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.

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: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.

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....