RE: what ICANN is up to

["Antony Van Couvering" <avc@interport.net>]

Gordon,

Thanks for your research.  The whole thing is a quagmire that could be
avoided if ICANN simply behaved like they were operating in a free
society -- i.e., living up to their duty to be transparent.  What do I or
anyone else care if certain board members are too thin-skinned to wade
through hundreds of messages that are abusive or inane?   If you can't take
the heat...

The question has to be, who on earth picked such ignorant board members, who
didn't know what they were getting into.  Or, who didn't warn them?  Here we
see that a committment to open processes is not just lip service to a silly
ideal, it is a practical necessity.  If these Board members had been
selected with some input from people in the trenches, these faint-hearted
types would have been weeded out.

The U.S. Government is to blame for arrogating to itself the power to say
what's going to happen, globally, on the Internet.  It torpedoed IANA to
replace it with an organization that has far less (or no) respect among its
natural constituencies.  It has based this power upon dubious legal grounds
(as you among others have shown).  It has made the principle of government
interference a reality while mouthing a pleasant line about the "private
sector."  Result?  Just about everything substantive has not only to pass
through Congressional subcommittees who worry whether things "will sell on
Main Street" (Chip Pickering), but also through the tender clutches of
Brussels bureaucracies  -- and surely if the U.S. and European governments
have a say, why not those of Japan, Australia, Russia, China, and so on.
Disaster.

Possibly there is no legal basis for the Internet at all.  That's why I'm
opposed to rejecting ICANN's authority on those grounds.  Something that
looks *like* ICANN will have to come into existence.  Having seen the
gTLD-MoU eviscerated, with the result that we have something that looks a
lot like the POC, with the unwelcome addition of U.S. Gov't veto power and
European gov't meddling rights, I really don't want to start the whole thing
over -- it could get a lot worse.  Imagine a UN conference in 3 years with a
bunch of government-appointed experts running the show.  This could end up
looking like GATT.

But the ICANN board does have to "get it" that open processes, public
meetings, etc., are just part of the rules, they are not optional.  They
should look at the gTLD-MoU as an object lesson in what will happen if they
don't.  The involvement of the US gov't means that the process is now
political, and if there's one thing politicians don't like, it's a group of
unpopular eggheads.

Antony