ICANN Updates

ICANN is meeting in Bucharest next week, which means they're floating all their usual smoky-room schemes just prior to the meeting. leto writes "The three RIR's, ARIN, APNIC and RIPE-NCC have just released a joint statement that basically tells ICANN that their Evolution and Reform plan is unacceptable, and tells ICANN to go play elsewhere, and leave the address space in the hands of the well working bodies." An interesting mailing list debate has been going on between ICANN's critics and ICANN's extremely well-paid and extremely sleazy attorney: critic, attorney (sleazy!), critic again, another critic, attorney again, critic's response, still other critics. And finally, note that the .org TLD is up for bids - the New York Times has a story, Newsforge has another.

Re:What needs to happen...

[mtthws]

It may not be the mbest solution, but it seems like the most fair way to do a vote would be the owner of every domain name gets one vote. Before an election every domain owner gets some type of id number emailed to them, and they use that to vote. Granted people with more domain names would get more votes, but there does not realy seem like there is a "good" way to do this, and this seems to be the most fair way to me. Also since the people with more domain names are hopefully contributing more to the web by increasing the amount of content on the web with more web sites, they should get a little more control becouse they are hopefully contributing more. The same argument also works for the people who do own domain names. Every single election system has some type of prereq to vote, in the us it is citizenship and age, on the net it is owning a part of the net, a domain name.

Oh, Joy.

[osgeek]

ICANN's extremely well-paid and extremely sleazy attorney

I credit the Slashdot editors for aggregating most of the topics that I find interesting -- however, I don't think that I'm going to be accusing them of jounalistic integrity any time soon.

ICANN: Why is there no seperation of powers?

[jemele]

Most systems that involve policy making bodies and implementation bodies seperate the two logically to allow some checks and balances - that is, in a system of governing, it makes no sense to consolidate the law makers and the law enforcers. But, from their own 'Mission and Core Values statement':

ICANN's Mission lies in the nexus between ICANN's technical coordination role, its operational role, and its policy role [icann.org]

Why isn't ICANN structured this way? How can they be a group that decides policy AND a group that implements policy? Doesn't this create an room for conflict of interest that ultimately leads to abuse of the system?