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.

Comments

Did you notice this?

[Milo Fungus]

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?

They want public participation

[www.sorehands.com]

They want public participation only as long as the public blindly follows what the board wants to do and not question their edicts.

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.

Are they on crack?

[Dynedain]

"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?

Crooks

[dh003i]

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.

Irony Meter is pegging...

[Black Art]

Does anyone else find it ironic that this announcement was made in Shanghai?

Re:Irony Meter is pegging...

[SirSlud]

Oh no. It was the G8 that came up with the brilliant idea of holding a meeting in a location where public protest is illegal (Quatar, I believe it was.)

Funny thing, huh? Its almost like countries themselves have become conference halls, each with its own set of convenient or inconvenient services (er, laws) for the planners of our future.

Re:Can anyone explain why this is significant?

[Mnemia]

Remember when it used to be free to register domains?

Re:ICANN Ditches Ordinary Users

[tomhudson]

Headline I'd rather see: Ordinary Users Ditch ICANN

I'm sure I'm not alone.

History Repeats Itself...

[avgjoe62]

"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

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...

Technically ICANN has no power

[btempleton]

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

They tired of the illusion of democracy...

[sterno]

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.