CaveBear Blog

ICANN - Clueless

ICANN once again demonstrates that it is clueless.

A moment ago I tried to submit a comment in response ICANN Launches Public Comments on Whois Task Force Report

However, the submission email address is invalid.  My comments were rejected with the following:

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
whois-services-comments@greenriver.icann.org
    (reason: 550 5.1.1 <whois-services-comments@greenriver.icann.org>... User unknown)
    (expanded from: <whois-services-comments@icann.org>)

ICANN most certainly needs a 24x7x365 operational point of contact.

Update, the problem is now corrected.

Kaboom!

Not everybody can say this: I have an H Bomb in my office.

No, it's not the kind that goes "boom"; instead it's part of a set from a musical I ran lights on a few years back.  I think that it it adds "that special touch" to my office.

It's over 7 feet tall, is built of plywood and painted muslin, and contains several light bulbs - it's really impressive when plugged in!

Six Years Of ICANN Delay And Unjustified Retention of $2,000,000

It was six years ago this month, in year 2000, when ICANN accepted nearly $2,400,000 to review 47 applications for new TLDs.

ICANN approved seven of those 47 applications in an infamous, clearly biased beauty contest that was so overtly unfair that one very well qualified applicant with an innovative idea was rejected because one ICANN board member could not pronounce the sequence of characters as a word!

Among the seven winners were several who are now asking ICANN for a change to their contracts.  ICANN's Board meets next week to consider these changes.

I would hope that ICANN postpones these decisions.  For how long?  Until ICANN deals with the remaining applicants who have been waiting for 6 very long years and watching their $50,000 (each) application fees rot away.

Those other 40 were not rejected, in fact they have been often reassured that their applications remain pending.  And when I looked at ICANN's finances I did not see that this $2,000,000 was in a contingent fund or was being treated as anything other than permanent, non-refundable income.

If those 40 applications - and the $2,000,000 in application fees - are not still alive than ICANN has lied and taken their money under false pretenses.  And ICANN would not do that.

Fairness and justice requires that ICANN not amend the contracts of any the seven lucky winners until ICANN squarely and fairly deals with 40 applicants who have been waiting all of these years - or ICANN admits that it lead them on, took their money, and returns that money, with substantial interest (remember year 2000 was still within the .com boom) and an apology.

By-the-way, this kind of delay is ICANN standard operating procedure - I filed a request with ICANN for independent review in that same year - ICANN has never honored its obligation to deal with it.  And ICANN has been stringing Ed Hasbrouck along for years.

The ICANN process reminds me of something and someone - John Ehrlichman, an adviser to Richard Nixon, whose method of dealing with people who raised troublesome issues was to ignore them and leave them "twisting, slowly, slowly in the wind".

Interim? A Permanent State of Affairs

ICANN loves euphemisms - for example it has a "Nominating Committee".  But it is a committee that does not nominate.  It selects.

So, what has this "nominating" committee done for the community of internet users lately?

It picked two people to sit on the "Interim At-Large Advisory Committee"

Interim?

Yup, after nearly half a decade of operation, ICANN's substitute for public elections, and even for a place for the public, in ICANN remains "interim".

It is long past time when the ALAC turkey should have been abandoned as an abject failure.  But ICANN keeps pumping away in hopes that the ALAC will come to life in some ICANN-Pygmalion fantasy.

Democracy Depends on This?!

I spent the last few days at a conference of hackers.  (It's run under a cone of silence so I won't say more about who was there or what transpired.)

I took along a functional Diebold TS voting machine.

Our goal is to neither copy nor penetrate nor examine the Diebold software in the machine.  Instead we are planning on replacing that code, in its entirety, with inspectable and open source components.

When I got there I realized that I forgotten to bring a mini-bar key with me so that I could open the locks.  But with the help of a couple of metal twigs and a couple of seconds of wiggling, the lock was opened.

Sheesh, I would have expected a rather more substantial lock from a company that builds bank vaults.

Once More Into The Breach - ICANN's New Strategic Plan

ICANN has just published this: ICANN Posts Draft Version of the 2007-2010 Strategic Plan for Comment

So I revised my ICANN Mission Statement Generator.

I consider it a fair question whether my generator produces the more accurate ICANN strategic objectives.