Comments on: A battle for the soul of the Internet

Tucows CEO Elliot Noss warns of a threat to cyberspace if international politics are allowed to trump sober judgment.

What can we do to protect the internet?

I know that most of the people that are interested in this topic have read, heard, or at least heard of the Hacker Manifesto. I believe most of that to be true. The internet was started by hackers and is maintained by hackers.
I don't use the term "hacker" in the loose sense the average citizen is familiar with (ie the random teenager who brings a company to its knees just to get his kicks and to show his power.) I use it in the truer sense that Hackers are the beloved members of the IT industry that help move the internet along. The biggest example of true hackers are at opensource sites like www.sourceforge.net.
What the politicians don't realize by doing something like this is that they are attempting to remove the technical experts from their leadership positions because they aren't politicians not because they don't do an excellent job.
Why do the governments of the world have the desire to put their hands in everything, especially where they not only don't belong but aren't qualified for.
I imagine that if the UN does manage to wrest control from ICANN there will end up being two versions of the internet. The government controlled version which will have the ammenaties that we have become accustomed to and the "underground" which will have to take a step backward and in turn will have more support from the people that really know the internet and how it works.
I suppose what my point is I would rather type www.google.com into my browser instead of 66.102.7.104 it is just easier. ICANN made that possible not the UN not the US not any government on the planet can claim responsiblity.
We need to protect the internet from those who are trying, yet would fail, to protect us.

[Collants]

Why in the world does the UN need this?

I don't understand clearly why the UN needs to take control of Internet domain names. What business is that of theirs? And why does it matter to them that ICANN is in California? Do they have my best interest in mind? Probably not. Well, at least they don't own rights to my backyard grass. Or are they trying to get control of that too?

this is an hoax

We created the namespace in 1977/78 under FCC license within the ITU framework. As such we imposed the RFC 920 restrictions to the IANA which strictly respects them. We registered ARPANET in 1984 in the international namespace. The mistake we did was not to also impose them end to end numeric address connectivity: we would be all under IPv6 now. I suppose we will soon be under ITU/NRO (RIR) cooperation.

As users we fight for the involvement of ITU and their cooperation with ICANN so we/the world cease to be under the single ICANN and USG dominance. The USG supports the WSIS against ICANN for the simple reason as everyone: ICANN does not deliver and IAB/IESG/IEFT does not listen to ICANN and to users. IETF never wanted to care about ICANN's call for experimenting DNS development, so now we are going to face what we did not experiment. This may be surprising. No chance that ICANN can address that mess. May be ITU can help if they join forces.

In democracy States are here to protect the rights of citizens (even in the USA I suppose). Only non technically informed people (or politically biased/disinformed people) can fear ITU involvement. A broad part of the Internet concepts come from ITU or have beed developed in common. ITU is the bad guy which invented ADSL, low cost banwidth, etc. Opposing ICANN and ITU is as suprising than opposing arms and legs. Since some keep doing it, 190 unanimous Govs asked ICANN to leave the room (Twomey was not happy) and requested the head (UN Secretary) to document that arms/legs story. To understand what to do.

If some hackers want to stay with current Internet, there is no problem. The current version of Internet is technically a complete default version. What we need is to use the differnt parameters towards some more adequate offers. ICANN has asked IETF to experiment this four years ago. IETF is not interested (at least for the time being).

We will see. If someone hi-jacked the internet, it is ICANN and the pity is it does not know what to do with it... just to keep it the way it was in 1986. Some love antics. Not much useful.

[mnemonician]

At-Large and individual user representation...

In his article, Elliot Noss makes the point that:

"ICANN's form of governance explicitly includes policy, technical, business and user interests under one roof. Each interest group has a formal role and voice in both policy making and governance. Each has a stake in the proceedings, and each is an important part of the system. (Yes, users' voices need be heard more, and as an active participant in the ICANN process and member of the 2005 ICANN Nominating Committee, I will continue to work toward that goal.)"

When ICANN was first formulated, provision was made in its By-Laws for the representation of individual users/registrants via the ICANN At-Large membership and called for a total of nine globally elected At-Large ICANN Board Directors. Sadly, one of the first major organizational moves by ICANN was to whittle way at the At-Large directorates and finally to do away with the token two -of an originally slated total of nine- ICANN At-Large Directorships! Simply put, ICANN went from being an open and representative organization that held the first successful global election in history, to a functionary of corporate interests and IP lawyers. What difference will it really make to users and individuals at this point if the ITU or the UN do take control of the Internet's DNS...? Fact is, the international telephone system works just fine and individual users have about as much say in its functioning as they do in ICANN.

If ICANN apologists wish to impress upon individual users the benefits of ICANN internet oversight, they really must account for the fact that ICANN has done very little for (and actively selected against) representing the interests of the overwhelmingly vast majority of the DNS system's users: individual registrants and small business.