As a seller of wholesale domains you will know that time is of utmost importance across the Internet. Domain API's, launches and purchases all need a time zone to operate across so that there is a standard.
Across the world we have Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to keep control of the time of the world. Countries are either at GMT or show their time as being GMT-5 (New York) or GMT+8 (Brisbane) so we can easily work out what the time is in any location and adjust our programmes accordingly.
But who keeps a track of the time on the Internet? With networks and applications it is really important that we are all at the same second so that things can run smoothly. This has been brought into question recently when a lawsuit threatened to question the site that held the official time used by Linux programmers, and put the whole Linux network into uncertainty. The people running the ftp site that held this important service could not afford to defend the claim, and issued a press release to say “A civil suit was filed on September 30 in federal court in Boston; I’m a defendant; the case involves the time zone database.” And, therefore, “the ftp server at elsie.nci.nih.gov has been shut down.”
But ICANN were on hand to resolve the problem, and have now adopted the task of being the clock watchers for the Internet. It is important that this time remains the same, and although we are used to time zones staying the same in politically stable countries like the USA and here in the UK, there are a lot of countries in the world who regularly experience time zone upheaval due to political unrest in their homes. For this reason, the time zone needs to remain fixed to prevent disruption in these areas.
Akram Atallah, ICANN’s Chief Operating Officer explained that ICANN was taking it over as, "The Time Zone Database provides an essential service on the Internet and keeping it operational falls within ICANN’s mission of maintaining a stable and dependable Internet."
It seems that for the time being, Old Man Time will be protected by ICANN.