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Karl Auerbach Wins Right To Inspect ICANN Records
Siobhan Hansas writes: "Karl Auerbach was in court today fighting for the right to inspect and copy documents he first asked to see in 2000, shortly after he became a member of the Board of Directors. Salon have the AP story. Auerbach won the right to inspect documents, but not to copy them, and was required to give ICANN 10 days notice of release of any information marked "confidential" to give them the opportunity to seek a court order stopping him." M : A first-hand report from the hearing makes good reading.
remind me again why we have to have these kinds of legal battles with the orginization that is "running" the Internet? Doesn't it counter the "priciples" of the 'net? (openness, sharing of knowledge, etc..)
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
ICANN has -- as we all know -- hindered Mr. Aeurbach and others representing the public interest since elected. Now, they're finally forced to give him access to all documents -- though he should also be given an unequivicol right to copy them and make them publicly available.
It would be in character if ICANN went through before Friday and labelled all of their documents "confidential". These guys are crooks just like the people at Enron and Global Crossings.
ICANN obviously realized what a mistake they made in "allowing public elections", as critics were elected. They're revoking elections so they can retain their totalitarian control. Fucking nazi's.
Auerbach should have a permanent seat. No one on ICANN has done a better job than him. All the rest of them -- aside from that European elected fellow, allied with Auerbach -- are crooks.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
does this seem to anyone else as just a pitiful bid for extra time? auerbach has been working for two years to get ahold of these documents. what could an extra 10 days possibly do for ICANN? they're just trying to be difficult on principle...
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
...which means that he won't get very far, because ICANN will of course attempt to get a court order to stop him from releasing any information to the public, and he'll be prevented from doing so until the court renders its opinion one way or the other. And that's for every separate instance. ICANN will of course make sure that each attempt to get a court order takes as long as possible.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
So are we just in for another round of legal battles?
Dude, you've got a wonderful idea. It lacks the magic ingredient: $. Lots of $. Not to build the software. No, big $ -- cubic $ -- to pay for the bandwidth of a chunk of the world's name resolution traffic. I'm not sure, but it seems to me that at least some of the businesses that have the cash to make it happen, have an interest in keeping the system the way it is. It's easy to say "chuck the whole ICANN monopoly, let's build our own," but it's something entirely different to actually make it work.
The opinions expressed above do not necessarily represent the views of the poster. The voices in the poster's head though, are pretty sure that's what they meant.
No, I am not talking about opennic or new.net or similar. A splintered net is useless, which is why nobody uses these extra TLDs. I have yet to see any of these extra TLDs appear in a URL, ad, billboard or E-mail address, and for good reason.
There is a natural monopoly in the root. We all have to use the same root, or I can't tell you my e-mail address and expect you to be able to e-mail me with it. Or I have to tell you which root I use, which means a super-root that lists roots, in otherwords a shared root once again.
Attempts at alternate roots will fail both because of this, and because most of them so far have just tried to be a different ICANN. They still wanted to hand out TLD monopolies to people and create TLDs with inherent meaning.
A really workable system has to have all TLD operators (and thus the 2lDs under them) on an even footing. If they are not on an even footing you get artificial scarcity as people try to own meaningful words and phrases ahead of everybody else. Then you get conflict.
Nobody has done this.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
But the flow isnt 2 way. What happens to the AOL user who can resolve your domain? This is why most splinter DNS NICs dont work.
I thought this was very interesting: (from http://icann.blog.us/stories/2002/07/29/auerbachWi nsCourtCriticize.html cited above:)
"ICANN responded that it didn't see Microsoft or IBM putting their general ledgers and charts of account on the web, but the Judge quickly intervened with this: Court: 'As a non-profit, public benefit corporation, you have a duty to the public -- the international public in this case -- that is very different than Microsoft or IBM. This is a public benefit corporation.'"
That's just the problem. ICANN keeps forgetting that it's public, and keeps falling back into the private, corporate mindset.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"To ruin the net to save Disney is the equivalent of burning down the library of Alexandria to save monastic scribes"
Actually it's the equivalent of putting taxes on printing presses to SUBSIDIZE monastic scribes.
Or on establishing a "trade group" made up of representatives from the buggy industry to regulate automobile highways...
The old media companies established ICANN and other horrors strictly for the purposes of making the Internet safe for their profit.
Frankly, I feel it's more than slightly treasonous for ANY American administration/Congress to turn over US sovergnity to any kind of international body, which ICANN is.
Why? Because groups/treaties like ICANN, WIPO, NAFTA, WTO, almost ALWAYS end up being exploited by the powerful corporate intrest, both domestic AND foreign, to subvert the rights and interest of the common American Citizen.
The excuse for passing the DMCA, BTW, was that it was REQUIRED by WIPO...
Corporatism != Free Market
Another point I meant to make (hit submit too fast), is that the reason WHY corps and their allies in government favor turning over US sovergnity to such international alphabet soups is this:
l ) against these international corporate cartels who are subverting the law, but the cartels themselves!
To subvert the law (US Constitution).
Their loophole is to claim that obeying WIPO, WTO, ICANN, etc, is required because we are signatory to a TREATY. Which is how they justify overriding the Constitution.
The fact is, the Constitution puts rather severe restrictions on the government, AND corps, and there IS a limit to how far they can subvert it.
Setting up international orgs that operate in shadow (under US law, a director of ANY corp would have full access to records that Arebauch is having to SUE to get from ICANN), they can get greater lattitude that they could not get under US law.
For instance, want to have perpetual copyright? Get WTO to mandate it, and the President and Congress can say "we signed the treaty, we are obligated", thus striking away a DIRECT provision of the Constitution without going through the legal amendment process.
I submit to you all that it's not those who wish to fight back (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26433.htm
Corporatism != Free Market
Actually, the lawsuit was not about Karl's right to inspect the records. Read the filings.
The lawsuit was about who got to decide what he got to do with the records besides look at them himself.
Karl maintained it was not appropriate for ICANN to impose any restrictions whatsoever on what he personally as an individual decided to do with those records. ICANN maintained that it was not appropriate for an individual Director to assume all discretion over what could be done with the corporation's records; each Director has a fiduciary responsibility for the well-being of the corporation, but no Director decides alone what that is.
The judge imposed a balance between the Director's right to inspect the records and the corporation's right to retain some control over what an individual does with the corporation's records. If they could have reached this compromise themselves, there would have been no lawsuit. But people on all sides preferred to be stubborn.
It doesn't generally seem to occur to anyone that ICANN's records may have material in them that legitimately should be kept confidential. Everyone would far rather assume that the only possible motive for confidentiality here is for ICANN staff to conceal wrongdoing.
Karl will be deeply disappointed to discover that there isn't really all that much money to start with; there's a lot that the USG and others have asked ICANN to do and limited sources of funding. Everyone wants something from ICANN, everyone wants ICANN to stop doing something else, and no one wants to pay. This is a real problem, which ICANN's reform process has tried (badly) to address.
The saddest part is that people like Karl and the others associated with ICANN in their various ways, including most of its critics, should be teaming up against the real threats to the openness of the net, mostly the corporatization of access and content and the threats of *real* government regulation via the ITU: ICANN has fought VeriSign as far as feasible, has resisted the interest of various corporate powers in content control of the DNS, and has provided alternatives to the government control that would be imposed by turning over the DNS to the US government or to the EU or the ITU. As flawed as ICANN is, it's a compromise that successfully preserves many important values against some even worse alternatives.
The lawsuit is mostly an unfortunate distraction.
But if people would rather cheer mindlessly over a great victory for The Peepul, so be it. At least when they've crippled ICANN beyond any hope of effectiveness, there won't be anywhere for them to go to whine about it. You don't actually think the ITU and such agencies hold public meetings and comment boards where real people who are real users of the technology they oversee can actually speak, do you?