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Randy Bush on Recent ICANN Proposals
Jodrell writes: "Randy Bush, internet architect and co-chair of the IETF's working group on DNS, has some interesting thoughts on the recent proposals to re-organise ICANN. Randy makes some interesting points about the likely result of allowing Government control into the DNSO, and on the current bloated condition of ICANN."
If ICANN is out of control, it will take a little more insight than this rant to figure out why it got to that point. If it truly wields its power badly, there must be a reason. Randy seems to want to restructure it from the ground up instead of excising only those things that ail.
The whole system is not sick, only certain parts. Figure out what those parts are and remedy them. Don't try to reinvent the entire system.
I think it's obvious that it's time to reframe the question of ICANN... from:
their proposal to turn ICANN into The Force in the hopes that with enough of our money and total control over the root, that they may find a mission someday
to
how to reduce it to a useful size and believable function as Randy Bush is proposing.
I think it's time to start taking this seriously. Like to see next year's domain referrals go up $5 a year due to charges passed along to us by any registrar who wants to sell domain names people can connect to? Or $10? Or $100?
Or prices cranked up to the point where only major corporations and governments can afford them? The proposal to expand ICANN is an ambitious one. Ambitious translates to "if this goes through, it's going to cost somebody." WE are the somebody who will wind up paying.
My last comment on ICANN started with the phrase "taxation without representation". The proposed new ICANN doesn't have any public input that ICANN would have to pay attention to.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I do consider the source. When I first me Randy he basicly told me to go fuck myself. It was later in a NANOG BOF where I brought up the problem of small, multihomed e-businesses having problems getting their own address space from ARIN and the problems of getting providers to accept announcements smaller than a /20 that I was able to see that, brash as he is, the guy has a clue and a well working brain. Most of the ideas expresses are thought out and well peer reviewed. It seems that a lot of the Internet "gods" are kind of twisted people. Take Paul Vixie, please. But it is this kind of genuis and free thought working in the core of the internet that has kept it a viable structure. Listen to Randy, and Paul.. most of the time they are right. If you don't like what they say, don't post it on /., subscribe to the nanog mail list and vent there.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Or, why don't people just move to a different root system. If a lot of the root servers are really being run sans ICANN money, all it would take would be a few large root servers to say "fuck it, we're going to do it ourselves/move to someone else" to make ICANN powerless.
Is it written anywhere that the major (or even minor) ISPs "have" to hit ICANN's (er.. Network Solutions') root server?
Technical solutions are usually simpler, cheaper and, in the end, more effective than political ones.
One of the at large board members of ICANN, Karl Auerbach was reported as saying that "We've just had the equivalent of the president of the United States abolishing Congress" in response to Stuart Lynn's proposals.
At large board members are chosen by rank and file internet users.
Personally I think this proposal is a threat to the supposed impartiality of ICANN. To allow one third of the board members to be chosen by governments will completely alter the original mandate that ICANN was originally setup.
The BBC Website and the ICCAN Watch website has a much more indepth analysis of the proposed plan.
Just you're average nitpicker.
...is that ICANN is there to serve the Internet, not control it.
But "the Internet" (whatever that is) never asked for ICANN. ICANN was created by the good and pure desire of the US government to get completely out of the business of running the Internet it created. Unfortunately it just got a little out of hand.