When I get some spare time I hope to throw together a DNS registration system that operates roughly as follows:
- Someone sends in a request for a name, the system checks whether it is available, and if so, generates a digitally signed certificate of ownership - consider it a kind of "bearer" bond representing ownership of the domain.
- That certificate can be transferred through a transfer agent (who would provide non-repudiation protection) but who would not necessarily be able to know what domain name the certificate represented.
- Anyone who wants to change the registration data - mainly the list of name servers - would have to present a the current copy of the certificate ("current" meaning that it is subject to a check with the a transfer agent to make sure that a pre-transfer copy isn't being used)
- Garbage collection would be performed either by no queries for the name for some defined period of time or the expiration of something like 100 years.
I figure that this system could be inexpensive (remember, the main cost of today's DNS registration system is billing and that that what one is paying for is to stop someone from doing the work to remove a name from the registration database). I figure that $25 could buy a registration for a 100 years. (ICANN's rules limit registrations - nobody knows why - to 10 years.)
The system could also be anonymous as long as the initial registration and transfer agent mechanisms self-lobotomize themselves to forget everything they knew about the identity of the parties involved.
I've suggested splitting ICANN into a number of small bodies, most of which would be essentially clerical or service bureaus with no discretionary powers.
You've got it slightly wrong - ICANN's president tried to withhold documents from members of ICANN's Board of Directors. I, being one of those directors, had to bring legal action in order to look at ICANN's financial ledgers despite clear and unambiguous language in the applicable law that directors have the "absolute right to inspect and copy" such records. I won absolutely and completely; ICANN's behaviour was declared unlawful and that ICANN compared poorly with Enron.
I am still on ICANN's board - I'm a temporary boardsquatter (although I don't hold a candle to those board members who were appointed for one year terms but who have self-extended themselves into their fifth year.)
As for ICANN and ccTLDs (country code top level domains) - one of the big issues is that ICANN is using its ability to control the delivery of IANA services - things like updating the delegation NS records - to coerce country code operators into signing contracts with ICANN. ICANN left several big ccTLDs -.de/Germany for example - at risk of failure for weeks and weeks because ICANN demanded that the.de folks sign ICANN's contract and submit to unconstrained ICANN access to personal information in.de's databases that would in all likelyhood have violated Germany's privacy laws.
Even though on the internet we may not be able to tell whether someone is a dog, ICANN is trying to set itself up as the authority to say who is and who is not a country.
ICANN could, for example, decide who gets to run the domain name.iq (Iraq) - or (considering the developing confrontation on the UN Security Council) who gets to run.fr (France),.de (Germany), or.ru (Russia).
ICANN's treats country codes as merely database entries and not as an aspect associated with a sovereign nation. The sovereign nations, of course, take a rather different view. They don't pariticularly like having their existance on the internet subject to the private whims of a secretive private organization that exists in the United States and which is largely a private arm of the US Department of Commerce.
I suggested a similar mechanism to constipate TCP connections on the IETF e-mail list last summer. The basic idea is to add some new calls to the TCP API so that an application could peek at the incoming traffic without it being acknolwledged at the TCP level. If the incoming stream were something bad, then the application could tell the TCP stack to go into a slow acknowledgement mode, thus capturing the spammer in slow-mode transfer.
I believe that there have been prior elections held on the Internet - certainly my election to the ICANN board was done on the net. And I vote in a lot of corporate elections on the net. So it's probably a matter of definition - that this is the first vote for a public office.
I am personally still quite concerned about purely electronic systems - I have been swayed by the concerns about the ability to audit the results starting from unambiguous materials. I personally believe that the better voting systems are those that start with a paper ballot, with clear markings that the human voter can confirm, that are read into the electronic equipment (which the voter is then allowed to confirm.) It's certainly not as sexy, but when software or hardware errors (intentional or accidential) creep in, at least there is something to go back to and do a believable recount.
The system described in the article seems to require one to trust that the software actually accurately counted the choices that the voter made. To me that seems like a bad choice - after reading on/. about the bugs in BMW's automobile computers, I have more than a little doubt that voting software will be much better.
The best way to stop this kind of thing is to figure out what it is sending and then to generate reports about things we are not listening to. It will make the marketing reports useless.
Ignoring the fact that Congress incorrectly conceives of of domain names as referring only to web pages, the Federal government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. It is a fair question whether the US Constitution was intended to have the power to substitute its judgement for that of parents. But I'll let that pass - there is probably plenty of room under the commerce clause to permit this.
But in addition, we have the first amendment that limits the Federal government's power to restrict expression. By labelling certain forms of expression as "acceptable" and, indirectly labelling everything else as non-acceptable, there is a chilling of expression. This labelling will tip the scales so that someone who has something (possibly something quite valuable) to say to children will not do so if there is even a remote risk of falling afoul of some kids.us censor's attitude or biases.
If a private group wants to create standards for web content - fine, it can do it. There already is a PICS system that allows content markings (from many different content reviewers) to supplement web materials and many web browsers support PICS.
In other words, the tools are there in most web browsers for concerned parents to accept only that content that has been approved by some group who's preferences are in line with those of the particular parents. We don't need congress to become a puritanical maiden aunt, or worse, to give Ashcroft the green-light to become one.
It looks like Congress is once more failing to understand what the internet is, or rather what it isn't. The world wide web is not the Internet - the net is a much larger system encompassing many more services.
A domain name references a set of records that in turn may reference computers that in turn offer an array of services, one of which may be a set of web pages.
Is congress intending to police all of those services on all of those computers that are referenced by all of those different types of records under each domain name in kids.us?
And what are they going to police? As others here have mentioned, there is no single standard for content for children.
Don't panic - and there is no conspiricy
on
Root Zone Changed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This move is "a good thing".
The J server shared a broadcast domain (i.e. it was on the same Ethernet) as the A root server. That's was clearly sub-optimal.
So this move is good in that it creates a small bit of physical separation and a bit larger amount of net-topological separation between the J and A root servers.
I hear that the old server will continue in operation for an indefinite period - so there is no need to rush out and update your "hints" file for your DNS resolvers - you can do it at your leasure and you probably won't notice even if you forget to do it.
(Even if the old server is turned off - as long as a bogus server doesn't replace it, when DNS resolvers that are using the old hints file come up and look for a root zone definition, they will simply bypass the non-responsive absent server and try the other hints.)
But there is another issue - A change in the "hints" is always a nuisance. And since we are incurring this nuisance, I wonder why we did not use this as an opportunity to redress the imbalance of root server placement - there are few root servers in Europe and Asia, and rather than simply moving the J server from one side of Herndon, Virginia to another, why wasn't it moved to Europe of Asia?
Based on certain circumstances (such as the lack of California credentials of certain persons to practice law) I raised certain questions. ICANN had certain legal reviews performed by independent counsel. Although I do not agree with what is in that review, I do agree that this report by the independt counsel contains conclusions and logic that are ought to be protected from disclosure as being essentially conversations with legal counsel. (I hope I'm coherent, I'm sitting up here on the dias at the "public comment" session [at which the public so far, after several hours has not yet had a chance to say even one word].)
I'm writing a report (to the board) that will be making a summary of things and making recommendations.
There are parts of this report that I will probably not post publicly - for instance there are some matters that legititimately are such that I do want to preserve attorney-client privilege.
But the bottom line is pretty simple - I have not seen any smoking guns, but I have seen a signifcant lack of attention to the basics of running what amounts to a small business, a failure of the board to properly oversee the activities of management/staff, a mission that is expanding its scope faster than a star going nova, and an institutional hubris that causes it to reject anything that it does not want to hear.
Sorry for being somewhat incoherent - but I'm very jet lagged and my neuron activity is being fueled mainly by sugar and caffine.
Hello everyone - I'm currently in Shanghai at the ICANN meeting and connectivity is somewhat limited so I am not able to read and respond to all the comments in this thread.
The elimination of my board seat is not new news - ICANN repudated the concept that the right to govern derives from the consent of the governed several months ago in the meeting in Accra, Ghana.
ICANN's so-called "reform" plan essentially estalblishes an oligarchy in which a small group gets to say what is best for you and me without letting us cast votes to indicate whether we agree with those decisions.
ICANN is also retrenching its committment to a board-of-directors that evades its duty to oversee the behaviour and actions of the corporation's management. (For example, one of the things that was uncovered in the course of my lawsuit was that ICANN's Audit committee never bothered to look at ICANN's records but simply accepted whatever the corporation management chose to show it. Sounds like Enron and Arthur Andersen doesn't it?)
Anyway, the end of my term is somewhat uncertain - the annual meeting - being held Dec 14 and 15 in Amsterdam, is the formal end of my term. However, there are noises in ICANN about extending terms. That has me bothered as I do not feel comfortable with this.
My favorite error message was the single word "jackpot". It issued from the version 6 Unix "diff" program on seemingly random occassions. (This was the same version of Unix that contained the comment in the kernel "You are not expected to understand this.")
ICANN's so-called "reform" plan eliminates all vestiges of public participation in ICANN's decisionmaking processes. ICANN's board will probably never again have someone who represents the users of the net; it will be dominated by people who serve corporations who make money from users of the internet or who are trying to own the products of peoples' minds.
My own term as director will end on December 15 of this year - I have no sucessor.
As for ISOC/PIR - The actual awardee, PIR, didn't even exist as of a couple of weeks ago. In other words, ICANN awarded.org to an entity that technically didn't even apply for the job.
I do not have faith in the organizational/business skills of PIR - although its board members have skills, I do not perceive that they have the kind of skills that will be needed to make sure that.org runs smoothly. In fact, my experience with the lack of skills of some of the people gives me great concern. And I do not see that there are adequate financial resources. In many respects, PIR will be little more than a thin shell around the actual operator, Afilias.
One of ICANN's jobs is to create more competition in the domain name space. Afilias has already won a piece of the top-level-domain sweepstakes - it has.info. I do not see how giving.org to PIR/Afilias does anything but increase the concentration of DNS into the hands of a few operators; quite the opposite of increasing competition.
And lest we forget - this transfer of.org is the "other shoe" of the deal privately brokered by ICANN's outside lawyer, Joe Sims, in which he gave.com to Verisign/NSI in perpetuity.
Oh yeah, I voted against this. I liked the IMS proposal best. And I won't vote to give a TLD to anybody who already has one; nor would I vote for any entity in which ICANN directors or officers have a degree of control.
By-the-way, I'm a member of ISOC and have been since before it was formed.
Don't forget Dave Kashtan (sp) and the SRI and TGV [Two Guys and a VAX] folks - they added enough Unix-layers to make it possible to avoid DCL and created a decent networking stack as well.
(TGV was also a contributing source to one of the original two Internet Toasters - yes they really existed - in 1988. The other Toaster was built by John Romkey [FTP Software] [Both Toasters used my SNMP software in their controllers.])
I made it clear that I felt that.org should remain an open TLD, that no conditions be placed on those who wish to enter new names into.org or to renew existing names. I would have preferred that this policy be written directly into the resolution. However, board appeared to agree that rather than taking the time to amend the resolution that the board express its sense that ICANN management follow that expressed policy. We will soon find out whether ICANN's management follows that expression.
The ISOC proposal didn't pass the smell test. When I looked at these proposals one of my requirements is that no present or past (within 24 months) ICANN director or officer had any role of significant influence (again within 24 months) with the applicant. Needless to say, with two ICANN directors having influential roles in ISOC, I didn't allow ISOC's to be on my own short list.
ICANN's own conflict of interest rules are not this strict. But I consider ICANN's conflict-of-interest policy to be a minimum standard (and a weak minimum at that.) My vote is looking to be cast in favor of the best applicant, not the one that passes bare minimums.
I also wonder at the concept that competition is promoted by handing.org over to a body that uses for its backroom operations a company that itself has a substantial presence (i.e. it has its own top level domain that it got from ICANN two years ago.) To my way of thinking, this is a move that concentrates control and reduces competition rather than decentralizes control and promotes competition.
As a starting point, I assert that ICANN's role should consist of two jobs and two jobs only:
- Making sure that IP addresses are assigned and allocated on a fair and equitable basis and in conformity with demands of the the packet routing systems of the Internet.
- Making sure that the ICANN/NTIA root zone is expanded on a basis that is fair and equitable to everyone, that the root zone file is properly maintained and disseminated, and that its set of root servers are operated by persons and entities that have the proper skills, resources, and obligations.
We have plenty of national legislatures and treaty organizations that can handle those who claim that their commercial rights trump other rights.
It is an open question, and one that has never been debated, much less agreed upon by those affected, whether ICANN should have an additional role to act as a consumer protection body to protect those who due to historical circumstances are locked into.com/.net/.org.
I was the one who proposed this notice period - I proposed it last September as a compromise to try to break the apparent deadlock. ICANN refused to accept it. The judge picked up my idea and has put it into the judgement and made it clear that the burden is on ICANN to demonstrate that a proposed publication is improper.
Yes, the dispute was about who gets to make the choices. But you made a common mistake when you think that the purpose of looking at the documents was to make them public. The purpose is to permit me to obtain information that would allow me to be better able to make informed decisions.
There are many who believe that an elected director is like a publicly elected official to a governmental body. There is, however, quite a difference. Much as I wish I had the freedom under the law to act like an elected official, I can't. I have suggested in various places that square peg bodies such as ICANN do not really fit into the round holes created by the corporations laws of various states.
ICANN has decreed that they can slap a label of confidentiality onto a document and then dictate the restrictions. That kind of thing effectively gives the majority the ability to keep the minority from seeing anything the majority doesn't want him/her from seeing. As the judge declared yesterday, that is contrary to public policy and California law.
The win yesterday will largely be for naught unless ICANN directors other than myself make use of the now open-channel to information that my case has provided. If those directors remain true to their sit-back-and-consume-whatever-management-feeds-the m then ICANN will remain an opaque, unresponsive, and unaccountable body.
This is one of the reasons why it is so important not to accept ICANN's recent "evolution" or "reform" attempts to eliminate elections by the public for directors on its board of directors.
I don't think that ICANN aimed the r"evolution" proposal at me. It's my sense that ICANN's staff wanted to create impenetrable walls to eliminate any chance of real oversight, leaving ICANN's staff free to build empires, spend money, and wreak havoc on the concept of the internet as a place for innovation and impose pro-trademark regulations until there isn't a breath of room left on the Internet for non-commercial activity.
There are several agreements between ICANN and the US Department of Commerce. Those agreements come due for renewal this summer. Several groups - including ICANN's own "General Assembly" have advocated that the US Dept of Commerce hold an open selection among applicants for the job now held by ICANN. You may want to discuss this matter with your Congress critters and with the folks at the US Dept of Commerce.
Sometimes it's useful for an organization to split itself up into distinct and separate parts - AT&T split into various parts - Lucent and several AT&T companies. HP split into Agilent and HP.
As a general matter I consider ICANN's r"evolution" proposal to be nothing short of a disaster for the Internet community - we lose all forms of public participatio. Accountability to the public simply evaporates.
Slashdot Mirror
When I get some spare time I hope to throw together a DNS registration system that operates roughly as follows:
- Someone sends in a request for a name, the system checks whether it is available, and if so, generates a digitally signed certificate of ownership - consider it a kind of "bearer" bond representing ownership of the domain.
- That certificate can be transferred through a transfer agent (who would provide non-repudiation protection) but who would not necessarily be able to know what domain name the certificate represented.
- Anyone who wants to change the registration data - mainly the list of name servers - would have to present a the current copy of the certificate ("current" meaning that it is subject to a check with the a transfer agent to make sure that a pre-transfer copy isn't being used)
- Garbage collection would be performed either by no queries for the name for some defined period of time or the expiration of something like 100 years.
I figure that this system could be inexpensive (remember, the main cost of today's DNS registration system is billing and that that what one is paying for is to stop someone from doing the work to remove a name from the registration database). I figure that $25 could buy a registration for a 100 years. (ICANN's rules limit registrations - nobody knows why - to 10 years.)
The system could also be anonymous as long as the initial registration and transfer agent mechanisms self-lobotomize themselves to forget everything they knew about the identity of the parties involved.
I've suggested splitting ICANN into a number of small bodies, most of which would be essentially clerical or service bureaus with no discretionary powers.
Take a look at http://www.cavebear.com/rw/apfi.htm for details.
You've got it slightly wrong - ICANN's president tried to withhold documents from members of ICANN's Board of Directors. I, being one of those directors, had to bring legal action in order to look at ICANN's financial ledgers despite clear and unambiguous language in the applicable law that directors have the "absolute right to inspect and copy" such records. I won absolutely and completely; ICANN's behaviour was declared unlawful and that ICANN compared poorly with Enron.
A HC/Auerbach_v_ICANN/
.de/Germany for example - at risk of failure for weeks and weeks because ICANN demanded that the .de folks sign ICANN's contract and submit to unconstrained ICANN access to personal information in .de's databases that would in all likelyhood have violated Germany's privacy laws.
.iq (Iraq) - or (considering the developing confrontation on the UN Security Council) who gets to run .fr (France), .de (Germany), or .ru (Russia).
The details are all online at http://www.eff.org/Infra/DNS_control/ICANN_IANA_I
I am still on ICANN's board - I'm a temporary boardsquatter (although I don't hold a candle to those board members who were appointed for one year terms but who have self-extended themselves into their fifth year.)
As for ICANN and ccTLDs (country code top level domains) - one of the big issues is that ICANN is using its ability to control the delivery of IANA services - things like updating the delegation NS records - to coerce country code operators into signing contracts with ICANN. ICANN left several big ccTLDs -
Even though on the internet we may not be able to tell whether someone is a dog, ICANN is trying to set itself up as the authority to say who is and who is not a country.
ICANN could, for example, decide who gets to run the domain name
ICANN's treats country codes as merely database entries and not as an aspect associated with a sovereign nation. The sovereign nations, of course, take a rather different view. They don't pariticularly like having their existance on the internet subject to the private whims of a secretive private organization that exists in the United States and which is largely a private arm of the US Department of Commerce.
I suggested a similar mechanism to constipate TCP connections on the IETF e-mail list last summer. The basic idea is to add some new calls to the TCP API so that an application could peek at the incoming traffic without it being acknolwledged at the TCP level. If the incoming stream were something bad, then the application could tell the TCP stack to go into a slow acknowledgement mode, thus capturing the spammer in slow-mode transfer.
g 17009.html
For more, see http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/ms
The difficulty is getting enough of these deployed so that spammers, and open relays, have a good chance of getting stuck.
I believe that there have been prior elections held on the Internet - certainly my election to the ICANN board was done on the net. And I vote in a lot of corporate elections on the net. So it's probably a matter of definition - that this is the first vote for a public office.
/. about the bugs in BMW's automobile computers, I have more than a little doubt that voting software will be much better.
I am personally still quite concerned about purely electronic systems - I have been swayed by the concerns about the ability to audit the results starting from unambiguous materials. I personally believe that the better voting systems are those that start with a paper ballot, with clear markings that the human voter can confirm, that are read into the electronic equipment (which the voter is then allowed to confirm.) It's certainly not as sexy, but when software or hardware errors (intentional or accidential) creep in, at least there is something to go back to and do a believable recount.
The system described in the article seems to require one to trust that the software actually accurately counted the choices that the voter made. To me that seems like a bad choice - after reading on
The best way to stop this kind of thing is to figure out what it is sending and then to generate reports about things we are not listening to. It will make the marketing reports useless.
Ignoring the fact that Congress incorrectly conceives of of domain names as referring only to web pages, the Federal government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. It is a fair question whether the US Constitution was intended to have the power to substitute its judgement for that of parents. But I'll let that pass - there is probably plenty of room under the commerce clause to permit this.
But in addition, we have the first amendment that limits the Federal government's power to restrict expression. By labelling certain forms of expression as "acceptable" and, indirectly labelling everything else as non-acceptable, there is a chilling of expression. This labelling will tip the scales so that someone who has something (possibly something quite valuable) to say to children will not do so if there is even a remote risk of falling afoul of some kids.us censor's attitude or biases.
If a private group wants to create standards for web content - fine, it can do it. There already is a PICS system that allows content markings (from many different content reviewers) to supplement web materials and many web browsers support PICS.
In other words, the tools are there in most web browsers for concerned parents to accept only that content that has been approved by some group who's preferences are in line with those of the particular parents. We don't need congress to become a puritanical maiden aunt, or worse, to give Ashcroft the green-light to become one.
It looks like Congress is once more failing to understand what the internet is, or rather what it isn't. The world wide web is not the Internet - the net is a much larger system encompassing many more services.
A domain name references a set of records that in turn may reference computers that in turn offer an array of services, one of which may be a set of web pages.
Is congress intending to police all of those services on all of those computers that are referenced by all of those different types of records under each domain name in kids.us?
And what are they going to police? As others here have mentioned, there is no single standard for content for children.
This move is "a good thing".
The J server shared a broadcast domain (i.e. it was on the same Ethernet) as the A root server. That's was clearly sub-optimal.
So this move is good in that it creates a small bit of physical separation and a bit larger amount of net-topological separation between the J and A root servers.
I hear that the old server will continue in operation for an indefinite period - so there is no need to rush out and update your "hints" file for your DNS resolvers - you can do it at your leasure and you probably won't notice even if you forget to do it.
(Even if the old server is turned off - as long as a bogus server doesn't replace it, when DNS resolvers that are using the old hints file come up and look for a root zone definition, they will simply bypass the non-responsive absent server and try the other hints.)
But there is another issue - A change in the "hints" is always a nuisance. And since we are incurring this nuisance, I wonder why we did not use this as an opportunity to redress the imbalance of root server placement - there are few root servers in Europe and Asia, and rather than simply moving the J server from one side of Herndon, Virginia to another, why wasn't it moved to Europe of Asia?
Based on certain circumstances (such as the lack of California credentials of certain persons to practice law) I raised certain questions. ICANN had certain legal reviews performed by independent counsel. Although I do not agree with what is in that review, I do agree that this report by the independt counsel contains conclusions and logic that are ought to be protected from disclosure as being essentially conversations with legal counsel. (I hope I'm coherent, I'm sitting up here on the dias at the "public comment" session [at which the public so far, after several hours has not yet had a chance to say even one word].)
--karl--
I'm writing a report (to the board) that will be making a summary of things and making recommendations.
There are parts of this report that I will probably not post publicly - for instance there are some matters that legititimately are such that I do want to preserve attorney-client privilege.
But the bottom line is pretty simple - I have not seen any smoking guns, but I have seen a signifcant lack of attention to the basics of running what amounts to a small business, a failure of the board to properly oversee the activities of management/staff, a mission that is expanding its scope faster than a star going nova, and an institutional hubris that causes it to reject anything that it does not want to hear.
Sorry for being somewhat incoherent - but I'm very jet lagged and my neuron activity is being fueled mainly by sugar and caffine.
I'll have more later.
--karl--
Hello everyone - I'm currently in Shanghai at the ICANN meeting and connectivity is somewhat limited so I am not able to read and respond to all the comments in this thread.
The elimination of my board seat is not new news - ICANN repudated the concept that the right to govern derives from the consent of the governed several months ago in the meeting in Accra, Ghana.
ICANN's so-called "reform" plan essentially estalblishes an oligarchy in which a small group gets to say what is best for you and me without letting us cast votes to indicate whether we agree with those decisions.
ICANN is also retrenching its committment to a board-of-directors that evades its duty to oversee the behaviour and actions of the corporation's management. (For example, one of the things that was uncovered in the course of my lawsuit was that ICANN's Audit committee never bothered to look at ICANN's records but simply accepted whatever the corporation management chose to show it. Sounds like Enron and Arthur Andersen doesn't it?)
Anyway, the end of my term is somewhat uncertain - the annual meeting - being held Dec 14 and 15 in Amsterdam, is the formal end of my term. However, there are noises in ICANN about extending terms. That has me bothered as I do not feel comfortable with this.
Regards from Shanghai,
--karl--
My favorite error message was the single word "jackpot". It issued from the version 6 Unix "diff" program on seemingly random occassions. (This was the same version of Unix that contained the comment in the kernel "You are not expected to understand this.")
ICANN's so-called "reform" plan eliminates all vestiges of public participation in ICANN's decisionmaking processes. ICANN's board will probably never again have someone who represents the users of the net; it will be dominated by people who serve corporations who make money from users of the internet or who are trying to own the products of peoples' minds.
.org to an entity that technically didn't even apply for the job.
.org runs smoothly. In fact, my experience with the lack of skills of some of the people gives me great concern. And I do not see that there are adequate financial resources. In many respects, PIR will be little more than a thin shell around the actual operator, Afilias.
.info. I do not see how giving .org to PIR/Afilias does anything but increase the concentration of DNS into the hands of a few operators; quite the opposite of increasing competition.
.org is the "other shoe" of the deal privately brokered by ICANN's outside lawyer, Joe Sims, in which he gave .com to Verisign/NSI in perpetuity.
My own term as director will end on December 15 of this year - I have no sucessor.
As for ISOC/PIR - The actual awardee, PIR, didn't even exist as of a couple of weeks ago. In other words, ICANN awarded
I do not have faith in the organizational/business skills of PIR - although its board members have skills, I do not perceive that they have the kind of skills that will be needed to make sure that
One of ICANN's jobs is to create more competition in the domain name space. Afilias has already won a piece of the top-level-domain sweepstakes - it has
And lest we forget - this transfer of
Oh yeah, I voted against this. I liked the IMS proposal best. And I won't vote to give a TLD to anybody who already has one; nor would I vote for any entity in which ICANN directors or officers have a degree of control.
By-the-way, I'm a member of ISOC and have been since before it was formed.
Don't forget Dave Kashtan (sp) and the SRI and TGV [Two Guys and a VAX] folks - they added enough Unix-layers to make it possible to avoid DCL and created a decent networking stack as well.
(TGV was also a contributing source to one of the original two Internet Toasters - yes they really existed - in 1988. The other Toaster was built by John Romkey [FTP Software] [Both Toasters used my SNMP software in their controllers.])
From a button seen sometime and somewhere in late 1980's or early 1990's:
VAX/VMS - Software for the Sixties.
And ICANN's "staff" would never try to do something behind the back the members of its Board of Directors would they?
The ISOC proposal didn't pass the smell test. When I looked at these proposals one of my requirements is that no present or past (within 24 months) ICANN director or officer had any role of significant influence (again within 24 months) with the applicant. Needless to say, with two ICANN directors having influential roles in ISOC, I didn't allow ISOC's to be on my own short list.
.org over to a body that uses for its backroom operations a company that itself has a substantial presence (i.e. it has its own top level domain that it got from ICANN two years ago.) To my way of thinking, this is a move that concentrates control and reduces competition rather than decentralizes control and promotes competition.
ICANN's own conflict of interest rules are not this strict. But I consider ICANN's conflict-of-interest policy to be a minimum standard (and a weak minimum at that.) My vote is looking to be cast in favor of the best applicant, not the one that passes bare minimums.
I also wonder at the concept that competition is promoted by handing
As a starting point, I assert that ICANN's role should consist of two jobs and two jobs only:
.com/.net/.org.
- Making sure that IP addresses are assigned and allocated on a fair and equitable basis and in conformity with demands of the the packet routing systems of the Internet.
- Making sure that the ICANN/NTIA root zone is expanded on a basis that is fair and equitable to everyone, that the root zone file is properly maintained and disseminated, and that its set of root servers are operated by persons and entities that have the proper skills, resources, and obligations.
We have plenty of national legislatures and treaty organizations that can handle those who claim that their commercial rights trump other rights.
It is an open question, and one that has never been debated, much less agreed upon by those affected, whether ICANN should have an additional role to act as a consumer protection body to protect those who due to historical circumstances are locked into
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My GPG and PGP keys and fingerprints are on net in various key
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Karl Auerbach
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I was the one who proposed this notice period - I proposed it last September as a compromise to try to break the apparent deadlock. ICANN refused to accept it. The judge picked up my idea and has put it into the judgement and made it clear that the burden is on ICANN to demonstrate that a proposed publication is improper.
Yes, the dispute was about who gets to make the choices. But you made a common mistake when you think that the purpose of looking at the documents was to make them public. The purpose is to permit me to obtain information that would allow me to be better able to make informed decisions.
e m then ICANN will remain an opaque, unresponsive, and unaccountable body.
There are many who believe that an elected director is like a publicly elected official to a governmental body. There is, however, quite a difference. Much as I wish I had the freedom under the law to act like an elected official, I can't. I have suggested in various places that square peg bodies such as ICANN do not really fit into the round holes created by the corporations laws of various states.
ICANN has decreed that they can slap a label of confidentiality onto a document and then dictate the restrictions. That kind of thing effectively gives the majority the ability to keep the minority from seeing anything the majority doesn't want him/her from seeing. As the judge declared yesterday, that is contrary to public policy and California law.
The win yesterday will largely be for naught unless ICANN directors other than myself make use of the now open-channel to information that my case has provided. If those directors remain true to their sit-back-and-consume-whatever-management-feeds-th
This is one of the reasons why it is so important not to accept ICANN's recent "evolution" or "reform" attempts to eliminate elections by the public for directors on its board of directors.
I like my laptop and it would be a pain in the bottom to have to replace it.
Besides, would the NYT know how to run Linux?
I'm generally reasonably available by e-mail to talk about this stuff. (karl@cavebear.com)
If you want some of the raw materials a good place to start is Ellen Rony's archives at http://www.domainhandbook.com Also take a look at Bret Fausett's blog - http://www.lextext.com/icann/index.html
I don't think that ICANN aimed the r"evolution" proposal at me. It's my sense that ICANN's staff wanted to create impenetrable walls to eliminate any chance of real oversight, leaving ICANN's staff free to build empires, spend money, and wreak havoc on the concept of the internet as a place for innovation and impose pro-trademark regulations until there isn't a breath of room left on the Internet for non-commercial activity.
There are several agreements between ICANN and the US Department of Commerce. Those agreements come due for renewal this summer. Several groups - including ICANN's own "General Assembly" have advocated that the US Dept of Commerce hold an open selection among applicants for the job now held by ICANN. You may want to discuss this matter with your Congress critters and with the folks at the US Dept of Commerce.
Sometimes it's useful for an organization to split itself up into distinct and separate parts - AT&T split into various parts - Lucent and several AT&T companies. HP split into Agilent and HP.
In that line of thinking, I have suggested that ICANN consider a six way split -- http://www.cavebear.com/rw/apfi.htm
As a general matter I consider ICANN's r"evolution" proposal to be nothing short of a disaster for the Internet community - we lose all forms of public participatio. Accountability to the public simply evaporates.