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Rod Beckstrom Named New ICANN CEO
netczar writes "Former US cybersecurity chief Rod Beckstrom has been selected as the new ICANN president and CEO. The decision was publicly announced during ICANN's 35th meeting in Sydney, Australia on Friday. Beckstrom will be replacing Dr. Paul Twomey, who had been serving this position since March 2003 and announced his resignation earlier this year. Beckstrom recently made headlines for his sudden resignation from his post at NCSC, criticizing the lack of funding from the NSA and its move to try to 'rule over' the NCSC."
Reader darthcamaro notes a story which quotes Beckstrom as saying, "The system on [the] whole is healthy, but also strained, and part of the strains are natural and part of the democratic process. The process may be noisy, but a stable Internet is what has come out of ICANN. This is massively complex — wouldn't run well top-down. We would not reach the same balance of decisions to propagate through the network. All of us are humbled by the process. No one is in control, so everyone is in control."
I hope he recognizes that ICANN is supposed to make sure that the domain system works and that ICANN is not to be a policeman doing trademark enforcement for the intellectual property protection industry or enforcing various governments' views about what is acceptable use of the net.
"The system on [the] whole is healthy, but also strained, and part of the strains are natural and part of the democratic process. The process may be noisy, but a stable Internet is what has come out of ICANN. This is massively complex â" wouldn't run well top-down. We would not reach the same balance of decisions to propagate through the network. All of us are humbled by the process. No one is in control, so everyone is in control."
He wins the rhetoric award.
The process may be noisy, but a stable Internet is what has come out of ICANN.
Oh yeah. I mean, where would we be without ICANN? All of that wealth created by domain tasting & cybersquatting would never have been created.
Thank you ICANN. Thank you.
s/Thank/Fuck/g
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
No one is in control, so everyone is in control.
At least the first part is true. If you watch ICANN for any length of time you realize that there are so many diametrically opposed contingencies that they have a hard time agreeing to or implementing anything of significance.
If by stable, you mean strangled, then he's right. ICANN's only functional purpose is to maintain the status quo. It's stated purpose is to hand out IP addresses, protocol number assignment, and manage the DNS. And towards that end, it's been a complete cock-up, and has only survived because it's burrowed its way into the infrastructure like a parasite and can't be easily removed now. Oh, ICANN, how you've screwed up... let us count the ways;
They've massively extended the number of TLDs to the point that most people don't even know what they all are, and plan on making the number go from "barely comprehensible" to "infinite" soon. They've thrown the RFCs right out the window when it comes to domain naming convention, and have turned domain name management into a mangled corporate turf war that costs us billions of dollars in litigation globally every year, and despite the fact that it has repeatedly pledged to serve the international community, it remains based in, and under the complete control of, the United States. And the changing of the guards -- they're replacing the existing president, Paul Twomey, a man who was very international and worked with goverments all over the world, and was exceptionally well-educated and cultured (for a CEO) with Rod Beckstrom, who's lifetime achievements have been... creating a wiki, selling off a risk management company, and authoring a book on some whack management style about starfish, spiders, and Al Queta. His education got as far as... you guessed it.. he's an MBA. So they're replacing a cultured world-wise man with some delusional middle-management type who doesn't know much about international anything.
This institution is crap on a stick, and it's set to be salted to perfection with the tears of billions of consumers who will be forced to watch the internet steam along, captained by a man who been hand-picked by the US Government to be a total patsy. We are sooo f--ked.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Well, he has more actual power now.
I may fault ICANN on many things, but I don't find myself agreeing with your characterizations of ICANN.
First off, ICANN has been glacial with regard to new top level domains - on average about one per year. That is a long way short of "barely comprehensible" and certainly not even close to "infinite soon".
As for following name conventions - ICANN has been very closely following the hostname conventions and the internationalized name rules established by the IETF. Perhaps the only thing that ICANN has done that differs is that ICANN has been questioning whether single letter top level domains ought to be allocated.
As for Beckstrom - he is unknown to me, but I do fear that his "no central point of control" point may carry him too far into believing that institutions such as ICANN don't need someone firmly in charge and willing to say "no" to expansion and mission creep.
A person widely known and well-respected by and a frequent contributer to the Slashdot community wins an important position on the ruling body of the internet and all you can do is bitch?
What's that? Oh. Not Ray Beckerman? Never mind.
Steve
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
They could put a inanimate carbon rod in charge of ICANN and it couldn't do much worse than the current trajectory. ICANN is dead set on unleashing possibly one of the worst ideas in the history of the internet - gTLDs for sale - and nobody is doing shit to stop it. If you thought ICANN was a tremendous waste of space, resources, and human lives, just wait till you see what they won't do for you next year when the real shit hits the fan (and the new CEO starts raking in even more money).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Using the "NSA" and "democratic process" in the same article is blasphemy. I don't mind being watched, but in a real democracy transparency goes both ways. As such I won't hold my breath for ICANN't.
Hope is the currency of fools
I've been reading a number of other posts in this thread about how ICANN is a failure because it operates primarily in the interests of American corporations.
The thing to understand, however, is that everyone is raped by American corporations. Absolutely everyone. It is inevitable, and totally unavoidable. They chip away, tirelessly, day and night, and eventually they get in and dominate things, and because they are so relentless, there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it.
So get rid of ICANN if you want; create a new oversight group, and put it under the jurisdiction of whichever government you want. It doesn't matter how you do it; within six months, the new organisation will again be routinely sodomised by American corporations.
The Internet rightfully should never have been allowed to become commercial in the first place; it should have remained under the jurisdiction of the universities, the scientists, and the intellectuals, where it belongs.
Corporations, and the insects who run them, are a scourge, that needs to be violently rendered extinct.