Condi Rice, ICANN, and millions paid to lobby the US govt for total internet control Just minutes after the board of internet overseer ICANN applauded the results of a review into its accountability – announced at a public meeting in Dublin – the mood soured. An accountability working group – tasked with making ICANN answerable to the wider public – had decided, following months of pressure from ICANN, not to …
What a colossal mess. The Internet Community should hang its head in shame. Congratulations chaps, you've not only sunk your own attempt to reform ICANN, that had tacit support from nearly all quarters, but you did it while metaphorically blowing your own feet off at the same time. Only after both feet had gone did you realise that you needed them to walk...
Come now, people, we should know how to read between the lines by now. What they actually said is that they are committed to being as open and transparent as they feel like. Which is exactly how ICANN has behaved since the beginning.
While secretly laughing at all of us behind closed doors (and tables laden with coke and strippers).
If ICANN aren't prepared to say who they used (and how much they spent), is it possible to work it from the other end?
Find the public officials who they might have lobbied and work backwards from their declared meetings. Or from any equivalent to a members declaration of interest?
ICANN is not just doing its lobbying secretly in the shadows, it is paying for its lobbying using the money of the people it is lobbying against.
ICANN is using internet community money to lobby against the internet community !
Do we need any more proof that the current imperial bureaucrats running ICANN are unfit to govern us?
"Fair enough. Now tell us how we can wrest the power back from them? What cards can the community still play?"
Setup and use an alternate DNS root zone. It wouldn't be that hard to do technically in collaboration between the existing top level domain authoritative nameserver operators. There would be 2 harder problems:
1. Get those configuring DNS resolvers to point to it in preference to the ICANN root.
2. Decide who manages it and how.
Once enough people are using DNSSEC, a revolutionary consensus would also need include operating system vendors to patch operating systems to accept the new root zone signing key.
There would also be quite a financial stream available for such from the domain registrars, who would clearly have to be part of any revolutionary consensus if they are not to have to pay cuts from domain fees to 2 root zone operators during a protracted competition between 2 root providers.
> Now tell us how we can wrest the power back from them?
Stop using ICANN services. That is easy enough for the regional internet registries and the IETF to do; it might take a whole weekend, though. For DNS it's a bit more tricky: stop pointing to any of the root servers under US management, and announce a cloned root zone that only includes root servers outside the US. That would take a year or two to penetrate all the service providers in the world, so there would be glitches along the way.
Except the transition period can render the Internet vulnerable to usurpation by an unfriendly power. One reason everyone derides the UN taking it over is the fact most of the UN runs like the Ministry of Truth: the ones you LEAST want are leading all the committees. What's to stop say Russia or China from staging some kind of Internet coup while the transition's taking place?
> What's to stop say Russia or China from staging some kind of Internet coup while the transition's taking place?
You mean, what's to stop them from doing what the US are doing right now, under your nose, with your money?
"You mean, what's to stop them from doing what the US are doing right now, under your nose, with your money?"
ICANN might well be operating under the auspices of a US govt contract but the US govt has made it clear that they are not happy with the way things are being done.
The antics of ICANN are the kind of thing that only a lawyer could devise and uncoincidentally the previous chair was one - he also engaged in the same kind of tactics when the chair of the Internet Society of New Zealand. ICANN was dodgy before then but under his watch it went into full-blown maliciousness. In the opinion of many, the _ONLY_ thing that ICANN staff and most of the board care about is the lining of their own pockets and the furtherance of their own control of power.
Both the corporate world and IT professional organizations need to mobilize fast.
ICANN is as big a threat to the internet as the NSA, and an even bigger threat than the most virulent black-hat hackers.
Fail to act now and we'll be powerlessly wringing our hands for centuries the way football clubs and F1 racing teams do, unable to do more than moan helplessly and pathetically.
One thing I've always wondered from Kieren's otherwise excellent articles on ICANN is who are the "internet community"? I presume this is companies that are heavily involved in the low levels of the internet. Is it just the registrars for the top-level domains? If not, how does one become part of the internet community and have a say in this? Who decides if you are involved enough?
'One thing I've always wondered from Kieren's otherwise excellent articles on ICANN is who are the "internet community"?'
As far as ICANN are concerned, it's the people who pay them the most money, preferably without getting any power in exchange for it.
That's why ICANN is fast becoming ICANT, it's time for people to set-up there own DNS resolvers with there own Root authority as one lobbyist said "Balkanisation of the Internet!" followed with "all our tech is leaving in waves!" There's some nice photo's on-line of the white-house board-room filled with the head of apple, the head of twitter, the head of facebook, the head of micro-soft, the head of sun micro-systems and the head of google all chummily sitting around the table.
> What's to stop say Russia or China from staging some kind of Internet coup while the transition's taking place?
> You mean, what's to stop them from doing what the US are doing right now, under your nose, with your money?
Duly noted.
They know they've lost control of the free market because people are looking at there systems muttering about back-door's and note the latest news that after they praise there intelligence agencies for blowing up some Jihadi the news then turns into 8 more of them blowing themselves up on blackfriday whilst source code abounded in some circles all pertaining to blackfriday!
Don't tell me this doesn't serve the governments totalitarian agenda because it does and the sheeple lap it up whilst they hold talks about cyber having no idea how there own computer works baring switching it on.
Yeap outstanding intelligence work, pity the decision makers lacked any to begin with, an pity none of them spotted a large terrorist cell that just blew itself up, before they started screwing around with the "IETF" because when your talking about the "IETF" who is it exactly that operates that board?!
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