ICANN Update

mpawlo writes "ICANN President and CEO Stuart Lynn has announced his intention to retire from the position with ICANN effective around March 2003. Andrew McLaughlin also announced that he will be resigning as Vice President and Chief Policy Officer effective July 1, 2002. Andy Mueller-Maguhn has posted some unofficial notes from this weekend's ICANN board retreat."

What's next for ICANN

[mpawlo]

The big question here should read "what's next?"

In my opinion the future of ICANN is very vague. ICANN come from a shady place, but the retirement of Stuart Lynn does not automatically improve ICANN. Maybe someone will pick up the thoughts presented by the At Large Study Committe [atlargestudy.org], chaired by Carl Bildt? The work presented in a final report was more or less dismissed by ICANN under its current regime, but it does contain some good food for thought (even though I personally do not agree [slashdot.org] with the committees conclusions). Also the NAIS report [naisproject.org] should not be forgotten.

I guess the main question for ICANN is what it should be designated for. In my opinion ICANN should be a tiny coordinating body and nothing else - not a government for the Internet. If ICANN wants greater power it must prove itself worthy of such extension of its mandate, primarely through improvements regarding:

• geographical diversity (no single nation should be able to gain more than 33 percent of the votes on the board)
• organizational diversity (no stakeholder should be able to, in any way, gain a majority of the votes on the board)
• accontability (some sanctions should be triggered against any board which do not work in the coherence of their assignment, the sanctions could be political as well as judicial)
• transparancy (minutes and decisions of the board of directors should be available to the public)
• organizational freedom (when appointed to the board of directors, no one board member should be an officer of the organization which appointed him or her - an optional solution is that any organizational connections are brought out in the open).
  
  Regards
  
  Mikael

who cares!

[dostick]

what is this ICANN have to do with Internet. (no answer necessary)