First Thoughts On ICANN's Wellington, NZ, Meeting
First Thoughts On ICANN's Wellington, NZ, Meeting:
ICANN has begun a meeting in Wellington, New Zealand.
Nice place New Zealand. But remote. Has anyone noticed how many
years it has been since ICANN has had a meeting in the place where it has its
legal home, California? Perhaps ICANN is afraid. And perhaps ICANN
should be afraid, very afraid - I've spoken to people in the California
government and they are aware of ICANN and its ill and exclusionary behavior
towards citizens.
As a prelude to the meeting both Ross Rader and Susan Crawford wrote
interesting notes on their blogs. I'll take a moment and respond those
those.
Ross
suggested that ICANN's GNSO is not conflicted because it represents all
stakeholders. I don't agree. ICANN's GNSO, and ICANN generally,
exclude the largest group of internet stakeholders - the community of internet
users. The interest of that group, measured in terms of the cumulative
financial impact and in the number of people affected, the "stake" of
this community far outweighs that of the members of the GNSO by several orders
of magnitude.
But it is a well accepted principle of nearly every legal system on the
planet that collections of incumbent business interests ought not to have the
life-and-death power over the attempts of others to enter the marketplace.
The idea that incumbents can limit the entry of new players went out with the
Guild system. Yet is that not what ICANN has become, a Guild, a place in
which incumbent businesses (and a few other selected industrial bystanders, such
as the intellectual property industry) have been given the power to be
gatekeepers who permit or deny new entrepreneurs, new ideas, and new products?
And is that not also "regulation" in its worst and most
heavy-handed sense?
Ross suggests that ICANN is not a regulator. But if we examine the
aspects of domain name life upon which ICANN imposes mandatory conditions we see
that ICANN has established a deeply intrusive and deeply controlling system of
regulation. Among the things that ICANN imposes are minimal registry
prices, astronomically high hurdles for new registry proposals to overcome,
terms and conditions in registry and registrar contracts and users who acquire
domain names, a dispute policy amounting to supra-national law of
trademark-over-domain-name, a WHOIS policy that requires registrars and
registries to publish their customer lists and that also is the largest and
worst privacy abuse on the internet.
If that's not regulation then I don't know what regulation is.
Susan
suggested that from the feedback she has received that there is pent-up
demand for perhaps a dozen or less new Top-Level-Domains. I, and others,
tend to feel that that number understates the actual demand by at least several
thousand-fold.
An easy test would be for ICANN to put up on its website, in a place that
people can actually find on its website, a request for statements of interest in
obtaining a TLD. That web page should make it clear that ICANN is asking
for those who would be interested under the following conditions:
- Minimal application fee ($25 US) and no yearly tithes to ICANN
- The only review will be to ask whether the applicant will abide by
published internet technical standards. - No requirement to adhere to existing ICANN contractual structures, publish
customer lists (WHOIS), mandate a UDRP, or use a registry-registrar business
model.
Yup, that's it - those three conditions. The first condition should
cover ICANN's costs of checking the second condition and of mechanically adding
the TLD to the root zone file. (ICANN could charge a reasonable yearly maintenance
fee - perhaps $100 - for updates to the name server records.) The second
condition is really the only one necessary to protect the technical stability of
the internet - see the new ICANN/Verisign contract for one definition of what
"stability" means. And the third condition is there to indicate
that the abusive behaviors of ICANN in the past should be discounted when making
these statements of interest.
Under those conditions I'd
put up my hand for my .ewe registry.
Now, back to the ICANN meeting itself.
Paul Twomey opened a hornet's nest of accumulated
anger when he suggested that his discussion be off the record.
Paul: ICANN's began its life in secrecy with secret agreements made by
ICANN's founder, Joe Sims. The fact of those agreements is well known -
Sims once told me of their existence during a phone call when he told me that
changes in the yet-to-be-formed ICANN were impossible because such changes would
contravene those agreements. Then very soon after ICANN formed certain
ICANN board members and officers adopted a stance right out of Orwell's Animal
Farm - that in order to be "open" ICANN's board had to meet in
secret.
Then ICANN went on through the years in that mode, secrecy piled on top of
secrecy, closed meetings on top of closed meetings.
And then I was elected to ICANN's Board of Directors. ICANN felt that
it should operate in secret even against its own Board of Directors! I
tried to exercise my "absolute right" under the Law to take a look at
ICANN's financials. ICANN had the audacity to try to deny me that
right.
I had to sue. I won, ICANN lost. You would think after the disastrous
advice that ICANN's law firm gave it on that occassion, that ICANN might
reconsider its choice of law firms. When I left the board I recommended
(see Section 4.12 of Appendix B of http://www.cavebear.com/rw/senate-july-31-2003.htm)
that ICANN make a deep review and potentially significantly reform its
relationship with Jones-Day.)
Yet, apparently ICANN still does not easily open its books or its affairs to
directors. And most of the directors have been wimps, not asking question
much less requiring answers, not demanding that staff do what staff ought to
do. ICANN directors generally treat their jobs on the ICANN Board of
Directors as some sort of distant honorific in which the directors merely make
polite nudging noises rather than actually using their plenary power and
obligatory authority to actually direct
the affairs of ICANN by making informed and independent decisions.
In addition, apparently, ICANN
has not published any financial statements on its web pages for several years
- I wonder whether ICANN has made its mandatory filings of its IRS form 990, a
document that tax-exempt entities such as ICANN are required to make visible to
the public else be subject to a daily accumulating fine.
Stepping over to another topic - apparently TLD registries are trying to make
a land-grab by claiming that they have the exclusive rights to the
internationalized versions of their strings. What an absurd idea.
How greedy can these TLD registries get? Haven't they ever read the Grimms'
tale of The Fisherman
and His Wife?
Tell me this: What does "com" mean? It is not a word in
English. It has been used as shorthand for "communications" (as
in 3COM) or "commercial". What is the internationalized version
of a non-word or acronym?
By-the-way, I own the domain name "cie.com" which, if viewed
in French could be construed to mean the same as "com.com".