CircleID

I think Milton Mueller and Hans Klein's paper "What to do about ICANN" is really well-informed and makes balanced suggestions which deserve serious attention.

I guess the question is - how to achieve their adoption.

I think the paper homes in on central issues.

The irony is that although ICANN has resisted what the paper refers to as 'democratisation' (indeed, it reversed the process in 2002), if adopted, this could significantly strengthen ICANN's own credibility. It is extraordinary that ICANN does not move in these directions at a time when its own legitimacy (as a quango of the Department of Commerce of a single nation) is often called into question. Building legitimacy based on global and societal representation, rather than intra-national and governmental controls, could create a model which protects the Internet / DNS functions from too much political interference and allows for genuine self-determination by multiple stakeholders/constituencies.

I also like the model of a competitive yet shared role for ICANN and, say, ITU. After all, ICANN itself was launched in part with a view to promoting competition. Why should not ICANN itself not be part of a wider competitive market with more choice.

I commend "What to do about ICANN" for further study and consideration.

I hope this gets plenty of attention from all parties.

With kind regards,

Richard Henderson

In order for ICANN and ITU to compete, there should be at least a common set of ground rules, to avoid two competing and subtly if not overtly different systems getting built. 

Especially in the realms of domain naming and IP allocation, there is a single system for which different camps have different ideas for control .. with operators scared of just what is going to happen when these two systems start to fork because of ideological / political differences, and demanding that the status quo be maintained, with some of the reforms proposed being adopted, at least the ones that don't involve governance for governance's sake, but actually do highlight lacunae in the existing infrastructure.

In that sense, your proposal to restore, perhaps with some changes, the ICANN board elections, does make sense, as does winding up the RALOs / ALAC.  Extending ALAC and RALOs are not going to do more than an expensive mistake.  Efforts should be concentrated in making ICANN truly international but giving it direction, by reviving elections to the ICANN global board

Hand in hand with this would be for ICANN to mend fences with people or organizations with substantial technical skills, that it has had differences with in the past, and who have remained influential critics of ICANN - critics who are definitely not motivated by some of the more obvious issues that a lot of the ITU proposal supporters fear. Their technical skill and the respect they command will be invaluable to ICANN.

A lot of the criticism targeted at ICANN from some economies in the WGIG comments phase, and in mailing lists such as has revolved around fears and admittedly hazy ideas about ICANN, and about the administration of root servers. 

These fears include -

Allegations of overt control of ICANN / IANA by the USA

A fear that root servers are "only 13 in number, served by a super secret hidden root based in the USA, and to root servers only located in highly developed countries .. [completely ignoring or not understanding anycast, of course],

.. and coming to a lot of support for the Houlin Zhao proposals, a sense that IP addresses are a national resource and so must be in the nation's control much as telephone numbers are .. no matter that extending a telephone numbering paradigm to IP address allocation may not produce the results that some people expect it to produce)

For a rather detailed overview of this situation, I would strongly recommend reading Geoff Huston's article in the latest (March) issue of the Internet Protocol Journal (www.cisco.com/ipj/)

Highly recommended reading, that.