Internet overseeing organisation ICANN has backed down in its battle with the rest of the world

Internet overseeing organisation ICANN has backed down in its battle with the rest of the world and conceded that it cannot expect to dictate policy over countries outside the US. The decision - ratified late yesterday by the ICANN Board of Directors at the ICANN meeting in Montreal - is a victory of commonsense and speaks volumes about the new president/CEO Paul Twomey's reign. After four years of argument and an all-night session on Wednesday night, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) was finally formed and ICANN's metamorphosis from flesh-eating maggot to the dragonfly of ICANN 2.0 was complete. The decision has delighted linchpin of the world's country-code community, Dr Willie Black, who told us he was "very happy" with the decision. Although, he concedes, "we went in very heavy and said there was no way we would be bound by these rules. They had their backs to the wall." The issues raised in the formation of the ccNSO are a microcosm of all of the wider problems of ICANN and the Internet. ICANN has spent years pressurising the rest of the world's domains - such as .uk for Britain, .fr for France - to sign a contract with it that would give ICANN ultimate control over their domains and what they did with them.