[ga-full] Comments@icann.org

[Mark Measday <measday@josmarian.ch>]

In rereading some of the comments on the icann.org list, I was struck by
the absence of some 50% of the messages. It may be that these were all
from Jeff, it may be that they were unretrieved by the server for some
technical reason, it may be that they have been censored for good or bad
reasons. At least their absence meant that I did not have to read them.

However, their absence, and the lacuna in information that allows one to
attack ICANN because of their absence shows interestingly that ICANN,
chronically underfunded and short-staffed, will not be able to establish
full legitimacy (whatever that is) until it has the resources necessary
to resist attacks from governments, individual activists and opponents,
and until it also functions in the neutral way of international
administrations, neither proposing nor disposing but mediating,
educating and generally doing nothing that can be attacked (itself a
subject of attack, but nothing is perfect).

Forced as I am to concentrate on Mr Sondow's able demolition of
purposive action by such as Mr Sims and the DOC, who did what they
could, and his discovery of the genius of David Maher, one wonders how
to size the problem even more now. Your conference is opened by prime
ministers, one catches the able Mr Blair teaching a youngster how to
route through altavista on tv, whilst NSI is sold to Verisign for
comparatively small change. The domain and address have become prime
signifiers, but how big are domain name and addressing problems? Big
enough to compete for airtime with the disasters and pleasures of
primetime tv? What would be the costs of an internet strike amongst
those manning the root servers? Would the strike be broken in the
(inter)national interest?

Unreal problems whilst the internet community is there to protect us
with its ideal of equal free access, service to the community and
maintenance of stability. But what will happen as the interest groups
within ICANN polarise further, as commercial forces reach deeper down
into the organisation, splitting the ideal from the real? No businessman
(I have no licence to speak for IBM here) is going to be happy with the
underpinnings of his work run by a volunteer network of idealists. As
such ICANN has a duty to see that the necessary internet mappings, qua
the NSI model are not only supported by government at a fully strategic
level, but also appropriately capitalised and remunerated. Some of this
is in place, but not all.

ICANN will presumably negotiate itself a place in the sun somewhere
between the chaotically free 'route around damage' model and the
fully-fledged treaty organisation model where nothing can really happen.
Institutions are designed to absorb the shock of technical change and
redistribute it softly. ICANN must acquire larger and more powerful
resources in order to do so. However, it is unlikely that it will be
allowed to retreat to the highly technical cooperative resource model.

MM

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