[ga] Karl Auerbach's "A View From Vancouver"

[Danny Younger <dannyyounger@xxxxxxxxx>]

Karl Auerbach writes on his blog:

December 01, 2005

This is the strangest of ICANN meetings.  Several
registrars sit in the lobby making deals; other
registrars are very angry about the Verisign-ICANN
"settlement"; there are domain name owners who are
equally ticked off about the same thing; there are the
.xxx people wearing scowls, GAC people wearing deep
blue, and often shiny, suits; there are trade booths
(wo-)manned with folks who could be easily mistaken
for trade show bunnies; a small number of board
members pass through the public areas in as short of
time as they can; a larger number of board members are
unseen; and ICANN "staff" is largely invisible.

Barely anybody talks about WSIS. But there is a lot of
talk about lawsuits filed or contemplated.

There is a lot of quiet talk about how .xxx was
suddenly removed from the agenda and how a redacted
Freedom Of Information (FOIA) inquiry indicates that
the Bush Administration, in the person of Karl Rove
and at the behest of religious fundamentalist James
Dotson, caused the US Department of Commerce to
secretly instruct ICANN to deny .xxx and thus
triggering a dance of the proxies as ICANN and/or the
US government attempted to create a screen of
deniability by getting other countries to do the dirty
work.

Nobody here seems to support the ICANN-Verisign
"settlement", although nobody seems to really think
that ICANN will listen to the nearly universal
complaints beyond making a few cosmetic adjustments.

Those who actually use domain names, the community of
internet users, are nearly completely absent; the ALAC
meetings were so under-attended that they could be
squeezed into a small room at the end of a nearly
hidden corridor.  Even as UN is demonized for its
incorrectly characterized attempt to "take over the
internet", at least the formative UN Internet
Governance Forum will probably allow individuals to
obtain credentials while ICANN relegates us to a
powerless limbo.

There is talk of the splitting of the internet, not as
something to come but rather as something that has
already happened.  And that impossible as it is to
trivalize the situation when the split involves China
and other Asian nations ICANN has managed to pretend
as if nothing of significance has happened.

And in a bit of stunning Orwellian NewSpeak the United
States Federal Trade commission said that to protect
privacy it has to kill it.

Matters of IP address policy are not discussed.

Questions about the fate of the 40 TLD applications
left over from year 2000, for which ICANN collected
$2,000,000, remain unanswered while a very glitzy and
expensively printed, but otherwise vacuous and
self-congratulatory, booklet from ICANN's ombudsman
occupies space on the information tables.
 
http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000209.html




		
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