New ICANN Head Promises Greater Openness

PrideOfPomona writes "At ZDNet(UK),"The Internet addressing authority has been criticised as secretive, but new president Paul Twomey says the organisation is to turn over a new leaf"." I suppose it's possible that Twomey will be better.

Comments

My two favourite quotes here:

[SolemnDragon]

Formerly there was a process of online voting, but in the view of the committee it probably hadn't worked as well as it could have," said Twomey. He said the voting process was very vulnerable to "branch stacking", and pointed out that in North America and Europe the number of people who voted was in the thousands, while in South East Asia the number of votes was in the millions.

what we're talking about here is the voting for the board members, which there is to my mind no easy solution for. It's one of those difficult questions: who gets to control the Internet? Nobody wants it to be one person or one organisation- but without some form of organisation, we end up with, well... ok. so we end up with pretty much what we've got now, only without anyone making people play at least somewhere NEAR the same playing field. And how do you assure equal representation among a huge body of people? (I recommend fairvote as a place to start thinking about this one... The internet is one place where how we, as a people overall, decide to run things is going to have long-term ramifications, and i give ICANN credit for at least being aware of that fact.

ICANN will now rely more heavily on the At-Large Advisory Committee, which is charged with talking to other Internet organisations and individual users about how ICANN interacts with them.

Which to me, translates into (i could be wrong) : ICANN learns that it needs to play well with others.

It's a start.