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ICANN Ditches Public Participation
Ziest writes "The AP is reporting that ICANN, who is meeting in Shanghai, has voted to eliminate direct elections to its board of directors." See also does-not-exist.org. It's not as if this is recent change -- just the last step in a long process.
Critics said the revisions were aimed at getting rid of dissenting board members who say the group is out of touch with Internet users.
Did this line jump out at anyone else? They were tired of people telling them that they were out of touch with internet users, so they decided to stop allowing internet users to elect members of the board. Isn't that like cutting off your leg because of an ingrown toenail?
Or am I just out of touch with the politics here?
If ICANN had any interest in real public participation, then we would never had heard of Karl Auerbach as he would not have to file a lawsuit against ICANN to see the books.
Fight Spammers!
"This will make ICANN a much more efficient and effective organization that will get things done better and faster and be more plugged-in to the community than we are now,"
Uh? How does getting rid of publicly voted board members, and then buffering yourself from the risk of being voted out make one "more plugged-in to the community"???
Do they actually believe the bull that they are shoveling? Do they actually expect us to believe it?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Really, how are they any different from Saddam Hussein? Rised to power through illegitimate means; eliminate true public elections; now organize these scam elections which are just like the elections in Iraq.
ICANN has no legitimacy. If they did, ALL of their board member's would be publicly elected. Unless ALL of their board member's are publicly elected, the entire organization is a illegitimate crock.
"This will make ICANN a much more efficient and effective organization that will get things done better and faster and be more plugged-in to the community than we are now," Lynn said
What a fucking moron. How the fuck is it possible to be more "plugged-in to the community" by eliminating public elections? It isn't. The only possible reason for eliminating public elections is to dodge all responsibility, so you can never be held accountable.
As for more efficient, yes, it will be more efficient at making immoral decisions; just like Saddam Hussein is very efficient at quickly deciding how to execute his enemies. Its really tough to make immoral decisions when you have to worry about public elections. Much easier to just cave in to business demands when you don't have to be held accountable to the public at large.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Does anyone else find it ironic that this announcement was made in Shanghai?
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Remember when it used to be free to register domains?
I mean, there wasn't any public participation for most of ICANN's history, and then when they decided to have publicly elected board members they only made 5 of 18 seats elected. The public members would always be a minority and outvoted by the vested interests.
I don't see this as any big loss. Just more honest.
Lynn states, "We want to welcome and bring to the table all that are interested in issues that concern ICANN," Of course, the other half of this sentence is, "..without really taking your comments seriously."
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I'm sure I'm not alone.
That's right. Mussolini got the trains running on time and Hitler got the Autobahns built. I guess we need a dictatorship to get stuff done efficiently and effectively...
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
All the fear mongering here is somewhat misplaced, at least considering the long term. ICANN simply generates a bunch of policies that people *voluntarily* choose to abide by. ICANN has little in the way of enforcement. What legal settlements have transpired have been caused by contracts/agreements (AFAIK) and not laws stating ICANN owns/controls anything. ICANN has no teeth. This is nothing that can't be solved by an alert internet populace. See also: openNIC.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Why don't they just change their name already from "ICANN" to "UCANNT"?
Seriously. The time to stop a bad organization like ICANN is before they become too big to be feasibly replaced. The longer you leave ICANN in its unelected position of power, the more power it will consolidate and the more responsibility it will assume, until it becomes impossible to replace ICANN -- because nobody but ICANN will understand how to do all the things they do. Apathy towards a bad organization simply because it is not yet being malicious is exactly the attitude that has brought some of history's worst tyrants to power.
yes... we've all heard it a million times before, right?
Let's just re-cap what it means though:
The RFCs, ICANN, the DNS system, and so on, none of these are definitive authorities on anything. The reason the internet (a large collection of networks) works is because we all follow roughly the same standards; we all agree to follow what icann says with regards to who owns what IP addresses, and we all agree to use the current DNS system. Nothing FORCES anyone to follow any of these with their systems, other than the desire to obtain the benefits that go along with playing nicely with others.
If ICANN gets too far out of whack, they can be ignored. For instance: IF a bunch of major networks get together and decide that they no longer want to follow icanns regulations regarding ip address allocation, and that they are all going to start using some space that icann refuses to allocate, nothing will stop them. IT's their network, their business; if they all agree to route this traffic to each other, all the better.
The same goes for dns; if the dns system gets too crazy, a new standard can emerge, and peopel can follow it.
Of the RFCs that are relevant to the modern internet, we don't use them strictly. We don't use all features of IPv4, for instance.. it's a guideline, not a rule.
It's all about cooperation; if icann stops being a benefit to the internet at large, it will simply be let go.
It just has de facto power because every nameserver in the world is configured to point at ICANN's set of root servers, and it is that way because the name servers all come configured that way out of the box.
There is a good reason for this, we don't want a fractured net where different people get different answers to a DNS query.
At the same time, if we truly have the will to dump ICANN, and we all do it at once (or at least the most commonly used nameservers do it at once) their power can be totally stripped from them.
I outline how at this page
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Welcome to the future of transnational corporate governance ladies and gentlemen. Organizations get set up that are effectively untouchable by any national government, and are unbeholden to passe concepts like democratic representation. I mean right now this organization can pretty much do whatever it wants as long as they don't go far enough to drive all the network administrators in the world to start using a different root name server. And that, my friends, would be pretty damn far.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Put down the revolutionary propaganda and chill dude. The only effect continuous protesting would have is to cause people to ignore you just on principle. "Oh, here they go again."
"He states his point clearly, and there's no shallow soundbite designed to piss people off."
You must of missed the parts in his statement where he called those of differing opinions, parasites, nutcases, and crackpots.
How does "our Government" (not sure which one that is) sell out the "available internet bandwidth". Governments selling licenses to use broadcast spectrum at least makes sense - two people can't use the sample frequency at the same time without cooperating. On the other hand, internet bandwidth is not a limited resource - all you have to do is lay down another fiber optic line to add more.
As far as access to bandwidth goes - if you're willing to pay for it, the numerous companies who own fiber optic lines running around the world are more than willing to sell it to you. Of course, commerical sites tend to have more of it, since they can afford to pay for it.
Unlike broadcast, you can have as much bandwidth as you want from point A and point B. Of course, you may have to lay down more fiber if it isn't already there, and that is reflected in the pricing. Nobody regulates this area (well, beyond regulations that deal with running wires around cities in general) and there is competition.
Bandwidth isn't a public resource. It doesn't need to be, as it isn't nearly as much a natural monopoly as last-mile telephone is.
Of course, you might argue that DNS roots are a public resource - so if you are really talking about meaningful DNS addresses going to big multinationals that is a different matter...