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Interview with ICANN's Karl Auerbach
katie writes "Great interview!
ICANN, the Infofascist organization which rules the Internet with more effective power than any government, was told yesterday to 'fess up and show its knickers to reform-minded Board member Karl Auerbach. DesktopLinux.com Contributing Editor Malcolm Dean interviewed Auerbach at the Los Angeles Superior Court ..."
Auerbach is really quite reasonable, it is just the intro that makes it kind of hard to determine. Listen to what Auerbach is saying, it's very simple. Here is the froth-free version of the article intro: ICANN is an organization that is in charge of assigning domain name registrations, and in charge of assigning out IP blocks (IPs are kind of the internet equivilent of phone numbers, every computer on the internet is supposed to have one. ICANN gives ISPs blocks of these numbers that are "theirs", and the ISPs sell those numbers to others. If you knew that much already, then sorry :))
Auerbach is simply saying, this group, ICANN, is made up of some totally randomly picked individuals who have no oversight, by anyone. They are not accountable to voters or anyone else. This used to be a U.S. government agency, but the U.S. government set it free so that it could be truly international. They did this with the understanding ICANN would continue to serve the good of the public.
Auerbach is not saying the current people running it are nazis or anything (though he's saying he isn't very fond of them); he's just saying this is a recipe for disaster. He's saying that something this important to the world economy, there should be some kind of oversight to it. People should be able to see what it's doing. Having it totally subject to 17 arbitrary people without governments or anyone watching over their shoulders to make sure they don't become corrupt is just a bad idea. Power corrupts.
The current fight is over this: Auerbach wants to see the accounting books of ICANN. He wants this because in the first (and last, because the board didn't like the fact that the director turned out to be anything other than a figurehead) general public election. Auerbach was voted director of ICANN. By the bylaws of the group, the director has the right to unrestricted access to the accounting books at any time. The board, however, says that the "policy" is that the director can only see the books with lots of restrictions. But the bylaws say otherwise, and the bylaws are apparently legally binding, at least according to the judge this morning.
Why does Auerbach want to see the books? What does he think is there? He doesn't know. He doesn't care. He just thinks that that should be public information, because if ICANN is allowed to hide how their finances work forever, someday , if not now, this could lead to the system being very easily abused because no one is there to stop abuses.
Auerbach isn't saying there's some conspiracy here. He's saying the public has a right to know what this group of people is doing, and the ICANN board is saying "no, you don't have a right to anything, we don't want you to look at it". They can't really justify this. Basically the people running ICANN aren't used to running nonprofits, they're used to running businesses. So they are trying to run it like a business, assuming letting your competitors and such know wha'ts going on inside is bad, and totally forgetting they're a nonprofit.
The question shouldn't be "why does auerbach care what's going on?" the question should be "on whose authority do the ICANN people claim to have the right to dictate how the internet grows? how do they justify the fact they hold the temporal power that has been given to them?"
I'm generally reasonably available by e-mail to talk about this stuff. (karl@cavebear.com)
If you want some of the raw materials a good place to start is Ellen Rony's archives at http://www.domainhandbook.com Also take a look at Bret Fausett's blog - http://www.lextext.com/icann/index.html