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Farber, Neumann, and Weinstein Call for End to ICANN
lapse writes: "PFIR's latest policy statement calls for bringing
an end to ICANN. Without assigning blame, it calls for immediate action, and suggests some possible paths forward. Let's hope that this clear statement from such a respected trio will lead to better times ahead for Internet policy management." Salon also has an interview with Karl Auerbach about his lawsuit against ICANN.
It will take time to do, especially if ICANN does not want to give up control. It's got to be done though.
Nothing to see here, move along.
First, as an immediate temporary measure, all Internet policy, operational, and other Internet-related functions currently performed by ICANN should be transferred, as soon as practicable while maintaining continuity, to a different, already existing non-profit organization (or organizations) on a non-permanent, strictly stewardship basis. One potential candidate we would suggest considering for this role would be the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), although there are a range of other possibilities of course. The process to plan and begin a transfer of responsibilities from ICANN should be initiated immediately.
If you say so, but these kinds of global decissions should not be made easily. If they are going to reconstruct the system, make it a good one, and something that will work in the future (with future expandings of the network).
Yes, there was a Dell article between Science: Optical Cryptography and Your Rights Online: Farber, Neumann, and Weinstein Call for End to ICANN. I don't know where it went, but here is the link:
4 3
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/19/05162
Was it ICANN that refused to introduce the highly demanded .kids and .sex TLD but instead brought up that useless .aero TLD, so that in the end the Congress discussed introducing a .kids.us SLD?
IMHO ICANN is a useless good-will-bad-act organisation.
The fact of the matter is that the internet as a whole cannot be properly managed, unless the world as a whole starts co-operating. Right now, you've got each country carrying out its own laws on the internet, and meanwhile conflicting laws between countries are allowing virtually no semblence of consistancy or even proper causality. Trying to organize something as "big" as the internet without a consistant causality is always going to be impossible.
What needs to happen, regardless of ICANN or ARIN or any other "internet regulation group", is some type of international agreement on what the internet entails. It was easy when the internet was just starting to pop up on the international platform, but now this global network needs global management - not national management.
On the specifics on what was said about ICANN, I agree, partly. ICANN in its present form shouldnt live on. Theres a complete lack of direction, and it appears to be bumbling about like it cant decide what to do. I doubt we'll ever quite get over the mess its made.
.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It's a wonder he even got the position with an attitude like this:
"That's why I want to look at the records, to find out where the money goes. Why does it take $2.4 million (47 applicants paid $50,000 each) to evaluate seven top-level domains?"
It goes against all the immorral business practices that companies get sucked into.
It's amaizing that a non profit organization can have a budget that's so high, and the people that they represent get representation like Auerbach who has the integrity to ask a question like "...Why does it take $2.4 million..."
I believe that this is a clear case of public interest being served sloppy seconds from a management commitee that pays out sallarries to anywhere from 50 to a 100 people supposedly working to do something that like everybody says, should take less than 20.
Non profit company = not for profit.
somehow with the numbers there talking about, ie 23 million, I think someone is making some nice paychecks.
As he says here:
"What kinds of alternatives are you offering? How do you think some of the problems, particularly with fraud, should be fixed?
First, get rid of management. Here are people whose primary belief is that elections will never
work, therefore they don't try. There's a lack of will here. Also, we don't have to have electronic elections. We can have good old paper elections, the kind that work for all kinds of nonprofits all over the world. You send people an envelope, they fill out the paper and send it back.
Is that so hard? Is that so extensive?
Why do you think these kinds of things aren't being considered?
Because it gets in their way of building an empire."
A non profit empire run by people who control the worlds access (in some ways) to the internet.
"And that's what ICANN is turning into -- bureaucracy upon bureaucracy."
And one last comment:
"As far as finances go, the thing is just naive. Here he is asking governments to pay. Who in the U.S. has been the most vociferous opponent to ICANN at the federal level? Congress. If anybody at ICANN would bother to read something simple, like the U.S. Constitution, they'd recognize that funds have to be approved by Congress; the executive branch doesn't print money and spend it. If someone's going to pay ICANN, it's going to have to be passed by Congress. And that certainly gives Congress a much stronger level to exert control.
And how are you going to get governments to agree? Governments are required, under the Lynn plan, to gather into clubs and select someone. But now, according to a recent clarification, they have to select from a list prepared by this council -- and then pay for the privilege."
Pay for the privilege?!
A non profit organization requiring people to pay for the right to have participation in the proceeding that the non profit organization was made for?
It just strikes me as odd that these people got away with anything like this for as long as they did, but I can understand with the current and past administration. Also without slashdot and other websited like them I'd be totally in the dark about these things, they're not in the news or the local paper. It seems like people are just ending over for anything these days.
I'm totally proud of Auerbach and his ability to cut to the chase. SHOW HIM THE MONEY!
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Interesting....
they call for an immediate transfer to an existing non-profit organation. Who would they like this to be then???
Themselves?
One of the dates coming up on the ICANN calendar this summer or very early autumn is the renewal of the Memorandum of Understanding between ICANN and the Nat'l Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) [part of the US Dept of Commerce].
1 .htm This is due for renewal about now.
That MoU is the vehicle through which ICANN gains most of its authority over DNS. See http://www.icann.org/general/agreements.htm for a pointer to the MoU and its series of amendments.
Another vehicle is a contract with NIST for the "IANA Function":
http://www.icann.org/general/iana-contract-21mar0
Yeah, I saw that Dell article myself. Whats even odder is that it seems to have been removed from my cache/history mysteriously.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
On the face of it it appears that the only forum is ICANN itself and baring that (for obvious reasons) all u have left is the UN! The only other power player in this is really IAB/ISOC/IETF - but this forum has no "jurisdiction" over ICANN and can't be seen as neutral.
The only way to deal with this is for a large majority of the people that support ICANN at the grass roots to set up a consensual forum not controlled by the current ICANN leadership to thrash out a solution - subsequently seeking the support of groups such as IAB and so forth (now we know what yahoo groups are useful for...). Without this non-body will be able to claim any consensus.
I think the fundamental contribution made by this article stands though - do this "outside" ICANN. Once consensus builds this forum should be able to dictate terms to ICANN and/or simply replace it. Not easy but possible if the right leading figures emerge.
.sig
That sounds to me an exact description of the International Working Party on the White Paper, the consultation process which led to the setting up of ICANN (and, which, incidentally, I took part in in Geneva).
What worries me is that if we do the whole thing again in the same way,
It's a shame Jon Postel went and died on us; we moaned enough about him during his lifetime, but he died this job far better than ICANN have. Short of finding another individual as unmoved by commercial pressures, and as essentially fair minded as Jon was, we are stuck with a bunch of extremely wealthy conflicting vested interests, and a lot of hungry looking lawyers. The horizon to windward looks stormy.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
ICANN for all their faults are probably no worse than another body that could be appointed to fulfill the same role.
The big problem with the TLD's is that they're global as opposed to country specific and so any regulation needs to be done from that perspective -- and regardless of the rights and wrongs a central body is needed to prevent anarchy... unfortunatly given that power corrupts any replacement will probably over the years go the same way.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
It's back ! Somethign weird must have happened deep within the bowels of Slashcode.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
DNS only needs a little bit of administration and conflict arbitration ... thats it, needs a small organization. ICANN doesnt need direction, it just needs to do that small job. They cannot accept they just have to do the job they have been given and try to invent more work to grow their organization, thats the only problem.
Noone needs to define what the internet entails, it is what it is. It worked when the internet just popped up, and it still works.
Mr and Mrs
.thissucks .lotsoffreepornhere .tryingtoripyo uoff .thisinfoisnotreal etc. I run a server farm of 386s which I have been told are the top of the line. I also live in a rural area where my internet connection tops out at 19.2 baud, I think this should be enough to service requests. Hopefully you will consider my application. I look forward to talking to you in the next few weeks.
David J. Farber, Peter G. Neumann, and Lauren Weinstein
I feel that in the best interest of ICANN you should turn over control to me. I am the best man for the job because I will give people want they want. I plan on rolling out TLDs like
Nate Tobik
ahh, the egg in the basket..
Why do we need to have some central group of people telling us what hints file we have to put in our DNS servers? Why do we need to have some central group of people deciding what TLDs go into some group of root servers?
The simple solution also lets the market decide about what TLDs survive, and what TLDs fail. Everyone who runs a DNS server gets to create their own root zone file, and put in whatever TLDs they want (I do recommend all the 2-letter national TLDs). They can even point them to whatever servers they want or even run some themselves for own, or their customers. Or they can just outsource it to whoever they want to let decide it for them.
A little chaos is a good thing. It's called competition. We don't all get our food from the same place. We don't all get our computers from the same place. Why do TLDs have to be any different. Sure, we might want to have the same TLD as someone else, and if so, then we can choose to do that. So we end up with people peddling root zone files. It's your choice.
And if you don't have a DNS server, you can simply use whatever want you want to (if they permit it). And an ISP can ever set up more than one if they have varying issues to give customers more choice about.
The big advantage I see to this is that it avoids a lot of the legal wars going on now over ownership of domains, and whether domains are subject to trademark rules, and such. Make it totally open there's no longer a target to sue.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Take a look at the grass root initiatives to counter act the threat to democratic Internet namespace decision making caused by the ICANN.
The (intermediate) solution is in my opinion to support and use the OpenNIC project.
OpenNIC is a user owned, international Network Information Center alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries. OpenNIC was started in 2000 as a reaction to the growing concern about the lack of democratic control within the ICANN.
The OpenNIC discussion forum is here
I hope that in the future more nameserver packages are willing to provide OpenNIC root nameserver support in their default configuration files.
Let's face it, ICANN stinks like an outhouse in August. Does anyone know how to get in touch with Mr. Auerbach so I can offer my assistance?
It's time to act.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I really don't get what these guys are supposed to be doing, or how it affects anyone when they do their job poorly. Their website, between bits of quorn like "Statement Concerning Schedule and Process for Consideration of Restructuring Proposal (28 February 2002)" seems to indicate all they do is make sure IP addresses, DNS names, and port numbers (!) are unique.
Is that really it? I thought IP addresses were done by IANA, are they part of ICANN? and isn't DNS registration (mis)handled by network solutions or whoever owns them these days?
So, i guess what i'm asking is, what would i miss if ICANN just went away and wasn't replaced by anything...?
--
Benjamin Coates
Then you'll have access to many more TLD's. If enough people support AlterNIC and "enhanced DNS" it will make ICANN irrelevant.
"The OpenNIC is a user owned and controlled Network Information Center offering a democratic, non-national, alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries."
http://www.opennic.unrated.net/
Yeah, ICANN is important to the future of the net, but "your rights online?"
dinner: it's what's for beer
And resisting
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's censorship! Join the blackout! QUIT SLASHDOT NOW!
I heartily endorse the PFIR position that ICANN must be dissolved and its work placed into the hands of a capable temporary steward. What should happen beyond that is a big question. But there's no question that ICANN has lost any and all respect from netizens from around the world due to their ongoing abject stupidity.
And despite my major disagreement with Auerbach over his anti-small business, pro confusion idea of unlimited gTLD's (really a matter of democratic contention), I also endorse his lawsuit to shine the light on ICANN's finances. He has a clear right under the law to inspect these records at any time in an unfettered manner. If ICANN is to increase its budget ten-fold, then obviously the board needs to completely understand how money was being spent previously. In addition, I heartily agree with Auerbach's vivid descriptions of ICANN's empire-building management and limp-wristed board (Auerbach an exception, of course).
As is expected coming from the director of Democracy 2.0, I have to go well beyond Auerbach's strong concerns about Lynn's idea to remove any representative aspects of ICANN. Anything short of having a global direct democracy deciding Internet infrastructural policy is unacceptable. Obviously, how this deliberative/decisionmaking system would be set up is chock full of monster details that no one person or small group can handle.
I propose an open process for developing a constitution/charter for the substitute organization. This could be an open source document that's developed with wide participation using a tool like D3E (Digital Document Discourse Environment). This charter would define how all the parties involved with the Internet would come together (both online and offline) to effectively develop Internet policies. To start off, I also propose that a committee of roundly acceptable participants (perhaps those of the PFIR) craft the rough draft of this charter and act as the primary author through its initial stages. Later (perhaps within a year or so), the charter would be opened to democratic alteration via processes that the charter itself outlines.
Once the charter has been completed and democratically approved, the temporary steward would then hand over control to the managing organization that would be outlined in the charter. Then, all policy issues (perhaps except the overly technical ones) would be resolved via public discourse, deliberation and decision via democratic means.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
We need a single person like Postel again. An arrogant intelligent stiff necked bastard with nearly arbitrary power. I'd volunteer but for the "intelligent" requirement.
OpenNIC is available now and is a strict superset of the ICANN namespace.
I happen to think that ICANN would work best as a representative democracy, for much the same reason that the US is a representative democracy. The people, in general, haven't got a clue about how the Internet works. Allowing them to vote on how to run it would be insane. However, allowing them to vote for people that do (well, we would hope anyway) seems like a much better idea.
/. and other non-mainstream sites to find out about his views? Will an election system simply ensure that only mediocre, controllable individuals get elected?
Here's where we run into problems though. What happens if (when?) these elections become popular? Will we end up with something similar to the two-party farce we have in the States? Will the candidates with big corporate backing end up monopolizing AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and other major webites to promote their candidacy, reducing candidates like Auerbach to third-party obscurity? Would Auerbach have stood a chance if it weren't for the fact that most of the US At-Large members were pretty clued-in to what ICANN was and had outlets such as
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Take a look at some of the areas covered by this Declaration: financial privacy; medical privacy; technological aid to the developing world; monitoring and tracking of internet access by governments or industry; content filtering; spam; electronic signatures; electronic voting; DOS attacks; penalties for computer crimes; restrictions on anonymity; program installation dialogs; framing of web pages; web linking; encryption; national jurisdiction; DMCA and copyright issues; patents.
Now, by and large PFIR takes reasonable positions on these issues that most of us would support. But do we really want a body that includes all these topics in its area of responsibility? That would be an enormous concentration of power! And we all know what happens to regulatory agencies which have too much power. They get corrupted and influenced by the deep pockets businesses they are supposed to be regulating.
Creating the super-powerful replacement for the ICANN that PFIR calls for would be a big mistake. We should stick to an agency which has a very limited mandate to deal with Internet infrastructure like DNS. I don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan to fix ICANN, but following PFIR's ideas would be terribly risky.
Fight Spammers!
if you shut down ICANN, you need to create something in its place that represents all of the stakeholders. there are politically powerful folks who stand to make a lot of money from ICANN failing, and leaving unregulated monopolies to control TLDs. they will use all of their influence to oppose a replacement for ICANN being formed unless it favors them. it was difficult enough to form ICANN last time around; a replacement would be even more controversial.
the folks who believe we can have stable DNS with an arbitrary number of self-appointed roots and TLDs are deluded. if that happens the most likely result is that different countries will have their own root servers that are mandated by their governments (in order to ensure name stability within each country), but there will be conflicts between countries about the meanings of some names.
I think there are a few things amiss with the pfir plan and I'd like to suggest and comment on some alternatives and have a few comments about our continues use of 20th century DNS.
.SE nameservers of course) but an even better tactic in my opinion is to primary the root zone for yourself. Then, any or all root servers could be shut off and you wouldn't notice a thing. This would leave you with one remaining problem and that is where could you get the root zone from. Your upstream might be a good place or as DJB has suggested, a cryptographically signed root zone could be posted to usenet periodically. This has the inherent advantage of being out of band of TCP/IP; that is, even a UUCP connection could inject the zone into the news stream. That's one answer to "how do you bootstrap DNS without DNS".
Look back at the creation of ICANN and it's not difficult to see why it has failed. The timeline goes something like this: when the Wired article came out in 1994 where Joshua Quittner reported he registered mcdonalds.com and McDonalds didn't want it he ended up selling it to Burger King. At the time InterNIC registrations were taking about 3 days. This shot up to 11 weeks in a matter of days. The NSF, who funded NSI to run the InterNIC, did not feel it's role, which is to foster academic and scientific advancement, included subsidizing deodorant.com and the like, so, it asked the FNCAC to do something. What they did was instruct the NSF to tell NSI to begin charging for domains. This caught the Internet community rather off guard and discussion ensued on a "newdom" mailing list (whose archives can be found here). Several forces came into play. First was the rift between the group that felt they too could run a TLD and the group that though this should be run from a great big central registry. The latter became the IAHC/CORE thing while the former became the first alternative root. The US Government shut down the IAHC and began it's own proceedings: the white paper was produced. Other governments, most notably in the form of Paul Twoomey from Australia
and Chris Wilkinson from the EU balked at the plan and the revised plan, the green paper took out the language about creating 5 new TLDs immediately (thereby throwing each conflicted group at least one bone). At the time Mikki Barry and Kathy Kleinman suggested in Becky Burr's office that a set of global meetings take place, not to decide answers to tough problems, but to determine just where there was consensus on the various issues. This became the IFWP forum and 3 meetings were held in Reston Va., Geneva, and Singapore. There was to be a followup meeting to merge these consensus points into a framework for the new corporation that was to replace IANA. While this was happening, NSI and IANA were negotiating, and Ira Magaziner, Clinton's senior science advisor and Roger Cochetti, a VP of IBM were running around selecting a new board. The IFWP wrap up meeting never happened, it was scuttled by Mike Roberts (suspicion is high he had been told be would be president) and the vast amount of time and energy, money, hopes and aspirations that was IFWP went down the toilet - which is a real shame as it was a significant body of work. Three proposals went in to the US government to form the new corporation. The IANA/NSI proposal drafted by Joe Sims and NSI, the Boston Working Group proposal (which is where the wrap-up meeting was to have been) which was a sane version of the NSI/ICANN proposal, and the ORSC proposal which was the BWG plan with greater fiscal responsibility and an existing corporate shell. Citing popular public support for the IANA/NSI plan it was selected - but if you read the public comments on the NTIA site carefully you'll see far less support than implied and much of it was tentative, frankly. A board materialized out if thin air, selected because they didn't know anything about DNS. So what went wrong? Was the original ICANN plan flawed or were the people just the wrong choices? I suggest that if Karl Aurbach and 9 people like him has been the original board we would not now be even talking about DNS; the board appointed from in high did not represent the Internet community whatsoever and instead represented telco, government and trademark special interests. It is believed the concessions made so that foreign government supported the "green paper" was that they got to pick certain members of the board. The first big clue there was trouble was when the board missed it's deadline to define a process for their replacement and simply extended their jobs; they should have been gone over two years ago now.
So what have we learned from this? In my opinion, no group that says "we're in charge" really is; respect is earned, not asserted and I think this was the great failing of both IAHC and ICANN. So while I generally like Weinstein, Newman and Farber, I do distrust the IAB to some extent based on previous debacles like the Boston Tea party where they were thrown out for claiming OSI and not TCP/IP was the way to go. The ISOC is another non-starter, it's wanted to get it's hands on the DNS for over a decade and has been a great supporter of the authoritarian regimes of both IAHC and ICANN. The key, I believe, is not some group claiming they should be in charge or that they have all the answers - nobody does - but the good old fashioned and time proven method of Internet collaborative cooperation. And this means actually doing it, not paying lip service to it like ICANN did. Oh and cut out the 5 star hotels and first class Concorde flights.
Is this about Internet governance? No. Absolutely not. In it's most basic form this is nothing more than an institutionalized debate between Dave Crocker and Karl Denninger in 1986 taken to it's logical conclusion. But it's nothing to do with governance of the Internet. Face it, if all you do is read and write email and/or usenet news, and play on ISC or muck about on the web, you may never have heard of ICANN and it certainly has zero effect on you. This is just about new top level domains, period; the IP addresses have virtually all been handed over to the regional registries and the port allocations are handles by somebody than CAN add one to a number and write it down on a piece of paper.
But didn't ICANN break up NSI ? Nope. That was Ira Magaziners plan executed through the Department of Commerce. You don't really think NSI gave in because ICANN though it was a good idea do you? What has ICANN really done in 4 years? They've knuckled under to WIPO and given us the horribly flawed UDRP and 7 really stupid TLDs that despite $2.$M worth of scrutiny still had huge problems to the point of being dragged into court over it.
What alternative roots exist? Quite a few actually, and while on the face of it you might think this would be a problem, but face it, if you can pick up your mail and get to Yahoo! then they work, and any of them will let you do that. The differences in them are what new TLDs they publish in their root zones. I need to disclaim right away that I coordinate, with Brian Reid's help, the ORSC root, and it's generally believed to have the greatest penetration and is certainly the longest continuously operating one. The barrier to entry it low: show us working TLD servers and we'll list you. Other notable ones are the TINC root which is operated by some old time Usenet people such as Peter da Silva which has a policy of one tld per entity, which I don't like think can be made to work (the now defunct eDNS tried this and it was found to be too easily worked around), PacROOT which in my opinion swings too far the other way with their NameSlinger client - I don't think I know the proper number of TLDS any entity should operate but I do know it's not in the hundreds if not thousands; this raises anti-trust issues, and OpenNIC which is pretty good but only has a small number of new TLDs. There is also NameSpace which believes they should run all tlds. This grates against the notion of the root as a collection of independantly run TLDs in my opinion. But, it doesn't matter to me which one people use as long as they use one of them. Vote with your nameservers - it is in nobody's interest to break anything and using any of these roots will let you see all current DNS names and a whole universe of new ones although how many depends on which one you pick.
Why do we still use root servers? Now this is where it gets interesting. What if the US Government suddenly shut off the legacy root servers? 90% of the net would feel some sort of perturbation immediately especially since at least one TLD (.SE) is name-served directly from the root (not TLD!) servers as are many in-addr.arpa delegations. As the TTLs to TLD servers expired, users of the legacy root would not be able to resolve any DNS names. But, people that use other root servers would be immune to the demise of the legacy roots (modulo one of Swedens 7
Do I think ORSC should be the next ICANN as the ICANNWATCH poll suggests? No and hell no! Nobody should be in charge, and given that the net and the DNS itself is edge controlled - that is, whoever has the root password to a nameserver determines what dns names exist and what don't - any model that asserts a central authority is doomed to fail. There is need for coordination, but not authority.
Vote with your nameserver; vote early and vote often.
Richard Sexton
March 19, 2002
Need Mercedes parts ?
The trouble is that, as the Salon article says, certain people have let it go to their heads that they are at the top of an organizational tree that covers the Internet. The Internet is by, of and especially for the people, and ICANN needs to understand that they are our servants and representatives, and not the other way round.
I know they're hard up for cash; who isn't these days? If they're hard up for cash, I would propose an anonymous "tip jar" donation scheme, where everyone from companies with money to burn (like, say, AOL Time Warner, AT&T or Microsoft) to your average Net citizen can drop a few bucks in the jar. I say "anonymous" because I think the submissions and their amounts should be kept private, so as to discourage people or companies from being able to exert pressure on ICANN that goes against the common good.
Ultimately, ICANN should, if not must, answer to the Net itself. That includes everyone from big companies all the way down to the little guy. I think we all felt really good when Karl Auerbach got elected; we felt as though we, the people of the Internet, finally had some say in how our Internet would evolve.
How ICANN can simply disregard the voices of the people is beyond me. The Net is, in many ways, a country unto itself, with its own rules and customs, and for the ICANN board to say that they want to focus on governments is an insult to us all. The US government may have commissioned the project that became the Internet, but we, the people built it into what it is today, and we continue to build it into a little better place every day.
I say that if ICANN can't manage the Internet in a way that best serves its citizens, then we the people should bloody well find someone who can.
This will not work. Windows IE will be set to point to MS controlled DNS servers and in a few month MS will control the domains. Its unfortunately the path of least resistance the 95% of Internet users will follow. Maybe AOL could have an altenative DNS system but I doubt it.
Help fight continental drift.