ICANN has issued its "draft" Strategic Plan.
It is most interesting for what it does not say.
First of all, nowhere does it suggest that ICANN is striving to be accountable to the community of internet users or to serve their needs. Instead it is full of words about how ICANN is going to serve its "stakeholders", which by definition excludes internet users.
Did you notice that the ALAC or at-large isn't even mentioned? I guess that even ICANN has realized that the ALAC is a failure - institutional cheer-leading Astroturf is hard to grow.
Nor does ICANN even begin to mention that it aspires to ensure that the upper tiers of the internet's domain name system will operate 24x7x365, quickly and accurately responding to query packets with response packets and doing so without prejudice against any query source or mining of the data stream for non-operational purposes.
I wonder whether a lot of the text for this plan came from Dilbert's Mission Statement Generator? (If you look quickly you may see an experimental tool to generate ICANN Strategic Objectives.)
It's also nice to know that not only is ICANN planning on continuing its excommunication of internet users, much less granting them the lofty position of "stakeholder", but that ICANN is apparently canonizing and transforming some of its current stakeholders into "key-stakeholders".
Posted by karl at March 18, 2006 8:00 PM