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Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
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------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Sun, 08 Dec 2002 23:01:26 -0500 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: Interview with Karl Auerbach: "ICANN is out of control!" Send reply to: declan@well.com
[I occasionally forward items on ICANN, and many are admittedly negative. This is due to most of the articles and material available on the Net -- and Politech is only as good as its sources -- being somewhat critical. As always, I would be happy to forward rebuttals and replies from ICANN and/or its defenders. --Declan]
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From: "Richard Koman" <rkoman@attbi.com> To: <declan@well.com> Subject: Karl Auerbach: ICANN "Out of Control" Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 22:06:54 -0800
Declan,
You might be interested in this interview I did with Karl Auerbach, soon to be an ex-public board member of ICANN.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/12/05/karl.html
Here's the intro:
October's distributed, denial-of-service attack against the domain name system--the most serious yet, in which seven of the thirteen DNS roots were cut off from the Internet--put a spotlight on ICANN, the nongovernmental corporation responsible for Internet addressing and DNS. The security of DNS is on ICANN's watch. Why is it so susceptible to attack, when the Internet as a whole is touted as being able to withstand nuclear Armageddon?
It's religious dogma, says Karl Auerbach, a public representative to ICANN's board. There's no reason DNS shouldn't be decentralized, except that ICANN wants to maintain central control over this critical function. Worse, Auerbach said in a telephone interview with O'Reilly Network, ICANN uses its domain name dispute resolution process to expand the rights of trademark holders, routinely taking away domains from people with legitimate rights to them, only to reward them to multinational corporations with similar names.
Auerbach--who successfully sued ICANN over access to corporate documents (ICANN wanted him to sign a nondisclosure agreement before he could see the documents)--will only be an ICANN director for a few more weeks. As part of ICANN's "reform" process, the ICANN board voted last month to end public representation on the board. As of December 15, there will be zero public representatives on the ICANN board.
How does ICANN justify banishing the public from its decision-making process? Stuart Lynn, president and CEO of ICANN, said the change was needed to make ICANN's process more "efficient." In a Washington Post online discussion, Lynn said: "The board decided that at this time [online elections] are too open to fraud and capture to be practical, and we have to look for other ways to represent the public interest. It was also not clear that enough people were really interested in voting in these elections to create a large enough body of voters that could be reflective of the public interest. This decision could always be reexamined in the future. In the meantime, we are encouraging other forms of at-large organizations to self-organize and create and encourage a body of individuals who could provide the user input and public interest input into the ICANN process."
Former ICANN president Esther Dyson is also supporting the move away from public representation on the board. "I did believe that it was a good idea to have a globally elected executive board, [but] you can't have a global democracy without a globally informed electorate," Dyson told the Post. "What you really need [in order] to have effective end-user representation is to have them in the bowels (of the organization) rather than on the board."
Auerbach isn't buying. "ICANN is pursuing various spin stories to pretend that they haven't abandoned the public interest," he says in this interview. "ICANN is trying to create a situation where individuals are not allowed in and the only organizations that are allowed in are those that hew to ICANN's party line."
In this interview, Auerbach makes a number of strong criticisms of ICANN, beyond the issue of public access:
a.. ICANN uses its domain name dispute resolution process to expand the rights of trademark holders, routinely taking away domains from people with legitimate rights to them, only to reward them to multinational corps with similar names, Auerbach says. b.. ICANN unnecessarily maintains the domain name system as a centralized database, making it vulnerable to attack. c.. ICANN has failed to improve network security since September 11 and has ignored Auerbach's suggestions for improving DNS security. d.. ICANN staff takes actions without consulting the board, withholds information from the board, and misleads board members. e.. Finally, Auerbach charges that ICANN is guilty of corporate malfeasance.
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