Is ICANN The New USSR?
In an interview with The Register, former publicly elected ICANN board member Karl Auerbach alleges that ICANN resembles the now defunct Soviet Union: The organization, he says, has set up a Soviet-style pseudo democracy, insulates itself from Internet users, and resembles a central bureaucracy that is working on the latest five-year plan.
Auerbach favors a free-for-all TLD approval process that puts its sole emphasis on technical rather than ideological or "beauty contest" issues. He criticizes ICANN for continuing to string along 40 entities who applied for new TLDs back in 2000. ICANN has neither accepted nor declined their applications, while holding on to their application fees totaling $2 million.
Commenting on the recently announced wholesale price increase for .com and .net domains, Auerbach estimates that VeriSign spends only about $0.03 per domain name in actual maintenance costs, while pocketing the difference as profit.
Finally, he discounts recent speculations that ICANN is considering an urgent move to Switzerland to obtain de-facto diplomatic immunity from coming lawsuits…
ICANN is an arm of the US government in everything except an entry in the US Government Manual. And after watching the .xxx mess, it's pretty clear that neither the US Dept of Commerce nor the Dept of State will let ICANN be unsupervised.
… and offers the following solution:
The primary design principle is to know what we want to be done. From that we can create an institution that has exactly the authority it needs in order to accomplish that job and no more. For many of the jobs that we need done on the internet, the jobs are mainly clerical and non-discretionary - they could be hired out to a consulting firm. There are only a very few jobs of internet governance that deal with discretionary choices over matters in dispute.
A commentator asks the following question:
So when will the current DNS system get some competition? After all, we are not talking "Internet" (basically a set of inter-carrier contracts) just "Domain Name Resolution" and, well, that's a task that's really not rocket science anymore.
Is there really a problem - and if so, what is the solution? How would a competing DNS system work in practice?
First of all I don't see how they can legally keep teh fees for an application to have a custom exstention. They never accepted or denied the applications, so in a way it's not really an application if it hasn't be accepted or declined after such a period of time.
Second of all, I don't see how a new DNS system would work. When you say a new system do you meen a whole new thing, as in a whole new domain system?I'm quite confused about this.