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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?'"
It'll now be up to organizations like ICANNWatch to keep an eye on ICANN for the public. Is that good enough?'
Obviously not.
It'll now be up to organizations like ICANNWatch to keep an eye on ICANN for the public. Is that good enough?
No, I think it should be open sourced and made freely available under the GPL.
</zealot>
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I definitely think booting the publicly elected people is a Bad Thing. Monitoring by external organizations likely will not cut it. I have one question, though. What prevents us from ignoring ICANN when we feel like it and doing our own thing?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Contact your political representative (in whatever country), and ask them to contact the US Department of Commerce to express your growing concerns that ICANN is not working in the best interests for everyone, and
perhaps in light of its tactics to silent critics whom are board of director members
by eliminating their position, perhaps the Dept of Commerce should have an inquiry
into the affairs of ICANN and its executive.
Why should I adhere to ICANN's decisions instead of supporting alternative DNS-Roots? ICANN turns further away from the public, they ought to lose more trust in consequence.
It proved to be yet another nice illustration of politics efficiency; they do nothing for their users (consumers, they think), but they manage to obfuscate anything related to them, to be sure that they can grab a big amount of cash and still look legitimate.
Now that we got the long awaited new TLDs, what are the next key thing they're waiting to screwup?
have you been defaced today?
ICANNWatch was good enough, Auerbach wouldnt be needed. A single man made more change then a large orginization. What does that say about how well run it its? Hmmmmmm?
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
Nobody knows what the hell ICANN is doing. In all honesty though, the whole thing is kind of a joke. The only reason ICANN has any control is because the DNS admins of the world point to their blessed root servers. If we were to all decide one day to point to another set of servers it would make ICANN, Network Solutions.. err... Verisign, etc. completely irrelevent. So when we hear people bitch we need to take it with a grain of salt. We can fix it, it's just nobody wants to rock the boat.
None. ICANN seems to have decided that having directors who were elected by the net population at large was interfering with their nice, cozy, corrupt way of doing things. Auerbach was only the most obvious example of this.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
ICANN *must* be brought under government oversight, immidiately. They're essentially running a dictatorship, doing things how they want, not disclosing information, not allowing their own to see their inner workings, and eliminating the public voice.
This needs to be stopped immidiately...
The whole organization is a massive, bloated, moribund bureaucracy -- accountable to no one -- that can't even expand top-level domains or move up to IPV6.
The internet was nearly brought to its knees last week by a primitive smurf/ping attack, and ICANN has done nothing to stop it nor future attacks.
If Al-Qaeda launched a professional attack against the internet, it could go down for weeks, and ICANN would be entirely to blame.
The whole organization should just be given the boot, and an efficient, private, for-profit accountable capitalist corporation should be put in its place.
by painting him as a "loose cannon" and "politically naive" is scurrilous. A false binary-opposition is constructed: on the one side the claims of the ICANN monopolists that they are responsible, sober and politically sophisticated and on the other the picture of Auerbach the radical.
The fact is that the ICANN board tried to restrict information that ought to be available to the public let alone an elected board member, the courts found that this was wrong and then the buggers decide to kick him off the board.
Let's get these people under control. It's our friggin internet subsidized with our taxes, populated with our webpages.
ICANN's like Section 1, always trying to escape the essential Oversight.
These guys are all fucking crooks. Owned by corporate interests. They've shut out the public from participating in electing the board members -- ALL MEMBERS SHOULD BE ELECTED. If businesses want to have their interests represented, their executives can vote. These crooks have taken all accountability to the public out of the equation. Its no different than taxation without representation.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I can't believe you're modded to 5, while showing an almost complete ignorance of how the internet actually works.
ICANN only does domain names. IP addresses are handled by IANA. I've heard exactly zero complaints about IANA.
The only reason ICANN is in charge is because they run the 13 root DNS servers, which everyone has their dns servers set to look at. All we would have to do to get rid of ICANN is convince virtually everyone to look at a different set of root servers. Much harder than it sounds, but possible (though improbable).
As for why dns is not handled by the PTO, with how badly they handle patents, I'm glad they don't have anything to do with DNS.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
They tried very hard to eliminate the publicly elected seats before the election, and it was pretty clear when Karl managed to get elected anyway that they didn't want him there and were going to try to prevent any "representative of the public" from interfering. While Karl is definitely on the cantankerous side, that had a lot to do with why *he* got elected - it was obvious before the election that ICANN was trying to railroad the public, and the public responded by electing a representative who was not only articulate and aggressive but also very clearly committed to trying to get ICANN to behave properly, work openly, and make policies that were responsive to the public. He started off his term as pretty much the lone member of The Opposition, with his major support base being the people that the rest of ICANN wanted to ignore - it's a tough spot for someone who's really good at politics.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There have been some recent proposals saying that the ITU should be in charge - as somebody who's been in the telecom business for 25 years, I view them as better than ICANN, because some of them are engineers and because they're a slow bureaucratic multilateral committee rather than a cabal, but they're still the kind o f bureaucratic telecom who brought you E.164 names, X.25 as their best example of data networking, and OSI protocols and high European telecom settlement costs, and the best thing about them has been that you could usually ignore them and use whatever interesting tools came out of the vendor and developer community...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Seriously, I cannot believe that the rest of the world has not demanded that the US hand over control of ICANN to the UN.
Part of the point of ICANN was to avoid creating a new international treaty organization. I don't know that turning this all over to ISOC or IETF was ever really an option; the issue was simply too big. ICANN needs to be reined in, certainly, but having the DNS run by a subgroup of the International Telecommunications Union or by a new treaty organization would be a nightmare.
The big win of ICANN is that power stays with relatively clueful people (Dyson, Cerf, et al.) instead of representatives of major world governments. The really big win of ICANN was that the "people of the Internet" could elect even more clueful people to oversee the self-appointed board members. With this level of oversight gone, ICANN loses a good deal of its credibility.
Anyone thought about reviving the Boston Working Group, of which Karl was a prominent member?
ICANN looks after 3 things:
.cx may change a nameserver name, so to be completely up to date with the primary root server, grab a new copy daily. But frankly, you could use last years copy of the file and not notice.
1) Protocol numbers.
2) IP addresses
3) Domain names.
1 + 2 are autonomous. If ICANN were tovanish tomorrow, nothing bad would happen; they're fine, ignore the,
3) ICANN has an exclusive contract with the DoC to edit the Internet DNS root zone. Technically, they "suggest changes" to the DoC; they cannot do anything they want.
The extent of this though, is it only affects you if you happen to use the 13 root servers operated under aegis of the DoC. Last weeks attack that knocked, what? - half of them off the air is one more reason why we as users and administrators should end out dependance on the legacy root servers.
How?
Just primary the root zone for yourself. You really want to depend of somebody else for a 100K file that if it's not there the entire known internet ceases to exist do you?
Here's the file you need:
ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/
Dat's it. The whole enchilada. That's what all the fuss is about and that is all those 13 precious servers to is serve up that file. Grab a copy yourself and use it.
These are subtle changes every day. Lithuania may get a new secondary or
If you're using windows you may already have the ability to run your own nameservers on your box. If it's not built in, go grab a copy of BIND-PE (NT) or BIND-LE (W9x). If you're using unix, just declare yourself primary for "." or secondary the root zone from your favorite root zone publisher.
Now you don't care what happens to the 13 legacy root servers. Or ICANN.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Well well well... Good old ICORRUPT axing public seats and generally stacking the deck so as to have no outside influce.
Nothing like a good, old-fashioned, high-tech star chamber!
Ya, they need to be totally dissolved, and a new body put in place with rules strictly defined BEFORE any members are put in place, with some basic charter principles that can't be changed.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
funny - that post is 100% insightfull.
..and that is not funny at all.
ICANN needs to be reined in, certainly, but having the DNS run by a subgroup of the International Telecommunications Union or by a new treaty organization would be a nightmare.
How would that be the case?