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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.
Someone should hold them accountable.... oh wait!
Right. With this latest move, unresponsiveness now becomes a distinct possibility. I'd really hate to see ICANN become indifferent to ordinary users...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
the emperor dissolved the senate! Geez! Get your shit straight before you try to be all cool.
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!
a parallel namespace run in true freeware style.
You mean like OpenNIC?
Will I retire or break 10K?
"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.....
Shame they had to have it in China - dang dictatorship must be contagious.
Lynn said he would recommend adding three new Internet domain names, though he said there were no plans yet on when to create them or what they would be called.
.touch .this
.we .the .man
.out .of .touch
....
hmmm, how about
.cant
or
or
or
Best Windows Freeware
Some related items: there are rumblings of possible alternatives and here is a paper presented by the Centre for Democracy and Technology to the Shanghai conference yesterday, which outlines a few suggestions as to how things might be improved.
or democracy, ICANN begins the process of subverting the Internet toward its own nefarious private goals.
In keeping with these changes, ICANN announces that it will be changing its name to reflect its new mission to become:
Universal Controller of All Network Traffic.
(Headline: ICANN changes name to UCANT).
Credit.
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."
When does this get relevant? Well, when somebody disagrees about who owns a domain. It's nice that there are standard procedures for disputing these things. And remember when it used to cost some ungodly amount per year to register domains? Then along came OpenSRS and lots of registrars that pushed prices down, opening the web up to further colonization. This had to be approved and initiated by ICANN. The problem? ICANN already operates essentially without answering to any government or external authority, and the "citizens" of the Internet have no real voice in what goes on at ICANN. What if ICANN decides to go back to granting register.com a monopoly on new domain registrations? Well, they won't because the backlash would be huge, I imagine, but I am trying to give an example of what they theoretically could do.
Also little issues like the transition to IPv6 are governed to some extent by the ICANN, and that matters too - I for one would like my toaster and household appliances to have IP addresses in my frigging lifetime. I'm sure you can find more things the ICANN is responsible for at their website. Or do a Google search. Then tell me if you think maybe the users of the Internet who ultimately pay for its growth and the taxpayers of the nations that set up the original infrastructure for its growth ought to have some say in how it is managed.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
No, the President dissolved the Senate!
"Fear will keep the local systems in line."
"The Senate has got a lousy record on my judges. We need to change the Senate for a lot of reasons, and one reason is to make sure we've got a sound judiciary," he said Monday in Denver.
"This comprehensive plan calls for a clean start..." added the President's lapdog, Ari Fleisher.
(ok so it's not as bad as i made it sound, but it's still pretty funny, in context)
Okay, this situation has become quite surreal. There isn't even any sneaking around on this thing they're doing. They're clearly going well outside of what they were created to do... way out of bound on this.
Frankly, I do not want to see people writing their senators on this one though. I want to see an internet-elected system that everyone has dreamed of and then MAKE IT HAPPEN. Once we have a respected and responsible internet name counsil created along with a good base set of servers, then we simply persuade everyone to switch over.
Okay... I see the first hurdle that will be difficult -- getting people to switch. It can be done people. If there is no interruption in normal usage, it can be done. Further, once we have a good strong and accountable body in place with all the rules and regs ironed out in such a way that everyone agrees it to be a fair system, THEN we start crying to our senators and stuff. Show them that not only is ICANN screwed up, but we have something created to replace them today. Once they see that we offer more than a complaint, but a solution, how can they easily say no?
We can make a huge petition to push this thing through. They have to listen.
Complaints alone will not correct this problem. If you leave it to someone else to fix it, it will not be fixed in a way you will appreciate.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
They never wanted public participation; it was always pretty much for show, and the way they treated Karl was partly because they never wanted public participation and partly because he'd not only been elected by the public to push them into letting *actual*Internet*users* have some influence over ICANN's directions, which (as I believe I may have mentioned) they didn't want, but went beyond that to actually *try* to have some influence over ICANN, or at least force some shadow of openness or accountability onto ICANN, which they also didn't want. So when they got rid of him, they made it clear they didn't want him to be replaced; this is just formalizing it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Remember when it used to be free to register domains?
The Earth shifted even further in it's orbit, as Jon Postel continued spinning madly in his grave.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Universal
Corporation for
Assigning
Names and
Numbers via
Totalitarianism
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.
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.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
One correction to your post. ICAAN does answer to the United States Government. Everyone likes to think we operate in this fantasy land that the internet is open and free. If the US government wanted ICAAN to make a change they would comply. Would the US do this? Probably not due to international flack but they do have the authority to do so. ICAAN was created by the US to get the US government out of managing the internet. As it became more global the Administration realized that for appearances the Government needed to take a step back.
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
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
Over the years, idealists and dreamers have talked about the Internet like it's a new country or community, and that We The People own it. Well, here's a test for that assertion. Now we have to get off our lardasses and go through the strenuous exercise of typing new numbers into our /etc/resolv.conf files. I know, it's hard.
When we throw off ICANN's rather loosely-bound chains, then maybe those Internet "Declaration of Independance" ideas will be more than mere pretentious and immature daydreams, and we'll be Real Men, like our forefathers who had the courage to implement the 1986 Usenet renaming. ;-) Until then, though, ICANN and others like them, have no reason to pay attention to rants on Slashdot. At most, they might look down into our little field and idly wonder what we are "baaah"ing about.
As for some ideas on how to get from here to there, I recommend Brad Templeton's essays on DNS. He has put some thought into this that goes deeper than, say, the OpenNIC project.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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
Templeton's writings are here.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Clipper ship sailors used to talk about roving "press gangs" who would round up all able-bodied men they could catch and force them to serve as crew aboard a sailing ship. The term for this was "shanghaied". How appropriate that ICANN has announced, from Shanghai, that they have shanghaied the Internet.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
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."
The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
Anonymous Coward: "But that's impossible. How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?"
The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line.
DNS is flawed. When designed, it no doubt made sense to limit the system to a fixed set of TLD's and root servers. Technology wasn't available at the time to allow for much else. Creating an artificially limited namespace was a necessity driven by the cost of implementation. And as a balance to that, there was no fee to register a domain.
o nths.com and the like. DNS names are the equivalent of addresses or telephone numbers. There is no one demonstrating outside the UN for more countries so they can get a postal address or banging on the ITU's door that more country codes are needed so they can get a phone. Country names and country codes are the equivalent of TLDs
The problem isn't with with the DNS, it's with misusing the DNS as though it is a flat namespace. Thus you get www.someadvertisingsloganwhichwillonlybeusedfor3m