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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.)"
This has been coming for months. Soon, AOL, Microsoft and Oracle will own the domain name business and we'll all be screwed.
Want a personal website? Think again. If it's not in the best interests of a commercial Internet, it ain't going to happen.
And we can throw any sustainable hope of p2p file sharing out of the window too. When the corporations take over the Internet entirely, there won't be a damn thing we can do about it.
So what? Screw 'em, we don't need ICANN, there are plenty of alternatives like openNIC for example.
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?
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Drawn, sounds like a lottery. I'm guessing chance has nothing to do with who sits on the board.
Where was Auerbach?
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.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Recently the BBC has had rather a lot to say about ICANN on this subject here are three articles from the last few days.
Net body accused of bullying tactics
Net body under pressure
Reforming the running of the net
"Information wants to be free!"
... 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).
... it has merely become obvious to even the most casual observer now that we have the Internet to expose us to this process.
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
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
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy