[ga] Board descisions

["Siegfried Langenbach" <svl@nrw.net>]

Mr Chairman, members of the ICANN board,

 these is an open mail expressing my concerns about the way 
ICANN's board is acting. 

 as an individual who was and is involved in these process from the 
very beginning I feel to have the right to address all of you. 

 It seems to me that, in contrary to the original intention, decisions 
are taken from board, even worse from boards excom only (or from 
staff?), without proper consultation of NC or DNSO and equivalent 
bodies.
 Yes, you have the power to do so, but you should be aware that 
on the long run you will loose credibility. Are you discussing 
matters to be decided by the board, with those which elected you ? 
Perhaps, but I never heard of that. Instead you are using the very 
old argument of time-pressure to skip proper consensus building.

 Let me give you some examples:

1.) selection of new TLD's . Without going into details : The way 
how Joe Sims directed the board, by having them voting 3 (three!!!) 
times until the board recognized how Joe wanted them to vote 
(change .web to .info), showed the interested how familiar the 
board was with the matter they were deciding. Consultation could 
have helped.

2.) Internationalizing of domainnames or multi-lingual-mess. With 
all respect, these is nationalizing not internationalizing : are you 
really convinced that toshiba will use the japanese equivalent as 
domainname internationally? It could have some sence if national 
ccTLD's would do it, but they have too much respect for the 
process to overpass IETF and other. Nobody seems to care about 
the practicably : making money is more important. Should have 
been worked on before starting a so called testbed. Most confusing 
is the fact that ICANN on one side warns on the other side 
supports VeriSign's activities.

last not least
3.) Splitting com-net-org registry / registrar. I simply refuse to 
believe that the board is willing to cancel that part of the contract.
The argument astonishing : One of the main intentions of the whole 
construct was to weaken the power of an monopolist (NSI), now we 
seem to see that it works (does it really?) we try to disrupt that 
process instead to be happy that it works as it was intended to do.
I might be worng but I could not find that the matter was brought to 
NC and DNSO...

 I recognize that I am only an individual, perhaps with strange ideas 
such as that I would prefer the slower and not so easy democratic 
way instead of the more efficient board-alone decisions, but 
remember an head without an body is not really what you want.

 Elected members should be responsible to those which elected 
them, but not only at election time.


Siegfried Langenbach
joker.com
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