ICANN Excludes Plebes, Officially

Nofsck Ingcloo writes: " Reuters is reporting that ICANN voted on Friday to exclude ordinary Web surfers from its board in a move critics say allows mainstream interests to tighten their grip on the online world. ICANN unanimously passed the resolution at its quarterly meeting. (The last /. article I saw on this only mentioned it as a probable coming attraction.)"

Comments

Re:Now we're done for

[photon317]

Corporations took over the entire Internet long ago. The current crisis is that completely evil corporations with very short-sighted profit motives are beginning to push out the well-rounded corporations that understood how important the Internet's ideals are.

This is a shock why?

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

Let me get this straight. A group of nut monkeys with all the power and money voted to keep everyone else out.

I am just shocked out of my bean on this one. Paint me stupid but what did you expect?

not so crazy?

[tps12]

My first reaction to this was, "ICANN can go to hell...information wants to be free!" I'm sure if I posted a message saying as much, I'd soon hit the karma cap.

But rather than participate in this perfectly reasonable whoring opportunity, I'm going to risk a few points here to point out that barring ordinary web users from the ICANN board is not a bad idea.

I mean, we're talking about the unwashed masses here. Most of them access the web through AOL or WebTV or (choke, gasp) MSN, for heaven's sake. These are the people who call tech support lines complaining that "their Internet is broke." They use only Microsoft apps, propogate virii, and think there's nothing funnier than that video of the monkey drinking his own pee.

These are not the people we want making decisions on domain names or anything else. The Internet is a great experiment in true democracy, but that could prove to be its undoing if we aren't careful.

Um, yes, it is crazy

[L-Train8]

The unwashed masses, AOLer's and such, are already excluded from voting in ICANN's elections by ignorance. Most people on AOL, WebTV, MSN, et al, don't even know there is an ICANN, let alone what it does or that it holds elections.

If you are savvy enough to be aware of the elections, that pretty much means you are informed enough to vote on them.

Which is not to say that there couldn't be problems with the security-through-obscurity approach (a massive publicity campaign by an evil corporate entity, a "vote here" check box at your AOL log-in screen or something). But whether or not someone may have abused the system is something we will never know, because the system was never given a chance to work.

Information does "want" to be free

[FreeUser]

"Information wants to be free!"

Okay, I've heard this one to many times, and am sick of it. Information does not want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. It is just information.

"Information wants to be free!" is a geeky way of stating a rather obvious truth, one that was apparent two hundred years ago when Thomas Jefferson criticized the notion of patents and copyrights, long before the "information age" (i.e. the Intenet) ever dawned, to wit:

In the absence of profoundly draconian laws, and letigious thugs (IP lawyers) who go around over-reaching even those laws, information will almost always tend to flow widely and freely.

The entire concept of copyright was created by the British to counteract exactly this tendency by facilitating widespread and draconian censorship of the printing press (how easier can it get if you legislate printing monopolies from the outset and keep the press out of the hands of the unwashed masses ... exactly analogous to what ICANN is doing here). The notion of "artists' rights" was never a part of the formation of copyright ... and it was only added later, as an afterthought, in order to justify keeping the same draconian controls on information in place (to the benefit of those printing monopolists and the politicians to whome they answered, i.e the publishers. It is no coincidence that the RIAA, MPAA, and publishers profit far more than artists under the current regime ... that was exactly how it was designed to work).

The founding fathers of the United States bought this justification hook, line, and sinker, empowering tremendous forces to limit and control the flow of information ever since. The free press (which isn't so free) acted as a minor counter force for a time, but as anyone whose carreer has been shitcanned by the recording industry, or anyone whose book has been privished by their publisher, will tell you, it aint much of a countering force when it puts the freedom in the same hands as those who have been granted control of the information through government fiat anyway.

Information, in its natural state, does tend to flow freely.

We've created an entire genre of draconian, invasive law (so much so that we have a different class of lawyers, who take a different bar exam, just for the genre of law. Yes, I'm talking about IP lawyers) to limit and prevent the free flow of information. The reason the laws are so complex, so pervasive, so draconian, and so invasive is precisely because information does tend to otherwise flow so freely. This has always been the case ... it has merely become obvious to even the most casual observer now that we have the Internet to expose us to this process.