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Portrait Of ICANN Chairwoman Esther Dyson
ContinuousPark writes "The NY Times has an article on Esther Dyson's difficulties heading ICANN, some of them deriving with her inability to do politics, a much needed thing when you have individual and civil interests on one side and huge commercial ones on the other. Although the article praises her enormous intellectual capacity, it also has EFF's Mike Godwin saying: 'I think that there is a dimension of being a political being that involves going out and getting hands on and dealing with individuals. I don't think she is terribly comfortable with that. I think she is democratic in principle but not entirely democratic in practice.' Is Dyson recklessly ignoring politics or is she maybe redefining them?"
Steve Gilliard has a piece over at Net Slaves, called "Who watches the Guardians." It is about Esther D. and paints an unlovely portrait. I suggest you all read it before your boners get too hard for her.
I, for one, agree with Steve G. She's the last person I want running the ICANN. In fact, I want no one running it, 'cause you can't really trust anyone with that much power. Well, I might trust myself, but you probably wouldn't. :-)
Esther has too much money involved and she's too cozy with Technology CEOs to be trusted with this position. Just read her book, RELEASE 2.0, and you'll read what I'm talking about. It's just filled with all the names of all these companies and CEOs that she's involved in. She's also not a very technical person, and you get that from her book, not just 'casue Steve G. says so.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
But in the "real world", you have to be able to "politic" if you want to get things done. Politics doesn't have to be about taking and giving bribes or the other nasty things usually associated with it. If you can't interact well with others, it doesn't matter how intelligent you are, nobody's gonna listen to you.
Case in point, back in 1997, Dyson, who has NO experience in the anti-spam community, shot her mouth off about the spam problem and proposed a "solution" to it. Had she actually spent more than two seconds thinking about her "solution", or actually posting it to one or more anti-spam forums and asking for comments, she would have found that it's something that most anti-spammers don't see as being viable. But nooo, she didn't do that, she evidentally thought she knew more than everyone else, including those of us who have been dealing with spam for years, and the media blindly quoted her as though she were some anti-spam guru, which she's not.
I apologize for sounding bitter and turning this post into a rant, but dammit, it annoys me to no end when people don't think, and their short-sighted actions set back the efforts of an entire community. Dyson is in serious need of a clue.
<gets off his soapbox>
Esther Dyson was one of several people hand-picked by an unknown group and handed ICANN by Becky Burr and the US Dept. of Commerce. Nobody knows by what process Dyson was chosen, or who did the choosing.
Dyson and the other initial ICANN Board of Directors have demonstrated a distinct lack of ability to work in the open, to accept input in a bottom-up fashion, and to understand the technical aspects of the entity about which they are supposed to make decisions.
Now, in Cairo, The ICANN Board of Directors, led by Esther Dyson in this matter, decided to scrap the General Assembly process by which 9 new, individual ICANN Directors would be named, and decided to eliminate 4 of them.
Their reasoning? Becuase they're afraid of handing over control to people who "don't understand the Internet". A sad comment indeed, coming from a Board with a vested financial interest in the outcome of decisions related to namespace and IP-space, who do not have even a rudimentary understanding of that which they govern, except perhaps for Vint Cerf.
The ICANN Board of Directors was supposed to be completely elected and the original people, Dyson included, removed by September of 1999. Dyson and her cohorts have repeatedly voted themselves more years as ICANN Directors, and have both refused to relinquish control to any form of elected body, and have refused to run ICANN in the grassroots, bottom-up, narrow technical matter that the contracts with the US Government require.
That ICANN continues to exist at all is miracle, and a nightmare. That Dyson was chosen as figurehead for it and continues to lend her name to it says volumes about her character.
.@.
http:// partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/04/biztech/ar ticles/10dyso.html