[governance] Framework convention

[Karl Auerbach]

Alejandro Pisanty wrote:

> your posting reaches a level of offense, bias, and falsehood, and is 
> based on so thin a basis of qualifications of yours to emit it, that 
> civil response becomes an exercise in restraint. Allow me to exert it.

Falsehood?  No, what I said is quite true and has never been 
contradicted by concrete facts.  You offer none.

Bias?  Truth is not biased.

Offense - None is intended to you.

The subject here is Internet governance, in the stark reality of what it 
is, what it ought to be, what it can not be, and how it ought to be 
done.  ICANN, because it is am important lessen, must be examined with 
clarity and without self-deception.

In that harsh light of reality ICANN as an institution of governance has 
been an abject failure (except to a a few industrial beneficiaries); 
less a model of what to do than as warning about what not to do.

ICANN fails to do its essential purpose - protecting the technical 
stability of the DNS.  You have not offered any concrete facts to 
contradict this.

The community of internet users - natural people and businesses - live 
under the shadow of technical instability, manipulation, or failure of 
the upper tiers of DNS because ICANN has abrogated its responsibilities. 
  You have not offered any concrete facts to contradict this.

And at the same time ICANN has turned into a captured body that is best 
described as a combination in restraint of trade with direct costs onto 
the community of internet users on the order of half a billion dollars 
(US) every year.  You have not offered any concrete facts to contradict 
this.

As we go forward into the new world of internet governance we should pay 
careful attention to avoid the mistakes that underlie ICANN:

There was the mistake of non-comprehension of the technology either then 
or now.

There was the mistake of hubris that said that it was acceptable to 
establish a paternalistic governance structure that imposes the choices 
and values of  selected industrial "stakeholders" onto the entire 
internet community.

There was the mistake of forgetting that the primary purpose was to 
assure technical stability and, instead making social, economic, and 
business choices that had only the most tenuous of tenuous relationships 
to technical matters.

Then there was the mistake of mission creep to the degree in which ICANN 
is now so bloated that its budget forecasts are now within an order of 
magnitude of the ITU.

If ICANN can't take the heat of the truth then it ought to get out of 
the kitchen.

		--karl--







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