ICANN's Time Is Up, According To John Gilmore

EyesWideOpen writes: "Salon has a lengthy interview with Cygnus Software co-founder John Gilmore about why he feels it's time for ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, to go. Gilmore, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is currently helping to fund a lawsuit filed by ICANN director Karl Auerbach against ICANN. ICANN has denied Gilmore access to its financial information, providing the basis for the lawsuit. Gilmore states: 'I believe it's because there is information in there about how ICANN has misused its money, and/or has favored people who lent or gave it money.'"

Comments

discreditting

[larry bagina]

And he published it in an attempt to discredit the lawsuit, by claiming that the people behind the suit were just trying to tear down ICANN.

There's a saying that's popular with defense laywers ... "When you don't have the law, you argue the facts. When you don't have the facts, you argue the law. And when you don't have either, you persecute the prosecutor"

Read it and weep

[mumkin]

I shouldn't have to say this, but those of you reading comments without reading the article really should do yourselves a favor and follow that link. The fact that ICANN won't let its own director have access to the books is an incredible testament to both its star-chamber mentality and the incredibly fucked-up way in which it is constituted in the first place.

In addition, Gilmore has some particularly spooky things to say about the history of Network Solutions, and what he estimates the *real cost* of maintaining a domain's registration to be (less than 1 cent/year).

Re:Read it and weep

[rtscts]

If it gets much cheaper than it is already to register domains, people will just go around buying thousands of domains rather than dozens or hundreds they currently are that they have no intention of using, just to a) piss people off b) squat c) coz they can.

Re:Read it and weep

[Hobbex]

Why does it matter more then if people take the wrong street and end up at the porn store at 1700 Maple Street instead of the Ford dealership at 1700 Elm Street? Or call 1-900-5551234 to a phonesex service instead of 1-800-5551234 to Ford's customer service?

Domain names are not keywords. Domain names are not keywords. Domain names are not keywords. ARG.

Re:The EFF

[Anonymous Coward]

Find a link to the game without using a search engine or relying on the link posted here. Show how a normal Internet surfer would stumble upon the page in the course of their daily surfing.

Then consider how much time and money was wasted coming up with that monstrosity, time and money that could have been devoted to lobbying Congress or raising the profile of the EFF. That's why it's a debacle, it has completely squandered good will and actual money and nothing has come of it.

This is probably why they're introducing it

[Anonymous Coward]

"ICANN is going down, one way or another. Either it will go down like East Germany, with a peaceful transition to governance responsive to the public will, or it will go down like Japan, with big bombs dropped on it."

Somehow I don't think statements like that are going to go over to well.

That said, the rest of the letter is as the original poster said, intelligent, funny, and scathing. I used to have alot of respect for Vint Cerf too. I wonder what happened...

Corporate Governance Issue

[Slashamatic]

One of the things that is being kicked around with Enron/Worldcom/Xerox is that the board jointly and severally carries the responsibility for correct corporate governance. Well this for the "for-profit" companies. This means that the board is entitled to make enquires as to whether information being presented to them for approval (such as the balance sheet) is correct. What about non-profits? This question was posed before, but nobody seems to know about the specifics of California non-profits.

Actually, it sounds very similar to the shenanigans at FIFA where the CFO went up against the CEO on the basis of some very dodgy payments and accounting practices that he had authorised. The CFO was forced to resign, alledgedly through the use of bought influence (In FIFA, Tonga has the same number of votes as Germany).

Lets just forget that it is the Internet and just look at other organisations involved in coordinating things internationally. I mentioned FIFA, we also know about the Olympics committee. Other organisations closer to home, such as CCITT tend to be bureaucratic and inefficient but not particularly corrupt.

Is it possible to have a minimalist organisation that is cheap, efficient and honest that can manage something like the Internet?

ICANN't, Can you?

Re:P2P DNS, can it be done?

[Raul654]

This first saw this idea kicked around on slashdot a few months ago. I actually had sit down with one of my professors (who actually helped invent the internet, and I don't mean that in the Al Gore way) He said, IIRC, that for such a setup, effeciently updating dns entries would become a nightmare very quickly. Remember - there are only 12 root dns servers. I'd imagine that if you did the math, the sum total of all DNS entries would be on the order gigabytes (or maybe even tens of gigabytes) of data. Broadband simply is not at the point where it can cope with such a load.

Re:Hm

[clickety6]

Just like Enron's and Worldcom's financial statements were published for everyone to see? ;-)

Re:Vint Cerf's statement prefixing Gilmore's email

[vidarh]

The point is that he is not supposed to have to go through that route, as California law give a director an "absolute right" to access the material he has asked for - if the Audit Committee ever denies a request from a director, they are violating California law, so it would seem that this procedure is only there to make it harder for directors to excercize their rights (and duties).

Re:Time is definitely up.

[Vulture_]

There is, I suppose, the argument that there are a few, very few, genuinely international organisations which should have domain names not tied to any particular country. The International Red Cross is the kind of organisation which comes to mind as the type which has the moral right to the irc.org domain name.

That's what the .int TLD is for.

The pollution of the .org space by hobby software projects is another case in point. While these are certainly very useful and worthwhile projects, and the groups of individuals are frequently located all around the globe, I really don't think they have much in the way of absolute moral right to be in the .org namespace. Perhaps they should have a fully international top level domain name of their own. Is it .gnu or .oss?

Actually, .org was intended to be used by

• non-profit organizations
• individuals for personal domains
• everything that doesn't fit into another TLD

Therefore, the only namespace pollution in .org is companies that belong in .com, etc. Hobbyists and Open Source projects are using .org correctly.

The administration of domains which have been given away or sold by their countries should revert to the UN until the countries in question can do it for themselves. The very idea that the whole address space for an entire country can be traded away for the personal profit of an idividual is, in this author's opinion anyway, just plain wrong, and should be corrected as soon as possible.

I concur. I was rather discomforted when I first learned of what happened to .tv.

Similarly, while the enhancement of Internet security is sorely needed at the moment, no particular commercial interest should ever be able to hijack the whole exercise by introducing secret protocols protected by draconian intellectual property laws. The overall effect of this will be to give the particular patent holder the right to tax every Internet user, or indeed every single message.

Did you have any such secret/IP-encumbered protocols in mind?