Today ICANN posted the first [pdf] in what we hope will be a series of factsheets that will help explain various elements of ICANN’s mission as well as wider, technical aspects of the Internet.
The aim and intention is very clear: many of the issues that affect the Internet are quite technical and as a result are not well understood. Since the Internet is of such importance, and since ICANN believes that the best decisions over the Net’s future path will derive from wide and open discussion by all interested parties, the hope is that a series of factsheets written in plain English will improve that discussion and encourage involvement.
This factsheet hopes to serve several different ends: provide some timely information on the 6 February 2007 attack on the root server system; correct some misunderstandings about the root servers; act as an information resource for future referral; explain how the Internet is protected and by whom; outline what the attack was and how and why it happened; and lastly, look forward to what can be done to help tackle such attacks in future.
The factsheet has been produced by ICANN, and has ICANN’s masthead on it, but the information has been compiled and written with the wider Internet community in mind and as such we are releasing it under a Creative Commons licence. This means people are free to use it, copy it, add to it, do whatever they want with it, so long as a credit is given to ICANN, so long as people don’t use the material to make money, and so long as whatever changes are made by others are also released under a Creative Commons licence.
In other words: spread it as far and as wide as you like. If people want to make different-language versions of the factsheet, we would be delighted to receive copies.
We have also compiled a tentative list of other topics we hope to cover in future, but if you feel particularly strongly that an area in which ICANN can claim a legitimate interest needs to be covered, please do add it in a comment below.