This page looks at addressing: identification of websites and
other locations on the network. It covers - As Christine Borgman
notes in From Gutenberg to the Global Information
Infrastructure: Access To Information in the Networked World
(Cambridge: MIT Press 2000), if you can't find information it -
for practical purposes - doesn't exist. While there is been much
talk of the web as a global digital library, access to the sites
that comprise that library or to people is dependent on
agreement about identification of entities on the network.
Determination of rules for identification, in particular the
structure of the Domain Name System (DNS) and the allocation of
names, is thus particularly contentious. Globally and in
Australia there is debate about the operation of bodies such
ICANN and ownership of addresses or the network. Should names be
allocated on a 'first come, first served' basis or to those
bodies that 'own' the name offline? And how do we resolve
disputes? ICANN and the DNS The Internet Corporatio