ICANN, the non-profit corporation which oversees the backbone of the internet, has a new CEO in the person of Rod Beckstrom, former director of US National Cybersecurity Center. He takes over ICANN in a rather tumultuous time, and during a press conference, he put forth some of his ideas on how ICANN should work. Basic gist: the internet works fine, so there’s little need for change.
“My first reaction was I felt a little bit overwhelmed and amazed at the number of participants, the intellectual calibre and sheer force and magnitude of the community,” Beckstrom said, “There are so many different cultures coming together, having different dialogs, and that’s what I think is magical about the rich ecosystem that is protecting the Internet that ICANN is a part of.”
Recently, the EU reiterated its claim that it’s not right that ICANN is so closely tied to the US government through the joint project agreement via the US Department of Commerce. This agreement expires September 30, and Beckstrom believes it should be renewed, simply because the current ICANN setup is working out so well.
“The system on whole is healthy, but also strained, and part of the strains are natural and part of the democratic process. The process may be noisy, but a stable Internet is what has come out of ICANN,” Beckstrom said, “The DNS system, [the] naming and addressing system has worked with an incredible record of reliability and phenomenal scaling.”
On top of that, he added, 80 countries are already represented in the Governmental Advisory Committee, an advisory organ for ICANN. “Clearly, everyone at ICANN hopes that all the nations in the world will come and participate in that, and it is a vital group that feeds directly into the board, which is the policy decision-making body of ICANN,” Beckstrom said, “So there is already a mechanism there for international participation.”
Sounds about right to me.
I really don’t give a * about who is running the show wrt dns servers – but the fact that a single entity (in this case the US government) can trump all of the members speaks against the current model.
The process should be 100% democratic. Saying that there is a governing body is bullshit, since it can be ignored at any point in the process by the US government, yet the Canadian government has no say …
Democracy, Communism and any other form of governance that advocates rule by the masses is ridiculous. Equal say? Fair share? The world just doesn’t work this way. If it did there wouldn’t be inequality and neither would justice be dependent on how much you own or how much money you make.
Face it… there are those in power, and then there is the rest of us.
yeah, problems tend to go away if you ignore them…
SOME problems can’t be solved. Whenever, wherever humans are involved you can be sure that greed and the need for self-preservation will overcome social consciousness. Rebellion, push back and even reason might seemingly make a dent in an issue, but don’t be fooled, those in power will maintain their power.
Those in power are not kings and presidents, but usually people of means who aren’t about to give up their lifestyle for you or me.
I am not ignoring the problem, I simply don’t see a viable solution. If you have one, please enlighten me.
Unfortunately, your are in many ways correct :/
However, one must remember that in a democracy a person is put into power by the masses voting). This same person can again be elected out of power.
Unfortunately, this appears to rarely be the case, since the general public for some odd reason appear to not mind a certain amount of corruption and many times they also seem to care about an election and stay home.
I still cannot fathom that people would ever stay home during election day, yet some places its almost as high as 50% or even higher (witness the recent EU elections). Its very sad to see.
fwiw, I feel that a true democratic process is the way forward. Then we can look at fixing why people aren’t using their – fought for – rights to vote. So: Drop the US governments veto rights over ICANN and I’ll be much more happy. (next stop, more members aboard – and lets try to avoid a UN situation).
Reminds me of the argument over an international court; imagine you’re facing the international court and you find that the judges are from former colonies of your home country – you think that they’d put their bias’s aside to judge you fairly?
Its nice to be young and idealistic but the United Nations is an example of what happens where politics end up breaking an organisation into a dysfunctional quango that is answerable to no one. I agree that it needs to be opened up but at the same time it shouldn’t be opened up so large that it ends up becoming dysfunctional.
Edited 2009-06-28 14:56 UTC
Im bit worried on his mentality, as long as it works its fine. But lets face it ICANN is part of major problems in internet, slow implementations of IPv6, international domains names that are splitting internet to national parts, increasing number of national domain endings (im talking .eu and that stuff) that are used simply to fraud people, colorful way of getting domains (some countries have nazi style organizations that limit individuals to get domain names), etc. It might be fine but it could be lot better with stronger leadership.
Face it, the Internet is one of the most democratic places in the world. You can visit any site, you can create any site, you can put up any information you want on your own site. You are only limited by the laws of your own country.
In addition, the infrastructure is pretty decentralized. I don’t have to get permission from the US to access a site in my own country.
I don’t know of a time when the US government interfered with the way the internet runs in any other country, and I don’t see why I (an Indian) should be concerned. It works well right now. On the other hand, how many examples do you have on international orignizations that function all that well. Everything takes too long, too much discussion and argument, and nothing ever seems to get decided.
It works well right now. There is no need to mess with things.
You seem really clueless about the topic it seems? – try to dig around and see what problems people are complaining about instead of just saying that there are no problems because you are not aware of them. I am sure your local search provider will be more than helpful.
However, regardless of this, it is still not beneficial for a process that one entity has all the power. The internet is for the masses and as such (in lack of direct democracy) should be run by a representative democracy.
I really hate getting back to a political model, but … what would be easier? For a monarch to say “go do this now,” or for a congress of individuals who all have agendas to get together to try and decide to do something?
The problem isn’t that a “democracy” is needed.
The internet is decentralized. If there was a problem, how difficult would it be for other countries to band together and make decisions on their own.
After all DNS servers are located all over the world, and US has no way to control them. ICANN is in charge right now because they have done a great job so far. If they start doing a bad job they can be replaced easily. Is there any reason we need to deal with this right now?
Much of the criticism of ICANN has focused on potential/hypothetical problems that could, possibly, arise due to their close association with the US government – yet there are some practical problems that they’ve largely neglected. At present, there seems to be little (if any) accountability for domain name registrars.
Look at the whole RegisterFly debacle & how far they had to go/how long they were allowed to operate before finally losing their ICANN accreditation.
Off the top of my head, a few things that registrars should not be allowed to do:
– front running
– prevent domain owners from transferring active (non-expired) domains elsewhere
– increase the renewal fees for domains that have expired, but are still within the grace period
– stockpiling & parking / typo-squatting their customers’ expired domains
But numerous registrars do some, or all, of those things (GoDaddy being one of the current worst offenders). It appears that as long as the registrar pays their ICANN fees, they’re free to do whatever they want.