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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.
On the ground? On the table? Or will he just stand? I bet he finds this very uncomfortable.
... action from the last vestiges of elitism and arrogance that helped the Internet stay small and academic before the plaque of commercialism was allowed access in the early 90s.
Ahhh, the good ol' days, when the Internet was young, and closed to only the educated, and information was free to anyone who could pay tuition or get a grant/scholarship... all this open and free sharing of information, regardless of the IQ of the participant. I'm tellin' ya, we never should have let the stupid vote.
Dirty peasants!</sarcasm>
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
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"
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.
He's going to go to work for ICANNOT
Best Windows Freeware
#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.
#2. How many "publically elected" seats are left? The story just says they eliminated 5 without elaborating.
#3. Other than through public election, how does one get a seat on ICANN?
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.
I never use domain names anyway. When I want to web surf (only thing the Internet's good for), I just type in random IP addresses and see what I get. It's completely random that I'm here now posting this. The bestiality porn has cost me a few jobs, but I've learned 3 new sexual positions and proudly own a shiny X10 camera.
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.
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?
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.
Fight Spammers!
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.
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).
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.
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
What bothers me most about this is not the moves ICANN has made. It's not that they've booted the sources of public oversight off.
What bothers me most is, since it's been pretty clear all along they have no concern for integrity of the net or public good online, and they never felt the need to keep us from knowing that, what the heck is it they're getting ready to do that they don't want us o know about? Paranoid, yes, but I really don't see why they would have gone to so much trouble over this unless they have something up their sleeve.
They gave him the TLD .bye
"Publicly elected Karl Auerbach, suspected terrorist sympathiser, is booted from the ICANN board. His insubordination was seen as counter productive in the war on terrorism by the other self-appointed members of the board. One member said, 'Mr. Auerbach was a subversive who was sympathetic to freedom loving people - not a patriot. We will not allow these neo-commies the ability to destroy everything I, I mean we, have built. He may have been elected by the public, but the public doesn't know what we know and we know lots of stuff that would scare the public but we aren't to say what it is cause it's really scary.'"
LoRider
Let's hope Auerbach left the plans for the DNS server loaded in the memory buffer of a brave astromech droid.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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...
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.
No, Al-Qaeda would be to blame. ICANN would be guilty of negligence but not responsible for the activity.
You might as well say that whateverthehell airline it is whose plane was crashed into the WTC is wholly responsible for the attack, but they're not the ones who seized the planes and crashed them into the buildings.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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."
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
Since they mentioned it -- what did Karl find in the records he had to try so hard to get? I was expecting some sort of smoking gun the way the rest of the board was fighting him. Or were they just being stubborn to get Karl to use his time and effort getting something of no great importance?
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
What about handing over all naming, TLD, root server and registration services to the top comp. sci. universities in the world? A huge step, but logical if you think about it.
For one, universities are all connected to a huge backbone and the technical knowhow is there too. The money coming in from domain/ip registration would come in handy to the universities, too. Hell, even if they where to make a profit, I wouldn't care that much, as long as it gets pumped back into education.
But just as important is that universities want and need a free flow of information. Transparancy is what they're about, if only because of the historical precedents of scientific research.
Sure, this would be a huge undertaking to set up, but there are even more benefits here: the fact that more dns servers are around mean the internet will be what it has always meant to be. Decentralised in a big way, and if a top uni comes up, hell, put it in the loop. The pieces of pie get thinner, but that's the whole point: this pie is not for consumption.
Or am I missing something here?
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
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--
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 ?
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--