Slashdot Mirror
ICANN CEO Proposes Radical Changes
Froomkin writes: "ICANN CEO Stuart Lynn today released a plan for a "strong" ICANN that would have 5 of 15 Board members selected directly by governments and the rest by registrars, registries, plus a few Board-squatter-like ringers chosen by the ICANN Board or staff. The main justifications offered for this shift are that in order to be "strong" ICANN needs more money, more support, and less "process". Of course, promises Lynn, ICANN's "core values of openness and broad participation" should be "preserved". (Don't laugh. It's not funny.) "Meaningful participation" will be achieved by cutting out any direct representation for end-users. Oh yes, ICANN wants a much bigger budget, and to be independent of the US Dept. of Commerce, and to get direct control of the root server operators too, all so as to ensure that ICANN has unimpeded ability to execute its (undefined, growing) "mission". ICANN was supposed to save the Internet from governments; since major interest groups such as the ccTLDs and RIRs won't do what ICANN wants, and won't pay it, ICANN now turns to governments to save it from the Internet. See the Press Release here, and then look at entire plan, then visit ICANNWatch.org for updates and commentary." Yep. The proposal would eliminate any pretense of At-Large involvement in running ICANN - it would be solely a governmental and corporate body.
I think that the Government should have at least a little bit of control (although not as much as the US has right now) and each government should be represented fairly (not this whole US gets .gov while the UK gov gets .gov.uk.) ICANN should really be an international body rather than the Dept. of Commerce one that is is now.
...just an End-User.
The problem with giving the End-User control in ICANN is that there are too many End-Users around the world to do this, and aren't the governments supposed to be representative of the people? As for corporations having control...I think they should have little, if at all. But who am I?
Just my US$0.02
Hargun
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
Sometimes amazing what certain groups/companies will try to get away with, sometimes even being fairly sure that they will fail. If you try to get away with 100 absurd ideas, like certain patents for example, if even one or two of them fall through the cracks it ends up being worth it.
"I Think ICANN, I think ICANN."
(yes, I know, that was horrible)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
How else does everyone propose to convince these private companies to act in the public interest? Certainly nobody wants Verisign and AOL and Cisco to be the defacto policymakers...do they?
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
but really, don't they have better things to do than to help large corporations buy the rest of the internet?
I'm sure Esther Dyson (genuflects) is a very smart person and all that, but I shudder to think what will happen if governments and corporations are the only people left with any say on how the internet, and the web in particular, is run. I fully expect the world wide web to become just another string of TV stations with really lousy reception. Sort of like the cable access channel, only with product placements.
Perhaps Esther Dyson (genuflects) should think twice before auctioning off the rest of the public commons... again.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Well this article's been posted about twenty minutes and the responses are pouring in. Has everyone read the 16,000 word announcement that was the main link to the Slashdot post? I didn't think so.
One of the key problems here is that everything that ICANN is saying, in both their press release, and their 16,000 word announcement, is written in the most unimaginably dry style possible.
The wretched quality of the writing is, I think, deliberate. Because what people can't understand, they can't criticize.
How much money does ICANN leadership rake in each year? How about giving some competent writer $1500 of that, so that this mega-announcement and its press release can be written up in terms any interested person can get through? As it stands now, very few of us (and certainly not myself) are capable of debating this vitally important announcement. It can't be understood, and perhaps that's the way ICANN wants it.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
The more ICANN has [d]evolved, the more ICANN has gone away from its grassroot.
I am an ICANN member, - just a ordinary member thank you very much, - and I can tell you that I am really disappointed with ICANN's [d]evolution process so far.
Granted, there _are_ things that ordinary members like me don't know. Mebbe there are some valid reason for ICANN to do what it has been doing. I won't utter a blanket condemnation towards ICANN, not just yet.
But I have to say this - as I am a member of ICANN, I am also a member of the cyberspace, aka Netizen.
As a Netizen, and as one who don't really trust government - any government, mind you - that much, the ICANN's latest maneuver, in inviting the government to take such a large part of ICANN's operation really worries me.
If ICANN is let to do its own thing, there is a huge possibility that ICANN will be yet-another-irrelevant-organization.
I don't care who that ICANN CEO is, but this is what I will say - if ICANN forgets its grassroot, ICANN might as well fold its operation. Because without the grassroot, ICANN will no longer be representing ANYTHING relevant.
Governments and corporations already have their own way to express their views. ICANN was set up primarily to address the views of the grassroots.
No matter it's DCMA or ICANN's latest move, the future for grassroots in the cyberspace doesn't look good.
We keep losing in the power struggle. The corporate power and the bureaucrats from the governments keep on winning.
What will it be like 10 years of 20 years in the future, if the Net can not tolerate FREE VIEWS anymore ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
And exactly why should US congress be the ultimate governing body of the Internet? (or US government...). Internet is well past its earlier "US only" phase... Being international, and there not being many international organizations with any formal powers (UN being one of the few... and its powers are severely limited), it's hard to see any (existing) organizational body having "ultimate" control over Internet.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
We are the people who are ultimately going to pay for this. Just what is it that ICANN is trying to sell us that is worth paying for? Making you feel secure isn't worth a cent of my money. The whole reason behind the proposal is that that the ccTLDs and other registries can't find a reason to pay what ICANN wants to charge. How much does it really cost to run a root server? How much more than that does ICANN want to charge?
Adding a superbureaucracy to ICANN somehow doesn't seem to add value to the product to me. As an end user and owner of a domain, all I want from whoever is running a root server is reliable enough propagation that if I want to access a domain by e-mail or ftp or via Web, I can with no screwing around. While a true Internet government responsible to the userbase might be an interesting thing, that has nothing to do with the ICANN proposal.
If you don't feel worthy to be part of the governance of the Internet, I agree completely with you. You aren't. Some of the rest of us might be. Go back to your TV set and believe whatever the pundits on CNN tell you.
Nobody has to get shot at by anybody to create alternate root servers that ICANN can't touch, and if ICANN actually gets it together far enough to make this happen, the question isn't whether there will be alternate roots, the question is how many. Do you want to have to select an ISP based on which root is most likely to have in its namespace the people and entities you want to communicate with?
What you have mistaken for a legitimate attempt of the Internet to govern itself is just another political scam to get us to buy services that nobody except a few major corporate and governmental interests who want better tools for intellectual property control and control of Internet content in general want.
The Internet is screwed up enough as it is and it should be obvious to any informed person that the ICANN proposal isn't even in the right general direction to fix what's wrong.
Will this clean up the spam coming out of Asia? Will this make open relay operators fix their servers? The other problems like insufficient bandwidth will be taken care of by the private sector when it becomes profitable to do so.
What do corporations do when governmental powers are made available to them? The DMCA, Cybercrime Treaty complete with secret protocols, and the new WIPO restrictions on use of copyrighted material are good examples. A corporate charter says to do things that are good for the stockholders, not for the public interest.
"Who shall watch the watchdogs?" The ICANN proposal says nobody... perhaps power exercised by backroom deals solely accessible to insiders makes you feel warm and fuzzy. If this is what you want to pay for, write ICANN a check with your money. NOT mine.
Tech Public Policy stuff
ICANN finally admitting that they are run by, and for, the large groups with big pockets is just truth in advertising.
Something everyone should read and understand is Reed's Law as in the end ICANN et al don't matter a lot...
For the supreme protest against ICANN, try an alternative root server, such as OpenNIC.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
As Bob Frankston has been saying and saying and saying: "The solution is very simple. Just separate the technical mechanism of the handles from their role as names. This can be done within the existing system by just assigning meaningless identifiers, such as numbers, instead of words. We already have the example of phone numbers that don't have any relationship to names."
And still no one is listening!
It's beyond foolish to think that governments represent their people in any significant way.
Certainly here in the 'States at least.
This kind of message is exactly what they need to hear, and also exactly the kind of message that will never make it through the bureaucracy.
Seriously, bureaucracy never tollerates the message that they are not needed. Bureaucracies always expand and extend their power, not restrict it.
As needed as this message is as a "reality enema", the ICANN and the governments whos force the ICANN thrives on will never officially "hear" it.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
The only people who control the IP address space are the ones who control the routers. It's agreement between these people that allows the internet to exist. ICANN can proclaim whatever they want, but doing something like revocing all of China's IP space simply isn't going to happen.
.aol sites.
And the government controls the Doman Name System? Tell that to the 30 million americans who regularly hit
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And yes the Government does control the DNS system that all of us use everyday. The US govenment ordered NSI to give the A root server to ICANN and I believe it(or they) sits in California as we speak.
ICANN's management created this monstrosity on its own initiatiative - it is esssentially an act of gross insubordination by ICANN's management and an act of disdain for the Board of Directors and for the internet community.
This "restructructuring" is a complete recreation of ICANN, but with even the hint of public participation stripped away.
I just go off the airplane home from this ambush. I'm really ticked off.
Are you completely fucking insane? starting your own DNS based on a DSL line? do you have ANY idea how busy the root servers are?
They AVERAGE 3000 queries per SECOND.
Read RFC 2870 about root nameservers - it'll cost you a lot of money to do something like that. You are talking about a fully loaded clustered pair of 4 processor boxes, HA networking engineering, HA firewalls, etc, etc, and a team of top admins. None of this comes cheap, and don't even think of using linux, you'll want something you can get top tier integrated OS/Hardware support for.
Have a look at the levels of redundancy nominum use for GNS - their DNS service.
Alex
IBM spent at least 2 years (maybe more, my data is 2 years old) of it's $60M/yr Washington lobbying budget to prevent the creation of new TLDs to protect its trademarks.
That's just one thing we've found out. You'd be a fool to believe they were the only ones.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I know there are multiple roots available to choose from, however I don't want to make a static choice. I want a named.conf entry where I can say, "check opennic first, then icann, then pacific root."
Alternately, I might want to say, "use the result from icann unless opennic and pacific root both agree on different result."
I want to be able to use multiple roots, not choose from multiple roots.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I thought that would be the International Conspiracy to Acquire Network Names, since they don't really assign them so much as they acquiesce to allow someone else to use them.
Edith Keeler Must Die