ICANN Director Sues ICANN for Access to Records

According to an EFF press release (press release mirror) today, Karl Auerbach (the North American elected representative to ICANN's board) filed suit (petition mirror) today against ICANN itself to obtain financial and other records that he has been seeking to obtain since December 2000. As a bit of background, according to general summaries that ICANN has released, it now spends about $6 million per year (for a job that used to be done by volunteers); roughly half of all the money it spends goes to the law firm of Jones Day.

Comments

Something is fishy here

[TrollMan 5000]

When a company's own director is denied access to financial records of his own company!

Though not an admission of wrongdoing, it does raise some serious issues on how ICANN is run.

One question, was this director already aware of any wrongdoing, or just checking some facts out?

Re:Something is fishy here

[sallen]

When a company's own director is denied access to financial records of his own company! Though not an admission of wrongdoing, it does raise some serious issues on how ICANN is run. One question, was this director already aware of any wrongdoing, or just checking some facts out?

A Board of Directors has a fiduciary responsibility to the Corporation. Anyone in management who attempts to withhold access from a Board member should be subject to immediate termination. I'd love to see how the insurer carrying their D&O policy would react to this type of activity. It seems, being non-profit under 501(c)3, it's even more paramount for the board member to insure the finances are in order. It sound like management doesn't realize they are employed BY the Board, and that goes for their legal team as well. (It's interesting to note someone mentioned a law firm receiving a substantial portion of the expenses. Check the 'contributions exceedind 5,000.00' in their financial statements)

JP

[rakerman]

Didn't Jon Postel do practically all of what ICANN does?

Do we really need a huge, opaque, multimillion dollar organization to do... what is they're supposed to do anyway, manage the DNS space? Sheesh.

I hope Karl Auerbach is a good guy

[phallen]

... because even though the financial records should be made avaliable since there's nothing to hide (right?), Karl could easily use the policy for political reasons.

If he sees that requesting the information would be rejected, he could do it on purpose, be refused, and then raise a huge stink about it in hopes of drawing attention to himself as a poor guy getting trounced by THE MAN. Kind of like saying "... so you won't tell me your secerets? What are you hiding? Hey everone, this guy is hiding something, he must be evil!"

I agree that the organization should cough up the information out of principle, but if Karl is requesting them becasue he can see that he would get personal (and political) gain out of it, we're choosing between two evils.

Umm

[mindstrm]

He *could* I suppose... but...

IT is *illegal* for them to not provide him with the requested records. He's a director of the company!

So political gain or not, he is right.

Orwell was RIGHT!

[isotope23]

Just goes to show Orwell was right on with "Animal Farm"!

All Animals Are Equal

But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

LOL!

Re:Can someone please help me out for a second

[nomadic]

He's a lawyer and a programmer, and a perpetual thorn in the side of the rest of the ICANN board. He's probably the reason they're trying to abolish the election of members.

Re:influence

[reemul]

The budget isn't that big. To you and me $6 million USD is a pretty sexy number, but once they've paid themselves, their lawyers, and their lobbyists, they wouldn't have enough money to buy even a single congresscritter, much less be able to exert significant influence around the world.

I suspect a lot of the budget that isn't going to the law firm is going to pay for all the meetings in out-of-the-way places they use to hide what they're up to while pretending to be global. Ghana?!? Who had that bright idea? Including all the laptops of members and lackeys and press, the number of PCs in Ghana likely doubled for the duration of the conference. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.

Re:Who do we sue?

[Sloppy]

They aren't really accountable to anyone, at least in the traditional sense. Their real power is entirely defacto. You give them power when you use (or run) nameservers that point to their roots.

To whom do we petition to have that power revoked?

For most people, the party to petition is your ISP. Whoever runs the resolver you use, needs to point to other roots. If that party is unresponsive to your desires, then you can either find someone else's resolver to use, or run your own bind or djbdns (or similar software) to query from the roots yourself.

I believe a few months ago, I saw that someone on the OpenNic forums was making a resolver or two open to the public, for people who don't want to mess with such details. Beware that using a far-away resolver does come with a slight performance hit.

Re:I've said this before

[Cyno]

Or hire a professional sys admin for less than $150k and have him write a perl script to merge both the world wide DNS maps with those of the alternate root servers and continue operations with a working complete dns map, without the greedy ICANN board controlling any of it, else it get fucked up again.

No, JP didn't do what ICANN does.

[billstewart]

• He didn't play politics much,
• He didn't declare himself to be autocrat of the world,
• He didn't refuse to listen to real users,
• He didn't act obnoxiously and irresponsibly.

Jon Postel wasn't perfect, and he did make some mistakes, but he was fundamentally reasonable and tried to do a good job. He didn't let the fact that he really was in charge of the world as we know it go to his head....