It's time for ICANN to go (Salon) [LWN.net]

Salon interviews EFF founder John Gilmore about ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. " The strings that were pulled before and during the Clinton administration's "Green Paper" and "White Paper" process, that ultimately resulted in the creation of NewCo, also known as ICANN, were pulled by SAIC. SAIC is a very interesting for-profit company with a multibillion-dollar annual revenue, most of which comes from classified contracts with the U.S. military. What's even more interesting about SAIC is that there is no external control on it: It is "employee-owned," i.e., there are no outside stockholders. If you leave the company, you have to sell your shares in it. SAIC's board of directors reads like a who's who of the military-industrial complex (former secretaries of defense, spy-agency heads, etc.). When you read about the government wasting billions on "homeland security," guess who gets it. SAIC's home page features their new brochure on "SAIC -- Securing the Homeland." " (Thanks to Joern Nettingsmeier)

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It's long since time for ICANN to go

Posted Jul 8, 2002 4:43 UTC (Mon) by BobRobertson (guest, #2048) [Link]

Oh come on! Like anyone didn't see this coming? When the IANA was usurped
circa 1995 it was obvious, or didn't anyone notice that Network Solutions'
board of directors is the same list of who's-who of spooks and bureaucrats?

I sure did, and wrote about it at the time. So did EFF and lots of other
people. There is nothing so short as an Americans memory of history.

Abolish the ICANN, abolish the top level domains. Let the country codes be
the real TLD's, they already exist. Or let anyone who wants to run a TLD
do so. Name one single technical reason why not! Who would pay $20/year for
a domain like "BobRobertson.ibm"? or free like "vanity.sc.ca.us"?

Play nice, be reliable, or people take you out of their resolve.conf. If
you're worried, look at what happened to the abortive attempts to "charge
for peering" back in the 90's. Even the big egotistical players realized
that it's better for their own customers to peer as widely as possible, and
AlterNet (who didn't realize it) is as dead as the Dodo. Good riddance.

IP address organized by cooperation between all the ISP's, that's easy. If
you want to peer, you agree to use addresses as handed out by the "non-profit"
co-op, better known as IANA. How amazing, a return to the way things were
working before it was taken over by the Fed.Gov.US

No, ICANN't.

Bob-