I may have just been there for a few months but from the inside the problems with icann are obvious in light of this article. Its management culture is an immature, top-down, command and control structure instead of the bottom-up, multistakeholder one icann espouses and much larger organizations have embraced long ago.
The steady decline of icann transparency over recent years is a direct result of this ancient top-down management approach.
icann has created this structure by systematically hiring friends of gdd pres (left over from last ceo) into upper layers of management, who have no internet or international governance organization qualifications or experience with the community icann serves. this has surrounded the ceo and board with top-down echo chamber paranoia and fear (them versus us) instead of the cordial , bottom-up approach, and familiarirty community members in these positions would bring.
staff is rarely consulted and if consulted most are too inexperienced and afraid of losing their jobs - by hiring design - to respond critically...and what I saw, they rarely ask the few community centric old timers and then do not heed their advice. this is too bad.
although it appears some independent thinkers are being brought into upper layers, until there is more house cleaning at the vp and higher layers (including IANA vp) - replacing them with independent experienced players and have some time for icann to actually experience and learn from the bottom-up experience themselves, icann is not ready for the iana transistion.
all the tld problems and recent self anointing coordination leadership are results of this close minded , old management style.
before icann can go it alone, it must gut the cronyism based upper management and practice bottom-up multi-stakeholder management internally first to appreciate it.
replace them with seasoned community members - not friends and relatives with no experience in DNS.
Also if they believe in the bottom-up process so much, a whistle blower protection policy would demonstrate that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
