FC: Interview with Karl Auerbach: "ICANN is out of control!"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[I occasionally forward items on ICANN, and many are admittedly negative. 
This is due to most of the articles and material available on the Net -- 
and Politech is only as good as its sources -- being somewhat critical. As 
always, I would be happy to forward rebuttals and replies from ICANN and/or 
its defenders. --Declan]

---

From: "Richard Koman" <rkoman () attbi com>
To: <declan () well com>
Subject: Karl Auerbach: ICANN "Out of Control"
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 22:06:54 -0800

Declan,

You might be interested in this interview I did with Karl Auerbach, soon to
be an ex-public board member of ICANN.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/12/05/karl.html

Here's the intro:

October's distributed, denial-of-service attack against the domain name
system--the most serious yet, in which seven of the thirteen DNS roots were
cut off from the Internet--put a spotlight on ICANN, the nongovernmental
corporation responsible for Internet addressing and DNS. The security of DNS
is on ICANN's watch. Why is it so susceptible to attack, when the Internet
as a whole is touted as being able to withstand nuclear Armageddon?

It's religious dogma, says Karl Auerbach, a public representative to ICANN's
board. There's no reason DNS shouldn't be decentralized, except that ICANN
wants to maintain central control over this critical function. Worse,
Auerbach said in a telephone interview with O'Reilly Network, ICANN uses its
domain name dispute resolution process to expand the rights of trademark
holders, routinely taking away domains from people with legitimate rights to
them, only to reward them to multinational corporations with similar names.

Auerbach--who successfully sued ICANN over access to corporate documents
(ICANN wanted him to sign a nondisclosure agreement before he could see the
documents)--will only be an ICANN director for a few more weeks. As part of
ICANN's "reform" process, the ICANN board voted last month to end public
representation on the board. As of December 15, there will be zero public
representatives on the ICANN board.

How does ICANN justify banishing the public from its decision-making
process? Stuart Lynn, president and CEO of ICANN, said the change was needed
to make ICANN's process more "efficient." In a Washington Post online
discussion, Lynn said: "The board decided that at this time [online
elections] are too open to fraud and capture to be practical, and we have to
look for other ways to represent the public interest. It was also not clear
that enough people were really interested in voting in these elections to
create a large enough body of voters that could be reflective of the public
interest. This decision could always be reexamined in the future. In the
meantime, we are encouraging other forms of at-large organizations to
self-organize and create and encourage a body of individuals who could
provide the user input and public interest input into the ICANN process."

Former ICANN president Esther Dyson is also supporting the move away from
public representation on the board. "I did believe that it was a good idea
to have a globally elected executive board, [but] you can't have a global
democracy without a globally informed electorate," Dyson told the Post.
"What you really need [in order] to have effective end-user representation
is to have them in the bowels (of the organization) rather than on the
board."

Auerbach isn't buying. "ICANN is pursuing various spin stories to pretend
that they haven't abandoned the public interest," he says in this interview.
"ICANN is trying to create a situation where individuals are not allowed in
and the only organizations that are allowed in are those that hew to ICANN's
party line."

In this interview, Auerbach makes a number of strong criticisms of ICANN,
beyond the issue of public access:

  a.. ICANN uses its domain name dispute resolution process to expand the
rights of trademark holders, routinely taking away domains from people with
legitimate rights to them, only to reward them to multinational corps with
similar names, Auerbach says.
  b.. ICANN unnecessarily maintains the domain name system as a centralized
database, making it vulnerable to attack.
  c.. ICANN has failed to improve network security since September 11 and
has ignored Auerbach's suggestions for improving DNS security.
  d.. ICANN staff takes actions without consulting the board, withholds
information from the board, and misleads board members.
  e.. Finally, Auerbach charges that ICANN is guilty of corporate
malfeasance.




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