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

[George Sadowsky]

Karl,

You've written a thoughtful piece here.  I have some mixed reactions 
to your comments.

OIn addition, since you wrote, Roland has started a more technical 
discussion with you regarding some of the points you raise, and I 
would prefer not to mix my response in with that discussion.

I'll provide a short response here, and since we know each other 
personally, I'll look forward to welcoming you at my house the next 
time you visit your property in New Hampshire.  Meanwhile, I'll 
respond as best I can to what you have written.

  At 7:13 PM -0700 7/7/09, Karl Auerbach wrote:
>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".)

That's creative. :-)

>
>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?"

I understand the difference in philosophy here regarding what should 
go into the root and how easily it should go in  --  and who should 
say whether and when it goes in.

However, given ICANN's current de facto authority over the root, I 
think that creating new TLDs outside that framework and providing 
such addresses to others DOES disadvantage ordinary users by giving 
them generally non-resolvable addresses.  And it's the average user 
that I'm focusing upon here.

>
>>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.

I'm not sure that this is still true, but if so, I agree that ICAN 
should have better information.  On the other hand, it's difficult to 
get excited about a $6-$10 per year charge, especially since the 
average user doesn't need one to benefit from the Internet, and those 
users sho need one can presumably afford it (since the cost of 
computers and netwrk connectivity are orders of magnitude larger.

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

I have some concerns regarding the role that the IPR community plays. 
I also have concerns about the current interplay between IDN TLDs and 
the IPR community's concerns.  In fat, one could argue that if ICAN 
were to hold up IDN TLDs in favor of the IPR community's concerns, 
then this would clearly be harmful to those users  --  and there are 
a LOT of them  -- who are unable to use the latin character set.

>
>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.

Yes, if others decide to abandon ICAN's model and go around it. 
That's in effect what you're doing with .ewe, isn't it?

Karl, that does not help the average user.

>
>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.

It's not clear what ICANN's role is here.

>
>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.

Perhaps so; again ICANN is supplying the addresses through the RIRs 
and is doing what it can in the way of education.  Would you argue 
that any of this is harmful?

>
>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.

The relationship with the root server operators has been essentially 
cooperative and voluntary, as is the relationship with the IETF. This 
system of voluntary distributed administration of the Internet has 
brought us to where we are now, for better or for worse.  More 
centralized and tightly coupled systems have existed in the past  -- 
remember SNA??  -- but anything like that would not have spread as 
quickly or as innovatively as what we have now. Internet 
administration is an evolutionary process, and I recognize that a 
number of your suggestions are designed to help it in the next stage 
of its evolution.

There is certainly room to discuss models of Internet administration, 
and that is what the IGF is trying to do.  My own assessment is that 
the IGF operates very much on the political level, with some 
disregard for technical realities, whereas the I* community (ICANN, 
ISOC, IAB, IETF, IESG, RIRs, etc.) proceeds to evolve more on a base 
of operational and technical reality.

Finally, I hope we continue this conversation in person.  My focus is 
likely to be primarily on the average user.  I want the domain name 
system to help that user navigate the Internet and obtain the 
information resource and communications capabilities that he/she 
needs.  I view ICANN as one of the organizations that is involved in 
providing that assistance, and I think that it should abide by the 
Hipocratic oath, "Do no harm."  After that, let's see how we can 
evolve it  --  as well as the whole administrative structure of which 
it is a part  -- to "do better."



>
>		--karl--

Regards,

George
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