't such a bad thing.  The U.S., after all, has done a good job so far, eliciting few complaints.  The First Amendment helps us resist calls to use such control as a bludgeon in the service of censorship.  An international organization might yield to covert pressure to enact restrictions on content.

While Mr. Rabkin's arguments appeal to me, I wonder how much my view is clouded by being an American.  Furthermore, I tend to think that some of his points would have rung hollow just months ago, before the current administration took office.

On the other hand, I've thought about alternatives to the current governance model before and never come up with one I felt sure would work better.  Is the current arrangement "the worst form except for all those others that have been tried"?