[governance] How do ICANN's actions hurt the average Internet

[Karl Auerbach]

On 07/07/2009 02:59 PM, George Sadowsky wrote:

(Different Karl here)...

> I think I understand what you are saying - that in the past individual
> registrants who signed up with TLDs that had not been explicitly
> approved by ICANN lost registration rights and had to re-register with
> an ICANN-approved TLD to obtain a domain name. That appears to be
> historically correct.

There are people who do have names in TLDs that are not found in ICANN's 
list.  These include the original .biz, IOD's .web and my .ewe.  (My 
wife has the name "beautiful.ewe", I, of course, have "wassamatta.ewe".)

The fact that ICANN doesn't have these in its inventory does not have 
any effect on the fact and reality that those relationships have 
substance and reality in the stream of interstate commerce.

For example, I have and use cavebear.web in IOD's .web.  We have a 
contractual relationship.  I can resolve those names even if many others 
can not.  If one says that "it isn't real" or "that it is a toy" I'd 
suggest that those same arguments once could have been applied to those 
things called "email" and "the world wide web".  I remember back in 1972 
when I handed out my ARPAnet email address and many people said "what's 
that?"

> However, apart from these incidents, can you identify any current harm
> that ICANN is doing to individual Internet users?

Well to start there is the amount of several hundred million $(US) that 
is being taken every year from internet users in the form of arbitrary 
and groundless registry fees that ICANN grants to TLD registries.  ICANN 
has not a clue what the actual costs of providing registry services are 
and seems to show no interest in finding out and much less interest in 
ever conforming those mandated fees to actual costs plus a reasonable 
TLD monopoly profit.  Even J.D. Rockefeller couldn't have worked out a 
sweeter deal.

Then there is the fact that ICANN has adopted privacy-busting policies 
that bend over to give solace to the trademark protection industry.

There are also many internet innovators who, albeit relatively few in 
number, who want to try out new ideas.  ICANN, acting like a 
trade-protective guild, has locked those people out of the marketplace 
and that, in turn, denies the internet community the opportunity to 
partake of new ideas.

Some ideas may be good, some may be silly, some may be duds:

For example, I have my .ewe TLD.  It is highly protective of privacy and 
has several other innovations - see http://www.eweregistry.com/ 
Although it is 100% lawful it violates ICANN's protectionist policies 
and it would be a waste of time and money for me to even apply to ICANN.

In the longer term I see enormous harm arising from ICANN's 
protectionism.  That harm would be the fragmentation of the DNS name space.

There are already many forces that create pressure to fragment the net 
in various ways:

First is the change in perception by users (a perception that is 
strongly encouraged by the large commercial providers such as Comcast 
and AT&T) that the net is not an end-to-end carrier of packets but, 
rather, is access to services such as web browsing, email, and skype. 
That change in perception makes it easy, and often desirable to a 
provider, to slip in application layer gateways for those few 
applications but with immeasurable ancillary damage arising from the 
death of the end-to-end principle.

Second is the IPv4 address issue.  IPv6 isn't taking off, and even if it 
does, because it is not an evolutionary protocol but really a new 
protocol, any IPv6 user who wants to experience the full richness of the 
net is still going to have to have an IPv4 address as well thus 
nullifying the pressure on the V4 address space.  The address pressure 
will drive people to install super-NATs and application layer gateways.

Third there is national pride and cultural groups that want to build 
their own view of the net.  One can't argue with the drive that makes 
parents want a better way to protect children from porn.  And one way 
for that drive to be satisfied is one that has been historically proven 
- separation, whether it the Mormons moving to Utah in 1846 or other 
groups.  They may, like China, find it useful to wall themselves in (or 
us out).  DNS is a useful tool when one wants to do that.

I think we are heading for a lumpy internet, one that more resembles our 
mobile phone networks here in the US - we can all call one another but 
other services don't work so well across provider boundaries.

ICANN's incumbent and TM industry protective policies are lubricating 
and fueling the engines that will create this lumpy internet.

There is one final way in which ICANN is harming internet users - ICANN 
projects the glamor (i.e. the false impression) that it actually is 
doing things to assure that DNS query packets are reliably, quickly, and 
accurately turned into DNS reply packets.

Users depend on that every second of every minute of internet use.  Yet 
ICANN does not provide any protections.

If the lights were to go out on a big part of DNS, as they did in 
actuality over the US Northeast, and somebody calls ICANN and says "fix 
it", ICANN's answer will be "not our job".  That somebody is going to be 
very surprised, and very unhappy, as will all those internet users who 
thought that it that was precisely ICANN's job.

ICANN does try to protect the name registration systems.  But that is 
really of interest to internet users when on those relatively rare 
occasions they want to acquire a name or update name server records.

ICANN has never imposed real operational standards on name server 
operators - the standards that are there are rather light weight - and 
there is nothing about recovery should bad things happen.  We have been 
fortunate that root server operators and TLD operators for the most part 
have run first class quality operations.  But there is nothing by ICANN 
that requires or even induces this halcyon state to continue into the 
future.

		--karl--
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