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ICANN Eliminates Karl Auerbach's Seat
BrianWCarver writes "SiliconValley.com carries an AP report by Anick Jesdanun indicating that ICANN has given Karl Auerbach the boot by eliminating his seat as well as the four other publicly elected seats on ICANN's board. ICANN is the internet's key oversight body, managing the Top-Level Domains (TLDs). You may recall from this previous Slashdot story that Auerbach is the director who successfully sued ICANN to receive access to their records without having to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. 'Though soon leaving the ICANN board, Auerbach vows to keep complaining. And he leaves with no regrets -- he'd do it again.' It'll now be up to organizations like ICANNWatch to keep an eye on ICANN for the public. Is that good enough?'"
Expect to see lots of good, firebreathing commentary on this at Farber's Interesting People mailing list. He usually has good things to say about public internet matters.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
To answer 2 & 3, they eliminated all the publically elected seats. This appears to be in an attempt to non-discriminatorly remove Karl, and to reduce input into ICANN.
3, be a friend of Stuart Lynn (President and CEO, and acts like he is Mr. ICANN), or the US Dept of Commerce.
#1. The story makes it seem as if the seats were removed because of the trouble he was causing them. If that is the case, why did they eliminate the other seats.
Because the other seats are sources of potential trouble.
#2. How many "publically elected" seats are left? The story just says they eliminated 5 without elaborating.
None. From the summary: "...ICANN has given Karl Auerbach the boot by eliminating his seat as well as the four other publicly elected seats on ICANN's board."
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
The Internet is the primary storage place for all information contained in the world, and largely serves as a global resource onto which a price simply cannot be placed.
b ylaws.html
Therefore, I and many other feel that the actions of those on the executive board of ICANN must be closely monitored. Anyone and everyone who's ever signed onto AOL or Prodigy or even MSN has a stake in these events.
I've attached below a list of some sites to gleam information from about the latest happenings (and scandals) related to ICANN.
- http://www.icannwatch.org/
- http://www.icannwatch.com/
- http://www.atlargestudy.org/index.html
- And, for reference, http://www.domainhandbook.com/archives/comp-icann
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, B3H 3J5
FYI, he didn't sue to get access to the information he needed to do his job, he sued to get access to the information without having to sign a NDA. Basically, the info was available to him for internal purposes, but they would then not have allowed him to divulge what he learned to the masses. He sued to have the ability to inform the public about some of ICANN's internal mechanations.
What prevents us from ignoring ICANN when we feel like it and doing our own thing?
...)
The need for unique identifiers.
How do you do an internet if:
- A particular IP address may map to different hosts. (Packets addressed to 64.28.67.150 go to www.slashdot.org according to ICANN, a Microsoft server according to Joe's Nameservice and Grill, the US Army Recruiter according to the MIL BGP servers, and the local kindergarden according to a router configured by a junior high student. Which authority - and thus which route - do you think a commercial ISP (PAID to deliver packets) will honor?)
- A particular domain name may map to different organizations. (joe_user@slashdot.org may go to joe at VALinux, joe at Microsoft world headquarters, joe at the draft board, joe at the local kindergarden,
- A particular protocol number may specify different protocols. (WHICH IPV4 are you talking about? Which SMTP? Which NFS?)
- A "well known port" may perform different functions. (Imagine a new Microsoft OS putting a webserver up on port 414, or whatever port is used for an important service in the latest competing OS, and configuring the next release of Internet Explorer to try that port first. No need to "embrace" and "extend" before getting to "extinguish".)
and so on, depending on which organization the owner of any particular machine is affiliated with?
The answer is: You don't. (It's like the street addresses, state names, and personal names being a matter of political debate and faction-fighting - while someone's trying to send you a letter.)
Assigning a unique name or number is an indivisible transaction. In the absense of a solution to the "distributed update" problem you HAVE to do that with a single-point mechanism - an "authority". The best solution yet found is delegation - which is what ICANN does with domain naming and selling blocks of IP numbers.
Which brings up the question: Why are domain names handled by ICANN, rather than the trademark/servicemark section of the Patent and Trademark office?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
IP addresses are controled by IANA, the Internet assigned numbers authority. (US Represestitive being ARIN. And they can't come anywhere close to what you think they can do. They just delegate numbers.
And ICANN is not really a bussieness like you are thinking, it is a non-profit corperation for the "public good". Sort of like the corperation for public broadcasting.
Well, maybe it is time to move over to OpenNIC. It is pretty small, but since the Titanic seems to have hit the iceberg, I think it is time to make a break for the lifeboats.
:P).
I joined and set up my primary NS to resolve their domains for me, as well as the normal ones. Took about 15 minutes to get working (forgot the forwarders, so it took 10 minutes longer than expected
Yeah, I know; I have heard it all before. "But nobody else uses it, so it's worthless!". Not. Everything, and I mean EVERY DAMN THING starts out SMALL. That's not a reason to ignore it or otherwise dismiss it out-of-hand. It's even democratic right out of the box, so it is exactly what *we* want it to be.
Join it now. If you are an ISP, set it up for your customers. Help out. Set it up for your friends and family members. Make it a REAL alternative to the monopolized mess that the US Gov't has made of the current DNS system.
Don't argue. Just do it. It CANNOT HURT!
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Nothing. Check out OpenNIC, one of several alternate roots for DNS.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
If you take a look at ICANN's homepage you will see a number of references to new and proposed bylaws for the organization. The first proposal looks to have surfaced on Oct 2 of this year. I'm guessing what's happened recently is that ICANN voted to adopt the proposals and that's why Allerbach and the rest of the 'At Large' directors are out of a job. It's a guess, but it fits the available facts. But this certainly isn't really new information, not unless you count proposals posted over three weeks ago as new. Allerbach likely knew this was coming, it wasn't just some 'out of the blue' move from ICANN.
Reading through the proposals I note that they suggest eliminating a number of directorships, not just the At Large directors. The proposals call for shifting the functions of the At Large directors to an At Large advisory committee and a Manager of Public Participation. There are a bunch of other suggestions on reform, et. al. in the documents, feel free to have a look on your own if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of the ICANN organizational process.
Finally, I don't personally know Allerbach and I can't say one way or the other if his departure from the ICANN Board of Directors is appropriate or not. He may be a stark raving nutcase for all I know, or he may be the last voice of reason and integrity in the organization, who knows? Not me. I can however guarantee that suing the organization, regardless of the reasons he did so, was unlikely to win him any friends on the board. After that, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone that ICANN wants to close-up the ranks of their Board of Directors and avoid this type of public embarrassment in the future. But I think it's inaccurate to claim that ICANN forced him out, there's nothing to substantiate that.
Whatever the reasons, I wish him luck in the future and hope that he will continue his efforts to keep ICANN accountable for their policies and actions and keep the process open to public comment and criticism. God knows they need someone to hold them accountable.
I'm writing a report (to the board) that will be making a summary of things and making recommendations.
There are parts of this report that I will probably not post publicly - for instance there are some matters that legititimately are such that I do want to preserve attorney-client privilege.
But the bottom line is pretty simple - I have not seen any smoking guns, but I have seen a signifcant lack of attention to the basics of running what amounts to a small business, a failure of the board to properly oversee the activities of management/staff, a mission that is expanding its scope faster than a star going nova, and an institutional hubris that causes it to reject anything that it does not want to hear.
Sorry for being somewhat incoherent - but I'm very jet lagged and my neuron activity is being fueled mainly by sugar and caffine.
I'll have more later.
--karl--