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

How can they get away with this.

[Performer Guy]

Someone should hold them accountable.... oh wait!

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.

From the article:

[Hayzeus]

...a move that critics complained could make the group indifferent to ordinary users and hurt innovation.

Right. With this latest move, unresponsiveness now becomes a distinct possibility. I'd really hate to see ICANN become indifferent to ordinary users...

Re:From the article:

[n9hmg]

Here's the thread for this:
Lynn and others said the group's former method of electing five of the 18 board members over the Internet bogged ICANN down in debates that held up its main work -- making decisions that affect everything from how Web sites are named to how e-mail is sent.
Elected member: "We can't do that, it's wrong. They've been in business, since the great-great-grandfather arrived from Russia in 1830, and been shipping orders from their webpage since 1992!"
Appointed member: "There he goes again, bogging us down, holding up our main work"
A.M. 2: "We need to get on with transferring shapirosdelicatessen.com to Microsoft, since the new MS Delicatessen IDE is coming out next fall."
A.M. 3: "And don't forget, we've got to transfer cerf.net from that cybersquatter, Vint Cerf, Verizon, for their new C(entral) E(uropean) R(adio) F(requency) wireless broadband network."
Chairman: "Bailiff, remove him."

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?

Re:Did you notice this?

[mttlg]

Isn't that like cutting off your leg because of an ingrown toenail?

Actually, it's more like cutting off your feet with a rusty pocketknife because they hurt when you walk barefoot on broken glass and rusty nails.

Re:Did you notice this?

[schon]

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.

In other news, Vint Cerf was heard to remark "Let them eat cake!"

Re:Did you notice this?

[WeaponOfChoice]

Yet another Dilbert-Reality crossover. This really reminds me of the strip where the boss is explaining to the Engineers that due to the lousy results of the employee satisfaction survey (upon which part of management bonuses are based) the survey would be discontinued.

On a more serious note I would have thought there'd be some legislation to stop a public services company ('cause that's what ICANN is, like it or not) from reducing it's public accountability...

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.

Shanghai

[csnydermvpsoft]

Shame they had to have it in China - dang dictatorship must be contagious.

From the article

[L. VeGas]

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.

hmmm, how about

.cant .touch .this

or
.we .the .man

or
.out .of .touch

or
....

And having dropped all pretention of fairness

[3-State Bit]

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.

Re:And having dropped all pretention of fairness

[uberstool]

Slashdot has also changed it's name to

66.35.250.150

Re:Can anyone explain why this is significant?

[Fnkmaster]

Well, I'll assume you mean this as a legitimate question. I am not the most qualified person to answer the question, but I'll tell you what I do know. The ICANN ultimately sets up procedures and policies for registering domain names and controlling the allocation and deallocation of all TLDs (top level domains, like .com). Why do they control this? Because everybody has always agreed that they do. So to say you are connected to "the Internet" you really need to be pointing to a DNS server that syncs up with the root DNS servers approved by ICANN.

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.

Re:Good

[Dr Caleb]

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

That was Monday's Karl Auerbach story

[billstewart]

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.

In other news...

[Amazing Quantum Man]

The Earth shifted even further in it's orbit, as Jon Postel continued spinning madly in his grave.

Re:ICANN Ditches Ordinary Users

[tomhudson]

Headline I'd rather see: Ordinary Users Ditch ICANN

I'm sure I'm not alone.

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.

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.

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.

No more elections

[quantum bit]

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.