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?'"

Comments

No suprise.

[www.sorehands.com]

In the last year it seems as though ICANN wants to have their own kingdom with no oversight or critism.

Karl being on the board was a black eye for them as he kept trying to reform them and trying to assert the rights of the public and make them accountable. The last straw was Karl successfully suing them.

They had to get rid of Karl and in one stroke, they got rid of Karl and the public input via the other elected members.

Does Congress know about this?

[CathedralRulz]

Ultimately Congress or agencies directly responsible to ICANN gave the organization the power they have under the premise that they would have an open ear to the public: IE - election of board members by the public (@Large members of ICANN). From the description of @Large members

ICANN's At Large Membership is a new way to participate in the ICANN process. The At Large Members will help select Directors to the ICANN Board. The At Large election process will give individual members of Internet communities worldwide a voice in the selection of policymakers to oversee the critical Internet resources entrusted to ICANN's technical coordination process. The selected At Large Directors will help the ICANN Board be representative of (and accountable to) the vast diversity of the worldwide Internet.

How was ICANN permitted to make this change to the charter that was granted to them by the government? It's this kind of crap that, if you raise your voice enough, can be changed by your representatives in Washington and by regulatory agencies who are open to public comment during policy making. It's also fertile ground for a lawsuit (albiet a money-losing one).

What happened?

[cranos]

Did someone sell the Internet to Enron or something? Seriously, I cannot believe that the rest of the world has not demanded that the US hand over control of ICANN to the UN. At least that way we can be screwed over by multi-lateral action instead of these pre-emptive strikes.

Inaccurate characterization of ICANN.

[billstewart]

ICANN is *NOT* a massive bloated moribund bureaucracy - unfortunately, it's quite the opposite. It's a lean mean collaboration of special interests -- accountable to no one -- who are able to do things they want because nobody's making them behave. There are some proposals out there to turn management of the DNS over to the ITU, who *are* a bloated moribund bureaucracy, accountable to so many people that it's even harder for them to get work done, and while I'd rather not see them in charge, at least they'd be moving slowly enough that they wouldn't be in the way of engineers doing engineering things because they'd be largely ignored.

As far as the DNS DDOS attack goes, the relationship between ICANN and the root servers is pretty fluid - it doesn't own or control them, though the Feds fund some of them, and it's more concerned with the master databases of who owns what names than the implementation issues of what IP address currently is attached to the names. Remember, ICANN are not engineers - they're intellectual property policy wonks. ICANN does encourage the root servers and the registries and registrars to follow security / reliability standards, and the recent DDOS attack means that there'll be some changes in the way things are run. There's an RFC 2870 on Root Name Server Operational Requirements, so if you've got opinions on how they can do a better job, go Comment.

ICANN's work on the top-level domains deserves mixed reviews. Moving slowly is usually ok; the big reasons for expanding the space are "because it gives us more cool names to sell", and one of the big reasons for going slowly is that you can only sell each TLD once, so you'd better get it right. Unfortunately, their definitions of getting it right strongly involve letting them stay in control, and are biased against any experimentation except along very narrow lines that they can stay in control of. But the IETF Ad-Hoc committee couldn't crack the political layer either. One thing both groups did right is pick a bunch of boring TLD names for the first batch, because they're going to make mistakes and discover unexpected problems in the first batch or two, and it's much better to mess up the market for .MUSEUM or .FIRM which nobody cares too much about than to mess up commercially valuable names like .INC or .LTD or .SEX or anything that overlaps with the voice telephone business.

IPv6 is Not ICANN's Job. It's the industry's, and the carriers', and Cisco's. ICANN does have the responsibility for coordinating the root servers' transition to support for IPv6 name lookups, and for making sure the Reverse DNS Lookup space (today's 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa PTR queries) gets managed correctly, though the standards work is probably the IETF's job, or maybe ISOC's. The one thing they've done in the IPv6 space that was Blatantly Evil (but probably reversable) was to claim that all your address bits are belong to them and set an unacceptably high price for the smallest routable address block. This not only delays widespread implementation until a major carrier either decides to pay them or ignore them, it nails down some assumptions about the shape of the hierarchy and organizational relationships that may be hard to repair, and increases the brittleness of the net without obviously benefitting the routing table situation (which is probably a more important IPv6 issue than the supply of address bits.) This delay gives them more time to try to finish grabbing power before IPv6's virtually-unlimited address space escapes from their ability to steal it from the world and sell it, but it also gives the industry more time to figure out what we're going to do with IPv6 and how to manage it, which is not a Bad Thing - there's a lot we really need to learn about how to use it before it's ready to replace IPv4.

Just checkin' in from Shanghai

[karl.auerbach]

Hello everyone - I'm currently in Shanghai at the ICANN meeting and connectivity is somewhat limited so I am not able to read and respond to all the comments in this thread.

The elimination of my board seat is not new news - ICANN repudated the concept that the right to govern derives from the consent of the governed several months ago in the meeting in Accra, Ghana.

ICANN's so-called "reform" plan essentially estalblishes an oligarchy in which a small group gets to say what is best for you and me without letting us cast votes to indicate whether we agree with those decisions.

ICANN is also retrenching its committment to a board-of-directors that evades its duty to oversee the behaviour and actions of the corporation's management. (For example, one of the things that was uncovered in the course of my lawsuit was that ICANN's Audit committee never bothered to look at ICANN's records but simply accepted whatever the corporation management chose to show it. Sounds like Enron and Arthur Andersen doesn't it?)

Anyway, the end of my term is somewhat uncertain - the annual meeting - being held Dec 14 and 15 in Amsterdam, is the formal end of my term. However, there are noises in ICANN about extending terms. That has me bothered as I do not feel comfortable with this.

Regards from Shanghai,

--karl--