Farber, Neumann, and Weinstein Call for End to ICANN

lapse writes: "PFIR's latest policy statement calls for bringing an end to ICANN. Without assigning blame, it calls for immediate action, and suggests some possible paths forward. Let's hope that this clear statement from such a respected trio will lead to better times ahead for Internet policy management." Salon also has an interview with Karl Auerbach about his lawsuit against ICANN.

ICANN

[Ozan]

Was it ICANN that refused to introduce the highly demanded .kids and .sex TLD but instead brought up that useless .aero TLD, so that in the end the Congress discussed introducing a .kids.us SLD?
IMHO ICANN is a useless good-will-bad-act organisation.

General Comment.

[Arimus]

ICANN for all their faults are probably no worse than another body that could be appointed to fulfill the same role.

The big problem with the TLD's is that they're global as opposed to country specific and so any regulation needs to be done from that perspective -- and regardless of the rights and wrongs a central body is needed to prevent anarchy... unfortunatly given that power corrupts any replacement will probably over the years go the same way.

Re:ICANN

[Masem]

It should be noted that due to lack of response from ICANN, one of the Houses of Congress (The House, I believe) passed a bill that would force the creation of a .kids TLD, and put it into the hands of NeuStar, the group that had originally proposed it to ICANN and was previous rejected. The bill would force NeuStar to police (with a good-faith effort) sites registered under .kids to make sure they are appropriate. Whether the other House has passed this, I don't know yet.

(I dont' remember the source of the story though I think it was news.com, it was about 2 months ago, and did try to submit here to /.)

Avoid ICANN -- use OpenNIC

[Dr. Zowie]

OpenNIC is available now and is a strict superset of the ICANN namespace.

Too much power

[SiliconEntity]

PFIR's Declaration of Principles [pfir.org] is FNW's proposed guiding framework for the replacement of ICANN. Most of them sound good to me (except for restrictions on anonymity). But do we really need and want an international organization which takes on all these areas? Regulation always sounds great if you think that all the decisions are going your way. But if this powerful body starts making decisions that you don't agree with, watch out. You've created a monster.

Take a look at some of the areas covered by this Declaration: financial privacy; medical privacy; technological aid to the developing world; monitoring and tracking of internet access by governments or industry; content filtering; spam; electronic signatures; electronic voting; DOS attacks; penalties for computer crimes; restrictions on anonymity; program installation dialogs; framing of web pages; web linking; encryption; national jurisdiction; DMCA and copyright issues; patents.

Now, by and large PFIR takes reasonable positions on these issues that most of us would support. But do we really want a body that includes all these topics in its area of responsibility? That would be an enormous concentration of power! And we all know what happens to regulatory agencies which have too much power. They get corrupted and influenced by the deep pockets businesses they are supposed to be regulating.

Creating the super-powerful replacement for the ICANN that PFIR calls for would be a big mistake. We should stick to an agency which has a very limited mandate to deal with Internet infrastructure like DNS. I don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan to fix ICANN, but following PFIR's ideas would be terribly risky.

only trouble with this is...

[keithmoore]

if you shut down ICANN, you need to create something in its place that represents all of the stakeholders. there are politically powerful folks who stand to make a lot of money from ICANN failing, and leaving unregulated monopolies to control TLDs. they will use all of their influence to oppose a replacement for ICANN being formed unless it favors them. it was difficult enough to form ICANN last time around; a replacement would be even more controversial.

the folks who believe we can have stable DNS with an arbitrary number of self-appointed roots and TLDs are deluded. if that happens the most likely result is that different countries will have their own root servers that are mandated by their governments (in order to ensure name stability within each country), but there will be conflicts between countries about the meanings of some names.