Oi, ICANN! Get to the bottom of this bottom-up process, haul ass – ex-Prez advisor Internet oversight body ICANN received a second kick to the buttocks on Saturday morning – this time from erstwhile US presidential advisor Ira Magaziner. Just a day after Assistant Commerce Secretary Larry Strickling told a room of internet policy wonks that they needed to get a move on or risk undermining the process to …
Is Ira Magaziner advocating the FIFA model? That the community compromise and let the ICANN board self-supervise?
The ICANN board needs supervision by the wider community, but the ICANN board and internal bureaucrats disagree.
The community has not come up with any good ideas for how the community should name a group to supervise the ICANN board.
This being the case, things really should halt, until a viable path is determined.
Much as Ira Magaziner likes his ICANN, the fact is ICANN is failing to gain community support and community participation.
Probably a completely different approach with different people is needed. The world is not going to end during the time it takes to get that going.
My fear is that patent lawyers and patent trolls are behind the scenes in this, somehow looking to lock the world into a commitment into making them billionaires.
Is Ira Magaziner advocating the FIFA model?
After reading your comment I re-read the article. I don't think Magaziner is looking for a FIFA model. That's essentially what ICANN is now, and that's the problem. They, as Magazier says, are "letting your dislikes or your fears or distrust get in the way". It's ICANN which is fearful of any changes and who is holding this back and pretending to go through a process when they don't even want a process. They just want this whole thing to go away because they see it as a threat. That's why any community involvement is continually being thwarted. I'm guessing Magaziner is hoping that ICANN will let go of their "fears and distrust" and allow for some community involvement - involvement that doesn't just entail going to meetings, but provides some actual input.
Top down.
Bottom up.
The trouble is both parties are talking past each other.
The ICANN insiders have a seat on the gravy train and don't want to get off.
The outsiders either want to get on the train in place of the present incumbents or they want to start again, preferably with themselves in charge.
As I see it the biggest problem is ICANN's non-profit status. They have a massive bank balance due to all the fees and charges they have collected and don't really know what to do with it all. So they spend it on things like the vanity project known as Netmundial, they go on jollies in expensive parts of the world and pay each other generous sums of money as "compensation".
Things are not going to change, there are too many vested interests here and the only way I can see of anything getting done is for someone, probably the US government. stepping in and banging a few heads together. This is a strange thing to have to advocate but unless the US steps in I can see no chance of the people who actually use, pay for and rely on the internet getting a say in what happens to something that is now a very important aspect of a lot of people's lives and livelihoods.
We, the users of the internet, pay for all this and we don't have a voice in any of these discussions.
This is unacceptable.
The way ICANN was set up was mainly Magaziner's fault in the first place. And the main error was listening to major US corporate interests who imagined that they would be able to capture the ICANN Board, so it was set up to be a creature of profit-motivated capitalism (California law, for heaven's sake). But the capture failed, or at least went horribly wrong, so ICANN has ended up as a forum for silly decisions and mindless greed.
What a mess.
They don't WANT to listen. That's an important distinction. It's like someone said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Since the incentive to do nothing is internalized (as in they get the money simply by being there), there's no way to remove the incentive from within. Meanwhile, "nuking from orbit" runs the risk of replacing it with something unanticipated...and worse (like say, the Chinese or Russians usurping control).
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