Re: ICANN Press Release for 10:00 EDT--"Commerce Department and ICANN Sign Historic Accord on Internet Governance"

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Karl Auerbach <karl () auerbach com>
Date: September 30, 2009 5:55:22 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject:  ICANN Press Release for 10:00 EDT--"Commerce Department and  
ICANN Sign Historic Accord on Internet Governance"




On Sep 30, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Karl Auerbach wrote:

I took a look.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

I find this "Affirmation" very, very troubling and of very dubious
legality.

NTIA once again cited authority that is utterly insufficient to enter
into an agreement that:

1. Establishes an oversight authority for a collection of private
operations called the DNS and the internet.

2. Mandates an involuntary system of publishing personally identifiable
information of people involved in certain forms of commercial
transactions. (Whois.)

3. Insist that a private US corporation include and abide by a committee
of foreign government representatives.


The agreement leaves vast questions open:

A. What happens to root zone file creation? Is NTIA still the ultimate
arbiter? Does Verisign still do the actual editing of the root zone  
file?

B. What about ICANN's position or implied immunity vis-a-vis the US
anti-trust laws?

C. What about ICANN's authority, or lack thereof, to delegate control of
legacy TLDs like .com and .net. In particular does the basic premise,
that ICANN "owns" .com, of the ICANN-Verisign contracts still exist?

D. Is ICANN still an instrumentality of the US Government?


I do wonder at the list of "reactions" - It seems that several people,
particularly people who are non-critics, got advance reviews of the
document thus allowing ICANN to publish a list of positive reviews
without risking any negative ones in the initial rush.

--karl--










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