Here's to the Crazy Ones....
Here's to the Crazy Ones....:
A group of registrars filed a new Request for Reconsideration this
week (PDF here). It addresses ICANN's many failures in openness, transparency,
legitimacy, and sound decision-making. It's well worth reading.
Registrars, it's also probably time you all got out of your work rooms
during the ICANN meetings and met some important people in the
community.
Allow me to make a few
introductions.
Registrars, I'd first like to
introduce you to the editors of ICANNWatch.... Michael
Froomkin, Jonathan Weinberg, Dave Farber, Ted Byfield, and Milton
Mueller. They started writing about the very issues raised in your
Reconsideration Request way back in 1999. Imagine that.
You also
should take a few minutes and get to know Karl Auerbach and Andy Müller-Maguhn.
They used to be on the Board. They were even elected.
Take some time to
talk about ICANN accountability with the many members of the NAIS Project and the At Large Study
Committee: Clement Dzidonu, Alan Levin, Izumi Aizu, Adam
Peake, Myungkoo Kang, Christian Ahlert, Stefaan Verhulst, Jeanette
Hofmann, Jerry Berman, Alan Davidson, Rob Courtney, Scott Harshbarger,
Don Simon, Raúl Echeberria, Carlos Afonso, Carl Bildt, Charles
Costello, Pierre Dandjinou, Esther Dyson, Olivier Iteanu, Ching-Yi Liu,
Oscar Robles, and Pindar Wong. Do you remember this statement in Ghana? Some of us will never forget it. We knew then what it would mean for this ICANN.
Take a virtual walk
through the former
DNSO's General Assembly, where disenfranchised individual
domain name registrants still worry about an unaccountable, opaque
ICANN.
Spend some time in Wellington getting to know
Committee. They're the last vestiges of a once robust At Large Membership.
And last but not least, let me
introduce you to Ed
Hasbrouck. In spite of being bullied by ICANN's counsel and
ignored by ICANN's Board, Mr. Hasbrouck has filed timely and important
requests for reconsideration and independent
review. In them, he makes allegations about ICANN's closed, non-transparent processes that are strikingly similar to the
ones you made. You two have a lot of common
interests.
You need to know all of these
people, Registrars.
See,
here's how this works: we're all connected.
You can
draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision
to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign
perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely
disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public
scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.
After you meet all these people, Registrars, you'll
find that you like their company a great deal. It's these people -- the
users -- who share your interests in an open, competitive marketplace.
They too believe in a transparent, accountable ICANN. It's time you got to know these people, maybe even helped them organize into voting GNSO constituencies or funded their travel to ICANN's farflung meetings. And when you
meet them in some hotel bar in Wellington or Marrakech or Sao Paulo, buy them a drink and raise a
toast to
the crazy ones.
As you've now discovered, they weren't so crazy after all.