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

Re:Good

[Dr Caleb]

Not to worry. With luck ICANN won't be around much longer.

Broadcast Spectrum

[OzPhIsH]

Now I'm just wondering how long will it take for the board our our Government or someone to sell out vast proportions of available internet bandwidth or addressing to large media companies "in the spirit to increase the public benefit" much like what happened to another of our 'public' resources, the television broadcast spectrum. The last thing I want to see is "internet TV brought to you by MSNBC" and the rest of us getting 5 minutes of public access... The public should be involved in what direction public resources take, either directly or indirectly. Getting cut out of the loop means we're gonna get screwed somehow, somewhere down the line.

Re:How can they get away with this.

[Zeinfeld]

The election is a symptom not the problem.

There are plenty of bodies like ICANN that are appointed indirectly. The problem with ICANN is that first they don't appear to want to be accountable to anyone at all and second their decisions appear to be utterly clueless to every consituency they might be attempting to please.

One might think that they would work out a somewhat more cluefull approach to funding than to simply try to shake down the country TLDs for huge sums. ICANN has no credible threat to back its demands. If they drop .uk from the root the root moves for sure.

In fact the whole business about who controls the DNS really comes down to the DNS root server operators and in particular the ones with the serious servers for the task. ICANN do not own the IP addresses, the root server operators do.