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Why ICANN Needs Fresh Blood
scubacuda writes "Akash Kapur of CircleID has written an editorial, Why ICANN Needs Fresh Blood: A Deeper View . Kapur writes, "ICANN was born amid the heady days of Internet euphoria. Its early promise to be the world's first global democracy (not to mention an entirely new form of governance) was a product of that euphoria. But like so many dot-coms, ICANN quickly succumbed to the hubris of its own vision. If ICANN has been a troubled organization from the start, then that is in no small measure because it over-promised at the start....What's needed is fresh blood -- new personalities, and new ideas to break the ideological impasse." Kapur lists cancelled at-large elections, the authoritarianism and secrecy of ICANN discussion, and the narrowing possibility that ICANN could represent a new model of governance as indicators that global democracy has failed."
ICANN needs fresh blood because it's a frickin' vampire!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I think the only thing that can help ICANN is a complete reorganization. Every rule and policy should be gone over by a 3rd party. The Internet is growing way to big and way to fast for ICANN to properly handle their job and they are falling very short. With their current policies I think they are hurting future growth of the medium.
If you think of ICANN as Institute for CANNibals, the title "Why ICANN Needs Fresh Blood" suddenly makes a lot of sense, but in a totally different way!
There is little debate among outsiders of the position that ICANN is in resperate need of being disbanded and redesigned from the ground up. The question is, - since there is little or no oversight of the organization - how would lawmakers go about tearing down the golem they've created. It's not simply a matter of U.S. law anymore. I'm not certain that ICANN could be disbanded and redesigned using anything less than an international treaty, but IANAL, so perhaps someone with expertise in this area could speak to the issue of how change would be brought about (which, is equally as interesting as what those changes would be).
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Just look at the United States. The first time through, they put together the Articles of Confederation. After a few years, it was clear that wasn't working. They reorganized the government in the form of the Constitution, and it's worked fairly well since.
I remember when I used to enter "billing@internic.net" as my e-mail address for every service (before they started requiring confirmation) and signed them up for all the free offers. :)
--
est modus in rebus
is an international organization to oversee the administration of ICANN.
It took me a long time to realize this, but the Internet qua Internet will NOT change the world for the better.
If you were part of the upper echelon in the Soviet Union, would YOU want democracy? Would you give up the security--your nice apartment, caviar dinners, and KGB contacts--to live in a country where you didn't know what your lot/role in life would be?
Once you look at it this way, everything from the way that closed regimes limit netizens' access to information makes to the way cable and software companies (namely, Microsoft) "act strategically" makes sense.
People/governments/regimes have worked hard to make their way to the top. They're not about to put in place policies or architectures in place that threaten that hegemony.
My question to the
ICANN has nothing to do with web standards. They're an internet organization that deals with addresses and domain names.
The design of the DNS system makes ICANN unnecessary. The whole idea of ICANN was founded by people who did not understand how this was so for the purpose of establishing privilege ( as in from Latin privilegium, a law affecting one person : privus, single, alone + lex, leg-, law ) for certain minorities to exert control over the DNS namespace.
Large corporations and cadres of lawyers are just as happy as the rest of us about domain squatting. They are even less happy about the whole somethingSUCKS.com court decisions which (by interpereting the US Constitution 1st Amendment) allow people to set up very spiffy parody sites to lampoon their hard-fought corporate images. How are they going to get control of this nasty thorn in their side?
The correct way for those people to solve their problem is to "fork" the DNS root and create their own set of root servers supervised by their lawyers. They could then begin boycotting the original root servers' registrars, and require end users to use DNS servers that submit to their authority. The first problem with that is how so many corporations will fail to agree on enough details to let that happen. The second problem is that anyone could selectively forward queries to their servers for some lookups, and forward queries to other peoples' servers for other lookups. Each DNS server decides who to delegate what authority to. Each end-user could theoretically run their own DNS server without ever needing to query a root server.
The bottom line is that DNS is anarchy, but there is a de facto consensus to trust several root server operators to be cool. The first step to accomplishing what the IANA wants to do is to convince people to revoke trust in the existing root servers. Instead, they keep trying to bully the root server operators, who roll their eyes and sigh..
The real risk that the IANA faces is that the DNS root server authority gets institutionalized in a widely publicised and debated way. If they can't weasel their way into control quietly, they risk the door being be slammed in their face by a new consensus formed out of "informed consent". It's like the UN where everybody has a veto, and it is terribly uncertain how the vote will go.
The real reason the ICANN is such a joke is that the tootpaste is out of the tube. People are widely aware of the attempted power grab, and the important people know how futile that is once it is widely known. ICANN would only be allowed to operate if it behaved identically to the current system, which begs the question: why are we fixing it if it isn't broke?
Pay attention to Verisgn.com (who bought NSI). They will attempt to leverage DNS authority with their x509 business. Look at how BIND9 signed-zones are supposed to work. It isn't just ICANN we should be worried about.
Learn PGP keyring management. It is complicated. It is very worthwhile though. The PGP trust management system is our defense. We should seek to protect the right to that system in the Supreme Court of the US under the Bill of Rights.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
At the same time Internet existence is not protected by proper international laws. And now we begin digging much deeper problems. The modern international law system is obsolete.
Recent events in Iraq demonstrate it. One arrogant leader of the most power country ignores all international laws in order to get rid from the other arrogant leader. It's like I am telling to police officer: "don't interfer, I will be dealing with my theaft by myself".
Internet in the same danger. If US govt will begin disconnecting countries from US, while other countries will not support it - there will be lots of problem with traffic, Internet will be bad, but it will survive. But if Mr President will decide that embargo is not a proper mean any more will start a cyber-war or something like that - that will be a beginning of the end of the Internet.
What I am telling, that all attempts to rebuild ICANN will be useless wasting of time and efforts (if not dangerous) until it will be protected by proper system of internation laws, which is broken today with a great help from US President.
Less is more !
Here we have two interesting subjects: 1) the much-lampooned ICANN, and 2) our writer Akash Kapur himself. In 2000, Kapur conducted an interview with author VS Naipaul, the transcript of which is intensely -- and unintentionally -- humorous.
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Naipaul tells Kapur that all the questions Kapur has faxed him for the interview are inane. Naipaul further instructs Kapur to go read Naipaul's books instead of wasting the author's time by asking him to repeat himself. Much of this transcript also ran in the UK newspaper "The Guardian" -- I distinctly rememer having hiccups all morning from laughing through my coffee.
Two links on our two interesting subjects:
1) ICANN -- the movie!
http://www.paradigm.nu/icann/icannstage.h
2) The transcript of Kapur's interview with Naipaul:
http://www.akashkapur.com/naipaulint.ht
Meaning, "No argument" with the idea that ICANN needs fresh blood. However, I do question the idea that a global democracy is even possible, due mainly to global corporate interests and not geo-political interests.
And no, I *didn't* RTFA.
C|N>K
Everyone seems to know that ICANN is ineffective and corrupt, so why do people even bother with them. What would happen if a (suitably large enought) group simply refused to recognize ICANN's authority? I'm thinking something organized along the lines of realtime blacklist.
I was called to New York to meet with Ira Magaziner and some other people about 10 months before ICANN was born. On the surface it was to end the hostilitied bewteen CORE and the alternate root folks. Some sort of democratic organization was envisioned. Lies, lies and more lies. The entire time Magaziner was running around behind the scenes - with Cochetti from IBM (now Verisign) selecting a board.
At a later and very private meeting where NSI and ICANN finally signed with each other, some very high up IBM lawyer-wonk (who called the meeting, that's how powerful they are) bragged they'd spent $60M a year of their washington lobbying budger to make sure no new TLDS were created. Is it any wonder they were so capriciously at Marina del Rey at the 2000 meeting or why there were so fucking lame?
ICANN has always been about protecting the interllectual property of big busines (read: trademarks). Never mind that there are laws protecting trademark owners but no laws protecting domain name owners.
ICANN doesn't need new blood, it just needs honest people at the helm.
As usual: vote with your nameservers - I don't care if you use the ORSC root that I coordnate, or new.net or name.space, OpenNIC or what have you, just back... away... from... the... legacy... root.
Richard Sexton
Need Mercedes parts ?
Because there is only ~80 comments to this article 20 hours after posting?