Re: [ga] Court oversight
Veni Markovski wrote: every legal system has its own pecularities. In the US anyone can sue anyone on anything. In any modern system in any country one would hope that anyone who believes that they have been harmed can seek an impartial examination of their claim. Do you really believe, as your comment suggests, that we want a world in which people can be harmed or constrained but not have recourse to impartial processes to ask why and request a remedy? I don't think you believe that and are, instead, parroting a widely held view of the degree, perhaps an excessive degree, to which people in the US avail themselves of these processes. But that's neither here nor there: What we are discussing here is a draft court order. And a draft order is but a short procedural step away from becoming a real court order from a fully empowered and fully legitimate court in the country in which ICANN has its legal existence. ICANN has not created this situation No? ICANN has most certainly created a pyramid of contracts through which it exercises rather deep control over the business and economics of the domain name system. To my mind it is very clear that ICANN has indeed created this situation. And because there were loud and clear warnings from even before ICANN's birth ICANN is not in a good position to claim that it created this situation by accident. Saying that ICANN is not doing its core job means you acuse not the Board (which I am used to), but the staff, and esp. the staff that actually does the work, which keeps the Internet running.
There is no truth to the notion that ICANN has anything to do with the continuous running of DNS or IP address allocation, much less the whole internet. And that notion is dangerous - It misleads people into believing that somebody is watching DNS and IP addresses and ensuring against technical instability. Because ICANN has abrogated that role ICANN has left the internet dangling and unprotected against technical dangers. That protection was the purpose of ICANN. ICANN has, like the US FEMA, left the internet DNS waiting for a Katrina. ICANN has, instead of doing its proper job, danced its way into being a centralized planning agency a la the Soviet Union of 1935. ICANN dictates all kinds of economic and business matters that not only have killed DNS technical innovation but has also cost internet users hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars. ICANN's staff does absolutely nothing to keep the internet running. Period, end of story. What ICANN's staff does do is to mechanize ICANN ever growing role as a central planning bureaucracy for the internet - one that is intent on imposing its own view of social, economic, and legal policy. That view is not broadly shared once one goes past ICANN's specially selected industrial "stakeholders". Do you realize that ICANN's staff and budget are now approaching that of the ITU? And that if one projects growth over the next few years that ICANN will actually exceed the ITU in size? Actually, there is one exception to my comment about ICANN's role in the technical stability of the net - the L-root server. But that's IANA, not ICANN. And the L root server is but one root server instance out of a constellation of more than 130 root server instances. So if the L root server should be powered down, it would take instruments to recognize that anything had happened; no users would notice. IANA (a job that ICANN performs under contract, but which is not ICANN itself) mainly does clerical work for the IETF. But if that clerical work should cease, the internet would not stop. ICANN and its board and staff deserve no credit for the work of the root server operators - they have done much of the job that ICANN ought to have done but has not. And neither ICANN nor its staff deserves credit for the RIRs - the RIRs have created sane (if not perfect) IP address policies and actually mechanize most of the IP address allocation machinery. ICANN's IP address policy can be best characterized as "when a RIR asks nicely, IANA grants." Might I suggest that ICANN has become Dickens' "Circumlocution Office" as described in Chapter 10 (Containing the whole Science of Government") of "Little Dorrit" -- http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/ldort10.zip Here's the first paragraph: The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
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