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ICANN Ditches Public Participation

Posted by michael on from the time-to-rebel dept.

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.

7 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Did you notice this? by Milo+Fungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. They want public participation by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

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  3. Re:ICANN Ditches Ordinary Users by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Headline I'd rather see: Ordinary Users Ditch ICANN

    I'm sure I'm not alone.

  4. History Repeats Itself... by avgjoe62 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "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...

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  5. Technically ICANN has no power by btempleton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

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  6. They tired of the illusion of democracy... by sterno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  7. Re:Irony Meter is pegging... by SirSlud · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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