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ICANN At-Large Study

Posted by michael on from the gerrymandering-and-poll-taxes dept.

perp writes: "ICANN has published the draft of its At-Large recommendations. It's long, but it looks like they're trying to raise the bar for at-large membership by requiring at-large members to a) pay a fee and b) be a registered domain holder. Their comments about all the non-committed at-large members who "enrolled only because it was easy" gave me a laugh; it took three days of trying for me to register." The draft also proposes slashing At-Large board members from 9 to 6. But there are some good points in there about organizational issues.

2 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Not as bad as first appears? by trust_no_one · · Score: 3, Informative

    At first I thought this was just a power grab by the corporate interests which already dominate ICANN. But then I came across this in the document (note I didn't read the whole thing, just skimmed).

    "We propose the At-Large user "community" include institutions, but only individuals may vote. Institutions already play a greater role in the existing Supporting Organizations, so this seems an appropriate balance. We encourage your input on this issue. "

    Further down they discuss the issue of multiple domain names and the possibilities of fraud. Since it is relatively inexpensive and easy to register a domain name these days, I don't think that the individual net user is necessarily locked out of the process.

    It can't be any worse than the system they used in the last election. I never did receive the snail-mail that was supposed to give me my password. I got many e-mails telling me it was coming, but apparently they sent it via the Pony Express.

    --

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    I'm not an actor, but I play one on tv.
  2. You, sir, are full of shit. by Inti · · Score: 4, Informative
    Some of the alternate roots did establish an 'all.your.base.are.belong.to.us' domain as a joke, around the time of the ICANN Melbourne meeting (March?). OpenNIC did not. We discussed the matter, decided we had no authority over the .us TLD, and decided not to do it. You have us confused with another root, apparently.

    We are not breaking the old DNS. We agree completely with ICANN on the importance of the stability of the inclusive namespace. We absolutely will not touch a TLD or domain that is outside of our purview.

    Our root.cache file is here (or here). See for yourself. There are no .us domains in it whatsoever.

    The OpenNIC claims only 5 TLDs. We have over 500 registered members - growing fast - and many more users.

    Finally, pointing resolve.conf at ANYONE gives that party control of what you see. I think the OpenNIC is more worthy of user trust than any other root, including ICANN/VGA. This is because the entire organization is governed by the vote of its members, much like the Debian people. So nobody's cutting deals behind the scenes.

    Get it straight, Cleatus. You're embarassing yourself.