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ICANN Stacks Board with Non-Critical Appointees
Froomkin writes "ICANN's outgoing dissident Board member, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, has leaked the slate that ICANN's so-called NomCom (actually an appointments committee) has picked. The new public representatives are mostly a mix of incumbent ICANN Board directors who don't rock the boat, corporate executives, and ISOC members. Dissident Andy Mueller-Maguhn got replaced by a former member of the board of Deutsche Telekom. Dissident Karl Auerbach (who had to sue ICANN to get to see its documents) got replaced by the President of the U.S. Council for International Business. At least the Board Squatters are finally going to be history. Details at ICANNWatch." ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.
When I read the headline, I thought "non-critical appointees" was a buzzword for "the folks we're about to lay off."
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Is that when the Autobots rule your board?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
[PS. Someone, I don't know who, nominated me for a Board seat, but I wrote in to say I did not wish to be considered.]
sulli
RTFJ.
where exactly does ICANN derive its' authority from ? Do they have any enforement powers or do they just suggest things ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The nature of the "Nominations" is summed up in the statement [Quote] After careful deliberation, the Nominating Committee reached consensus on the following slates of Nominees, each of whom has agreed to accept the responsibility of the role. They will assume their duties during the ICANN meeting in Montreal. [/Quote]
The "Nominees" have already accepted their posts and "will assume their duties" (or else?).
Sigarette: A short sig.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
ICANNABELIEVEIT!
I don't see how this could be a surprise because isn't this type of behaviour standard now for any kind of governing body in business? I thought that one of the major complaints about most modern board of directors is that they have long stopped operating in the public, or even their own company's or organization's, interests?
I'm going to make my own Internet! With hookers! And Gambling!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.
Thanks! ...I've been looking for some real-life examples of how to achieve this!
It's democracy, but almost all the voters are apathetic.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Vinton Cerf
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
There are GREAT ALTERNATIVES
OpenNIC has matured into a rather great truly democratic DNS Registry. I would highly recommend everyone support them. You can still support OpenNIC and have ICANN registeries, well everything except biz, but that's a whole nother can of worms ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Status of this Memo
This document is an IAHC-Draft. IAHC-Drafts are working documents invited by the Internet International Ad-Hoc Committee.
IAHC-Drafts are draft documents and may be updated, replaced, or made obsolete by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use IAHC Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as ``work in progress.''
Introduction
This is a formal proposal and recommendation to the IAHC on the creation of new commercial TLD names and the selection of registries to carry out registration in them.
Policies
In this section, I set out the ends and restrictions on them in the form of policies which will inform the specific selections which follow.
The Internet Society should not engage in trade. Instead it and its component committees should set policy and standardize technical and practical issues in areas subject to such policy.
The management of registries should operate under common law. There is no need to make law, but only to arrange the operation of registries so that they may obey the laws of their jurisdictions, and have access to the lawful conflict resolution mechanisms of those jurisdictions.
The selection of TLD names be compatible with trademark law. Where (sub)domain names are indistinguishable from trademarks, the same law should apply.
Maximize the choices available to registries and their customers, the registrants. Leave as much as possible up to the organizations desiring domains as possible, specifically including what kind of domain to register in and therefor what risks and benefits they wish to accept and achieve.
The selection of names and registries be compatible with previous proposals. Requests and offers made to the IANA in light of early proposals should be considered in the selection of TLD names and registries.
The mechanisms should be patterned after traditional ones. This specifically includes successful policies from the trademark and copyright areas, such as providing public announcements and periods for objections to be made.
Minimize rulemaking, now and in the future. Cease to be involved as soon as can reasonably be achieved. Specifically, do not create new bodies, but instead return day-to-day management of the namespace to IANA.
Define end dates Similarly, rules employed to ease the creation of a system of registration in new TLDs should cease to apply once a system is in place.
Customer's Selection of Domains
Before setting out policies, it is advantageous to expand the principle of maximizing the choice of customers: that of to letting customers decide what TLDs they wish to be in, while setting ground rules so that have the opportunity to do so without harming others.
This lets us see what results for the most affected community are, and broadly hints at what must be done to achieve useful results.
So let us then consider the customers' desires in selecting a commercial TLD, given a broad choice of at least existing (``.com''), categorical (eg, ``.oil') and synonymous (eg, ``.biz'') TLDs.
The customer would need to realize that there is a tradeoff: for some period web browsers wouldn't find them without user intervention.
Those include, in the short term, the
davecb@spamcop.net
Is it?
autarchy
n 1: economic independence as a national policy [syn: autarky]
2: a political system governed by a single individual [syn: autocracy]
[ant: democracy]
But what do they say? I'll refresh the page in a while. Thanks!
I think someone has been listening to their Rage Against The Machine MP3s while watching Fight Club again. Pronoun overload...
Thanks!
democracy2autarchy is a closed source software project, but it has been having some success, enough to be lucrative.
I've tried to install it myself but can't get past the point of needing libmoney.a
"Provided by the management for your protection."
ICANNABELIEVEIT!
Shouldn't it be ICANNCEIVABLE?
But I'm not sure if that word means what I think it means.
Blockwars: a realtime, multiplayer game. Go!
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
It's really weird that they approve useless domains like
We need to start getting people away from using DNS as a locator service. DNS is meant (mainly) to apply convenient names to IP addresses, not so that my mom can guess "www.example.com" when she wants to know something about "example".
DNS is inappropriate for this because it does not allow two parties with a legitimate interest in the same label to share it, except through the confusion of additional TLDs. Two parties could have a perfectly legal claim to a label that they now have to battle out in courts. A better solution would be to create a directory on top of DNS to map these real-world names to DNS domains. Put all of the trademark and IP crap you want into regulating this directory, but leave it out of DNS.
LDAP or X.500 could do this nicely, with the added benefit of allowing distinguished names to include information about the locality (thus legal jurisdiction). This limits the scope of an IP conflict to the jurisdiction in question.
If I want to load the home page for Example Widgets, I should just need to hunt for the common name "Example Widgets", pick the match that makes the most sense (assuming more than one match is found), and have my lookup return a DNS domain name. My browser would consult DNS for a SRV record associated with that domain, find a host providing HTTP services for it, and request the home page from that host. At no point should my mom ever need to be exposed to a hostname (or a URL for that matter).
My two cents, anyway.
I deeply apologize to you. My misquoted followup got all the karma points, while your correct finishing quote got none. If i could, i'd give you all of those karma points. *note, for once, i'm NOT being sarcastic*