* Posts by justacontractor

2 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2015

Big changes proposed to DNS overseer ICANN

justacontractor

Good step forward

Making ICANN a membership organization is an excellent step toward addressing "troubling revelations"* regarding the arrogance, weak, non-transparent, top-down mentality (e.g., .sucks issues), and poor, short sighted IANA management ingrained in the current "inner circle" staff - who sometimes refer to themselves as "the global leaders".

Oversight of IANA functions is essential. The current intentional obfuscation of creating groups upon groups to supposedly provide oversight over each other will never solve the circular - self anointed - oversight problems with ICANN.  This article does a great job pointing this out.

The troubling revelations regarding the growing arrogance inside ICANN have manifested themselves in the form of debacles such as netmundial handling where the CEO would rather pretend to play statesman hobnobbing at WEF and with Brazilian president (now fighting calls for impeachment), undiplomatic f aux pas revealing lack of necessary experience with both domain industry and CWG experts, a "circle the wagons" mentality of yes men management that has ignored warnings from experienced community members regarding names like .sucks and problems with IANA management as well as a string of breaches and failures leading up to the new gtlds.

This top down approach to governance has led to non-transparent decisions (e.g., 1M usd additional fee for .sucks and unclear redistribution to the community ICANN should be serving) that encourages legal actions.

This bodes well for separating IANA from ICANN for the sake of stability and continuity of the Internet.

Conclusion: current top management must go before transition can be safely carried out – or - IANA must be made a financially and legally separate entity from ICANN with different management and oversight.

* domainnewsafrica.com/troubling-revelations-regarding-the iana-transition-major-alarming-gaffes-by-icann-ceo

Caught on camera: ICANN CEO slams the internet's kingmakers

justacontractor

Managment must change before ICANN can be trusted with IANA functions

This is very unfortunate. From what I saw this "I know better" top-down non-transparent mindset is pervasive inside ICANN. Sad because it is exactly the current top mangament that understands the least - but will not listen to those that have much more experience in the CWG and elsewhere.

Therefore, the managment must change before ICANN can be trusted with the IANA functions. The timing is unfortunate but I would rather have a stable Internet than managment that puts themselves above the community and the tasks at hand.

What I find strange is that this is only comming out now when it has been a growing problem for many years. I suppose enough money buys silence.