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Join ICANN and Make Your Voice Heard
GuNgA-DiN writes, "ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) announced at large memberships available to the public." Yes, it's true - and it's free. Instead of leaving Internet policy decisions to AOL and other biggies, you can now help select "at large" ICANN board members and generally help make Internet policy. Will individual ICANN members like you and me get heard as loudly as the corporates? Hard to say, but worth a try. It's more voice than we've had in the past, anyway.
Am I the only one who thinks DNS is past its time? I mean, there's got to be a better way. I think it's time for a new naming service to be developed. I'm thinking context- and location-sensitive, text-based (as opposed to the fixed format of URLs), distributed naming services. CORBA already has some of the features I have in mind, but they're localised to CORBA apps and built in at compile time; I say the next-generation network software will be based on a more general distributed object model, indexed and localised through the use of these naming services.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
1) You've ALWAYS been able to participate in ICANN. Every time someone's posted anything related to domain policy, I've practically begged people to get involved, join working groups, and work to ensure things like the ICANN UDRP were fair to individuals. All you've ever had to do to get involved was to subscribe to a DNSO mailing list. (You can't join the ASO, but don't feel bad -- they're not letting ISPs join either.)
2) You will not legally be a "member" of anything. ICANN has gone to great lengths to ensure there is no such thing as a legal membership. In fact, they've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal counsel to ensure that there's little if any accountability within ICANN at all.
3) You will not get to elect board members. You will get to elect a handful of people, who will then CHOOSE the 9 new board members, and only then with the consent of the existing board.
4) Did I mention that you've ALWAYS had the ability to participate in ICANN and have your voice heard?
5) If you join the At Large Membership without informing yourself first, you'll only be harming EVERYONE. Take some time and learn what's been going on before you jump in and implicitly support what ICANN's been up to:
Go read how WIPO is using the ICANN UDRP to enfore implicit beliefs that the Net is nothing but the web, only businesses should own domain names, and only trademark owners should have rights to those names: WIPO dispute decisions
Go read how the UDRP was created in the DNSO WG-A. Go read how corporations want to prohibit you from registering any domain name that contains a trademarked substring (e.g., whereitsatt.com contains ATT) in WG-B. Go read how members of WG-B are trying everything they can to stop the rollout of new top-level domains in WG-C. Go see how the DNSO general assembly deteriorated, destroyed itself and was censored...the GA is the precursor of the ICANN At-Large membership, and should serve as a warning to any considering joining: DNSO Archives
In short, go read up on the history of ICANN and domain name policy before you lend your name to it. Rest assured, Mike Roberts is going to take every opportunity to hold up your membership as implicit support for what ICANN's doing. And you should think long and hard about whether you do support what ICANN's been up to. It may be trendy and cool to bash NSI, but to support ICANN just because they're not NSI may be the poorest decision you've ever made.
Go see for yourself what ICANN is before you lend your name to it.
.@.