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Interview with ICANN's Karl Auerbach 98

Posted by timothy from the look-but-don't-touch dept.
katie writes "Great interview! ICANN, the Infofascist organization which rules the Internet with more effective power than any government, was told yesterday to 'fess up and show its knickers to reform-minded Board member Karl Auerbach. DesktopLinux.com Contributing Editor Malcolm Dean interviewed Auerbach at the Los Angeles Superior Court ..."
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Interview with ICANN's Karl Auerbach More

Interview with ICANN's Karl Auerbach

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  • Infofascist organization

    gee just think how many places this can be used....

  • DMCA Virus (Envcrypted Virus) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @09:04PM (#3983436)
    Nobody would be allowed to decrypt an encrypted virus. If a Anti Virus Company writes software to protect against it or says how to protect against such a virus, it would violate DMCA. This would be the virus's ultimate protection against drugs.
    • Nobody would be allowed to decrypt an encrypted virus. If a Anti Virus Company writes software to protect against it or says how to protect against such a virus, it would violate DMCA.

      And the second you stepped forward to assert your copyright, you'd get arrested.

      Even if you want to argue that by unleashing your virus, you are "self-publishing" your code and that its propogation is violating your copyright, anti-viral programs aren't circumventing a copyright protection, they are doing the opposite-- keeping your "original work" from being "pirated".

      W

  • Just a bit biased (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @09:05PM (#3983442) Homepage Journal
    OK, while I agree with the CONTENT of the article, the way it was written was just a bit biased. I get very nervous when folks start throwing around words like "infofascism" - while it may sound good, and it may have a grain of truth, it is a word designed to appeal to the emotions, not to truth - a word designed to push emotional buttons and short-circuit rational thought.

    An otherwised unbiased and uninformed person will be inflamed by the article, one way or the other. But I fear that most people have a contrarian streak in them, and that most people's gut reaction to this article will be to dismiss it, since it is so blatently biased.

    • Amen to that. this was telling as well:

      DEAN: Why has ICANN delayed for months your access to its official documents?

      AUERBACH: It's obvious from their filings that they don't like me. They can't ground their fear in my votes, because I've voted with the majority 60% of the time. If they had given me the information when I requested it, the results of most of these votes would have been the same.

      The "They don't like me" line is unnecessary. It's also rather childish. I applaud this man for sticking to his guns and using the system, but this takes credence away from what he is trying to do. Leave the childish remarks out, comepletely unnecessary.

      • Honesty (Score:3, Insightful)

        by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 )
        Maybe it is a bit of honesty. He may have been saying that because he has ticked them off and that may have made the ICANN management more resistant to his requests than another person in the same position.

      • It's childish if someone doesn't like you, and you communicate that fact?

        You have some seriously f'ed up logic.
      • But he's 100% correct. They don't like him. Esther Dyson admits to it here [salon.com]:
        I probably should be very careful not to get messed up in a lawsuit. It's very unfortunate, and I would say both sides are to blame that Karl Auerbach cannot get along with them.
        The board despises him, and they won't listen to his good ideas, and he has some. And so he's not productive. Look at me. The American at-large community despises me but I think I'm doing more good for At Large by working with ICANN than I would if I were out there simply criticizing them, not trying to improve them.
        (my emphasis)

        I recommend the interview to anyone who thinks that ICANN has a shred of legitimacy; Dyson - presumably without realising it - pretty much confirms that it's little more than a cliquish power-hungry quango with little or no redeeming features.

    • If the definition of fascisim is: "total, unaccountable control of an collective entity" then I think his description is pretty darn accurate.

  • As I told U.S. Senators recently, ICANN can pass a law that supersedes any law they can pass.

    This is bad. VERY bad.

    And probably a wet dream for Hillary Rosen, but that's beside the point.
    • Is that necessarily a bad thing? Isn't the whole point of ICANN that they aren't controlled by a government? If they had to be accountable to the U.S. government, then why not to every country's governemnt? And then what would we have?
    • And it is utterly ridiculous. Congress can outlaw any ICANN policy at any time (modulo Constitutional restrictions), and put enough pressure on the California-incorporated ICANN and on U.S.-based registries, registrars, ISPs, and other groups to make it stick.

  • My take ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <be.eclec@tk> on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @09:10PM (#3983473) Homepage Journal
    Basically I see it like this, Karl Auerbach is a pain in the ass. And a good pain in the ass. He knows his way around the governing procedures that ICANN holds sacred and pisses on the "unwritten" rules of procedure whenever he feels like it. ICANN has a thorn that they placed in their own side, by opening elections they basically shot themselves in the foot. Now they're trying to hold on to what they once had before democracy came over and sideswiped them completely into submission. There seems to be some sort of thought that voting holds no power, if you think that, then you are just as much to blame as the rest.

    While he may be leaving in November, do you really think that he will just go into submissive hiding? Hell no he won't, he'll go on to be one of the biggest advocates against ICANN, you can count on it.

    Is this some type of new trend? Hell no it's not, basically it's a revolution, every now and then there needs to be someone to stir the pot up. It WILL happen in congress, it is ALWAYS happening in the supreme court, and well it's a little harder in the presidency, but has happened.

    As usual, with anything ICANN related, it's time to plug OpenNIC [unrated.net] again. Tired of ICANN, don't support them ... duh :-)

    • I wish it were that simple. ICANN has big money and politics behind them. They will:

      1) dump several gigabytes of electronic information on him - good luck finding the needle in the haystack.
      2) mark tons of stuff confidential.

      He doesn't have the time to build a case based on the interesting stuff, he's off the board real soon now. He can't leak the interesting stuff he finds -- 10 days = 6 months with holidays, court delays, and various appeals.

      So, at best he finds some minor graft (e.g. those lovely ICANN vacations and travel expenses,) and some serious evil (a few hundred million $ to cronies for non-competitive bids to "administer the net.") He can't copy the evidence, and loses his right as a board-member to pursue within a few months. Even if he finds evidence, ICANN will appeal it as confidential, run out the clock, and claim he has no standing to continue. He's screwed, we're screwed.
      • He doesn't have the time to build a case based on the interesting stuff, he's off the board real soon now. He can't leak the interesting stuff he finds -- 10 days = 6 months with holidays, court delays, and various appeals.
        Perhaps I misinterpreted the 10 day thing. I would think the 10 day limit works against ICANN, not Auerbach. He can decide to publish each item, and for the "confidential" marked ones, ICANN has only 10 days to get an injunction. If there are delays, then it gets published. No?

    • Re:My take ... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Danse ( 1026 )

      ICANN has a thorn that they placed in their own side, by opening elections they basically shot themselves in the foot.

      ICANN probably wouldn't exist in its current form if it hadn't promised up front to hold elections. They stalled for quite a while and cut the number of elected seats in half, but they had to at least hold an election eventually. Now that they've done it, they say it didn't work and that they aren't going to do it anymore. I think that is the signal to get rid of ICANN. If it can't work democratically, then it shouldn't exist. I think it has become glaringly obvious that what is needed more than anything today is transparency. We've seen the effects of secrecy and corruption. This corporation is administering the Internet for crying out loud! You'd think we could get a little democracy, transparency, and accountability injected into that at least!

    • What openNIC needs to take off is for some very popular site to offer some of its content only to OpenNIC users. Does anyone know if a pop up dialog could be used to reset the users settings? This would be an easy way for the browsing visitor to switch over, and after that they would be ready to visit any sites using OpenNic addresses. Another way would be if Macromedia, Real, or someone similarly pervasive could somehow bundle the process into Flash, Realplayer, etc.
  • "Into the breach dove the politicians, never a crowd intimidated by their lack of suitability for the task. They quickly recognized familiar features: The problem is international, requires human management, and has the potential for political manipulation. Call in the bureaucratic clowns."

  • John Gilmore's Salon Interview (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wfrp01 ( 82831 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @09:26PM (#3983533) Journal
    John presents his take on things [salon.com] in an recent Salon interview.

    And what's SAIC [saic.com] up to these days (read John's interview)? Homeland security. They're on our side (cough).

  • For the love of TCP/IP... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @09:26PM (#3983535) Homepage Journal
    Learn what the hell words mean.

    "The result was the ideal fascist solution." No, actually, it wasn't. "A money machine for insiders" is many things, but that's not fascism.

    Fascism is a particular political philosophy, not an organization whose politics you don't like. It places the rights and interests of the state above the rights and interests of the individual, because of a belief that the importance of the state to its citizens supercedes the importance of individual members.

    I'm sure there are many, many problems with ICANN that deserve the attention that Mr. Auerbach has given them, and this is not at all meant to detract from that. Using words to insult, rather than carry meaning, bothers me no matter who the hell it comes from.

    Don't toss around words without knowing what they refer to [freeyellow.com].

  • When I read interviews like this one, I don't how to react. I try to get more information, but it is so difficult to obtain unbiased facts.

    I feel like I have been programmed by society to view comments like Auerbach's as "crazy conspiracy theory talk." And when I try to find information to support Auerbach, I do find some relevant and informative material, but most of it reminds me of Bush's "we must get the evil ones" speeches due to its uninformed and clearly biased nature.

    I guess I'm trying to ask, "How worried should I be?" And can anybody point me to a source of informationt that cites references and tries to use facts only with no opinions?
    • One interesting source of information is IcannWatch [icannwatch.org].

      As far as objective sources of information, that is what Auerbach is fighting to get access to. As long as ICANN's records are kept secret, we will never know what is going on.

    • Re:Conspiracy theory or desperate truth? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30, 2002 @10:21PM (#3983755)
      Auerbach is really quite reasonable, it is just the intro that makes it kind of hard to determine. Listen to what Auerbach is saying, it's very simple. Here is the froth-free version of the article intro: ICANN is an organization that is in charge of assigning domain name registrations, and in charge of assigning out IP blocks (IPs are kind of the internet equivilent of phone numbers, every computer on the internet is supposed to have one. ICANN gives ISPs blocks of these numbers that are "theirs", and the ISPs sell those numbers to others. If you knew that much already, then sorry :))

      Auerbach is simply saying, this group, ICANN, is made up of some totally randomly picked individuals who have no oversight, by anyone. They are not accountable to voters or anyone else. This used to be a U.S. government agency, but the U.S. government set it free so that it could be truly international. They did this with the understanding ICANN would continue to serve the good of the public.

      Auerbach is not saying the current people running it are nazis or anything (though he's saying he isn't very fond of them); he's just saying this is a recipe for disaster. He's saying that something this important to the world economy, there should be some kind of oversight to it. People should be able to see what it's doing. Having it totally subject to 17 arbitrary people without governments or anyone watching over their shoulders to make sure they don't become corrupt is just a bad idea. Power corrupts.

      The current fight is over this: Auerbach wants to see the accounting books of ICANN. He wants this because in the first (and last, because the board didn't like the fact that the director turned out to be anything other than a figurehead) general public election. Auerbach was voted director of ICANN. By the bylaws of the group, the director has the right to unrestricted access to the accounting books at any time. The board, however, says that the "policy" is that the director can only see the books with lots of restrictions. But the bylaws say otherwise, and the bylaws are apparently legally binding, at least according to the judge this morning.

      Why does Auerbach want to see the books? What does he think is there? He doesn't know. He doesn't care. He just thinks that that should be public information, because if ICANN is allowed to hide how their finances work forever, someday , if not now, this could lead to the system being very easily abused because no one is there to stop abuses.

      Auerbach isn't saying there's some conspiracy here. He's saying the public has a right to know what this group of people is doing, and the ICANN board is saying "no, you don't have a right to anything, we don't want you to look at it". They can't really justify this. Basically the people running ICANN aren't used to running nonprofits, they're used to running businesses. So they are trying to run it like a business, assuming letting your competitors and such know wha'ts going on inside is bad, and totally forgetting they're a nonprofit.

      The question shouldn't be "why does auerbach care what's going on?" the question should be "on whose authority do the ICANN people claim to have the right to dictate how the internet grows? how do they justify the fact they hold the temporal power that has been given to them?"
      • Generally I agree with the above, but note that IANA, ICANN's predecessor, was never a US Government agency. It was essentially Jon Postel, working within the limits of the RFCs as laid down by the IETF, and had no articles of incorporation of any (legal) form. To the best of my knowledge, legally, it didn't exist, its unwritten constitution being derived from consensus.

        ICANN was initially a proposal of Postel as something he could hand the ropes to. He died, the governments got involved, and the current ICANN was the result.

    • Re:Conspiracy theory or desperate truth? (Score:5, Informative)

      by karl.auerbach ( 157250 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2002 @12:37AM (#3984210) Homepage
      I'm generally reasonably available by e-mail to talk about this stuff. (karl@cavebear.com)

      If you want some of the raw materials a good place to start is Ellen Rony's archives at http://www.domainhandbook.com [domainhandbook.com] Also take a look at Bret Fausett's blog - http://www.lextext.com/icann/index.html [lextext.com]
      • I'm generally reasonably available by e-mail to talk about this stuff. (karl@cavebear.com)

        I think claims like this should be signed with a PGP signature or some other way to verify the authenticity of the claim.

        For all I know, it could be a bogus email address to a SPAM address harvester or a valid link to the real email address of someone NOT soliciting mail. Yeah, I know, I'm paranoid.

        [does the /. rendering of a post mess up a pgp-signed block of text??]

        • -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
          Hash: SHA1

          This is a test. Let's see how badly this gets mangled.
          -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
          Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
          Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

          iD8DBQE9SBKOyId/WkJHMgQRAv06AKDBYn2qMeyVj1jTof9Dh6 XM0nPJ+QCg1+e2
          uncXpHrVvHkUSUvNWFoHuLg=
          =qjND
          -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
          • FYI, looks good to me.
          • In my test, Slashdot horribly manged my signature with linebreaks and spaces. But when I pasted it back into a file and check the sig, it was good. I guess that's one of the kinds of problems that "ascii armor" was invented to solve.

            The catch is that the actual message itself (the part before the signature), cannot survive any mangling. Insert a space into that anywhere, and the sig is deemed invalid.

            Some possible solutions:

            1. Format messages very carefully, with knowledge of how Slashdot can mangle them, so that you avoid mangling
            2. Ascii-armor the message itself. The downside to this is that people would have to use a separate tool (GPG,PGP,or something else?) to unarmor the message and read it. That would be inconvenient for people who just want to read without verifying signatures.
            3. Perhaps Slashdot could be modified to store comments without any formatting changes, and defer formatting until they are displayed? The seemingly-gratuitous formatting could be done during normal comment displays, but with an option for people to download a comment in its unaltered for, if they desire. The only downside I see to this is that it would increase machine load, since the mangler would be invoked every time a comment is displayed, instead of just once, when it is submitted.
            Thoughts?
            • Hey, I've got it.

              [Potentially] store the post twice. Hard disk space is dirt cheap these days. One copy mangled, another copy unmangled. Mangled version gets served normally, without extra load on server. Let people download the unmangled version if they wish.

              Improvement: only store the unmangled version, if the author checks-off something at the time of posting. Or maybe Slashdot could scan the post and see if it contains PGP blocks, and only store an unmangled version when that is the case.

              This would work very well, IMHO.

        • -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
          Hash: SHA1

          Yes, it is me.

          My GPG and PGP keys and fingerprints are on net in various key
          libraries as well as my website at
          http://www.cavebear.com/public_keys.htm

          --karl--
          Karl Auerbach
          -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
          Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
          Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

          iD8DBQE9SGPS1vJeUn0EFVoRAsH4AJ9WZc1999n8Pe3wKE3L rh mp0ZNIqQCfdcnH
          u0Hl6KVsG4Hg/jVg/M4R5xY=
          =RWW9
          - ----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
  • For a funny, but true (except for the optimisitc predictions) anti-ICANN movies, see The Official ICANN Movie [paradigm.nu].
  • it may or may not be exactly the fFull reasoning. but here's an answer to your radio signal loss.

    the problem was fFirst realized to major extent in places like atlanta, when commercially viable radio stations were starting to broadcast in sizeable areas. the radio station would put the the big radio antenna on top of a very tall building, and churn out a fFew billion hertz of radio waves. the idea was simple. make a big splash, cover as much area as possible. this was before stations really caught on to media markets in every town. so if atlanta's radio station could pump out a signal which could be heard as fFar away as chattanooga or chicago, well hooray!

    but here's the problem. image taking a water hose, and point it straight up into the air.if the pressure is strong enough, it will spurt way up, and create a giant arc back down to the ground. if the pressure is really strong and the hose is exactly straight up and down and you have no wind (conditions which closer resemble a radio signal) then almost no water will land at the source of origin. it will have fFlown so high and created such a massive arc, the source itselfd remains dry.

    so back to our radio signal. the signal is pouring out - over your head, blasting out across the land until it reaches somewhere the signal can spread out and fFall down on receving devices. if you turn the radio transmission girth down (like turning down the water pressure on our hose), you can not only target your specific commercial audience in one town, but you can actually hear the signal at all. which is what they fFound in major cities.

    (does that make sense? i wish i had a dry erase board ... oh nevermind)
    • another example (which isnt as good, but the idea may help) is a weather radar. it always shows heavy ground cover right around the radar itself, but can see a rain cloud on the other side of the state. in short, the equipment was not configured to reach you, so close by.

      so. to answer your question, you cant get the signal because you are to close.
    • What the fFsck?
  • Communism has killed more people than fascism.

    I stopped reading after he started his populist, simplistic "big companies are bad" shit.
    • I stopped reading after he started his populist, simplistic "big companies are bad" shit.

      They generally are bad for the simple reason that the people in the company with power become more and more removed from the customers' needs and problems. It's hard to avoid but it's nice if they at least try.

      TWW

    • And when did ICANN become a big corperation? ICANN is supposed to be the 'legal authority' of the internet, a place to set policies about IP assignment and other random crap that Jon Postal used to do. While 99% of the net works fine randomly, 1% of it needs to follow some set rules, and these rules need to be able to change, and that's what ICANN is for. It's not a fucking 'company'.

      And, um...regardless of whether or not you think it should be allowed to do whatever it wants, this guy was elected director of it, and has the perfect right to complain when he can't get access that the by-laws say he should.

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