Re: [ga] What is ICANN?

[Jefsey Morfin <jefsey@wanadoo.fr>]

Kent,
you cannot change that ICANN must have an owner and a market. Either
the owner is @large and the market will be large or the owner is small and
there will be competition to the ICANN.
Also, this does not prevent ICANN to have to abide by the law and to be
subject to investigation as anyone else. What people terms democracy is
in most of  the case customer quality and legality control.
Normal market and business rules applies as you ask for. To the ICANN
too. Anti Trust rules too: Either they operate as a consensus ("democracy")
or theyr are not (monopoly). Their choice and their destiny.
Jefsey


At 02:33 09/11/00, you wrote:
>On Tue, Nov 07, 2000 at 10:43:44AM -0800, Patrick Greenwell wrote:
> >
> > > 2) we have a perfectly adequate procedure for selecting a chair.
> > > moreover, if one examines the endorsements for board candidates, one
> > > notes a disturbing pattern of *large* numbers of people who have never
> > > participated in the DNSO in any way suddenly turning up to endorse
> > > candidates (for example, Jamie Love had well over 100 endorsements,
> > > most of who had never in any aspect of ICANN previously).   While this
> > > might be satisfying to supporters of Jamie Love, it illustrates
> > > perfectly that an election by the GA is terribly susceptible to
> > > capture.
> >
> > We have thousands of people in the U.S. going to the polls today that have
> > never actively participated in the U.S. government previously.
> >
> > It's called democracy Kent(well strictly speaking we operate in a
> > republic.)
> >
> > Get used to it.
>
>However, ICANN is not, and cannot be, a democracy.  You might as well
>get used to that.
>
>Instead, ICANN is a small non-profit CORPORATION.  It renders certain
>Internet services on a cost-recovery basis (but still FOR MONEY), to
>certain entities.  You could think of it as similar to one of the
>Internet Exchange companies.  (It is a non-profit to ameliorate concerns
>about anti-trust).  The entities to which ICANN markets its services are
>not "the people" -- the entities are other corporations, standards
>bodies, and so on.  The services in question are coordination of certain
>activities, acting as a central clearing house for number assignments
>and name assignments, management of the root zone (a glop of information
>shared among many of the the corporations for which ICANN provides
>service), managing a process by which names can be added to the root
>zone, etc.
>
>This coordination is a valuable service to these entities -- without it
>they certainly face heavy government regulation. (Of course, they may
>face such regulation anyway, but ICANN at least gives the hope of industry
>self-regulation.)
>
>--
>Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
>kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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