New ICANN Head Promises Greater Openness

PrideOfPomona writes "At ZDNet(UK),"The Internet addressing authority has been criticised as secretive, but new president Paul Twomey says the organisation is to turn over a new leaf"." I suppose it's possible that Twomey will be better.

Bah...

[Hank Reardon]

I'll believe it when I see it.

Remit

[blh]

It seems like this chap is inheriting some challenging budget [infoworld.com] problems, and will need reasonably serious diplomatic skills to sort out the legacy of Stuart Lynn (ad-hoc member controversy) and negotiations over non-roman letter domain names [zdnet.co.uk].

More Openness?

[GeorgeH]

That's a pretty easy promise, it's like saying that Windows isn't as buggy as Slashdot makes it out to be. Set your baseline low enough and you can make pretty much any claim.

Only a few post?

[manifestcommunisto]

Why so few discussion posts for this article??? Is there something wrong with ./ or are all the posters busy writing for thw War on Iraq articles? This is ./ after all, not a politics site.

Re:Only a few post?

[Tril]

It doesn't appear on the main page. I guess this one is a YRO special article, not for the masses. I often browse /. using Search with a blank search, because more articles appear. I don't know if it's a bug or a feature.

Paul - Interesting Challenge

[RedPhoenix]

I've known Paul for a couple of years now. He's a nice enough guy. He's had plenty of political experience as head of Australias 'National Office for the Information Economy' (An IT related government department in Australia), and has also gained some experience by migrating into the commercial world.

ICANN is a pretty big challenge, and it'll be interesting to see how he goes.. but he's certainly got a fair bit of experience behind him that will probably assist him in the role.

Red.

My two favourite quotes here:

[SolemnDragon]

Formerly there was a process of online voting, but in the view of the committee it probably hadn't worked as well as it could have," said Twomey. He said the voting process was very vulnerable to "branch stacking", and pointed out that in North America and Europe the number of people who voted was in the thousands, while in South East Asia the number of votes was in the millions.

what we're talking about here is the voting for the board members, which there is to my mind no easy solution for. It's one of those difficult questions: who gets to control the Internet? Nobody wants it to be one person or one organisation- but without some form of organisation, we end up with, well... ok. so we end up with pretty much what we've got now, only without anyone making people play at least somewhere NEAR the same playing field. And how do you assure equal representation among a huge body of people? (I recommend fairvote [fairvote.org] as a place to start thinking about this one... The internet is one place where how we, as a people overall, decide to run things is going to have long-term ramifications, and i give ICANN credit for at least being aware of that fact.

ICANN will now rely more heavily on the At-Large Advisory Committee, which is charged with talking to other Internet organisations and individual users about how ICANN interacts with them.

Which to me, translates into (i could be wrong) : ICANN learns that it needs to play well with others.

It's a start.