IP: ICANN session at CFP

[David Farber <dfarber () earthlink net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann () csl sri com>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 9:34:49 
To: dave () farber net, lauren () vortex com
Subject: ICANN session at CFP

FYI.

-------- Original Message --------
WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY 
APRIL 19, 2002 
ICANN Role Should Be Reduced, Conference Speakers Say 

SAN FRANCISCO -- The ICANN bureaucracy, activities and ambitions of Internet
governance must be stripped back to a few essential functions if the
organization is to survive and usefully support cyberspace, panelists said
Thurs. at the Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference here. ICANN has become
"an elephant compared to what should be a mouse," ICANN board member Karl
Auerbach said. 

Auerbach said the only crucial function was IP address-space allocation,
central to maintaining routing tables. It's "a fairly technical,
sophisticated operation" that ICANN performs well, though it "tends to
ossify the current ownership" of backbone, he said. By contrast, the
corporation's work on protocol parameters, although allocated 1/3 of board
seats, "is purely clerical," Auerbach said. On domain names, "where all the
battles have been," ICANN has legitimate roles maintaining the root zone
file and ensuring root servers run well, he said, but should leave running
the Whois database to registrars and get out of the businesses of regulating
their business practices, adjudicating domain disputes and setting trademark
policy, he said: "Its job should be seeing that the network runs safely. How
you treat your customers is your concern." He also accused the staff of
global junketeering. ICANN declined to send a representative. 

Principal Scientist Peter Neumann of SRI International Computer Science Lab
agreed with Auerbach's critique of usurpation of authority. "We keep seeing
statements about Internet governance" unsuited to ICANN's "very narrow
charter," he said. "They sort of believe they run the Internet." A drive by
the organization's management to serve govts., and industry neglects an
obligation of "actually representing the masses of users around the world,"
Neumann said. He said he would prefer abolishing ICANN if it wasn't greatly
constrained. Turning over control to the U.N. or ITU would simply substitute
a new bureaucracy, he said. 

Attorney Susan Crawford said she was "hopeful a humbled, chastened ICANN
will remove itself from the mire in which it's swimming." The group should
not become a vehicle for govt.'s agendas, lacks technical expertise and
delegated govt. authority and can't become an international
consumer-protection body, she said: "It is not a world democracy and will
never be." She envisioned broader responsibility than did Auerbach. Crawford
proposed ICANN be limited to: (1) Ensuring data safety. (2) Maintaining
stable interoperability of the domain-name system. (3) Providing global
trademark rules. (4) Maintaining the Whois database. -- Louis Trager 
 

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