[governance] ICANN stumbling on a hornet nest

[Karl Auerbach]

On 09/02/2012 01:49 PM, Fahd A. Batayneh wrote:
    Le 02/09/12 09:27, Roland Perry a écrit :
> 
>         What's different about the ICANN system is that a lone voice can
>         make a complaint which will be heard.

> Maybe a good example would be the court case that was filed by an
> earlier ICANN board member to get access to documents that ICANN
> rejected to reveal to him.

I am that board member.

Have you ever tried to chop eucalyptus logs with an ax?  The wood is so
rubbery that the blade just bounces off, leaving only a small notch: a
lot of effort for little progress.

ICANN is like a eucalyptus log.  If you want to affect it don't bring an
ax; bring a chain saw.

ICANN did not change much after my law suite prevailed.  In fact in some
ways they changed their procedures to become even more secretive.  For
instance their law firm changed their billing procedures so that rather
than enumerating the specific items of work and charges for that work
the monthly statements became a one-line statement of the total amount
of money due for the month's work.  This was done, I believe, to prevent
any future board member from evaluating the nature and quality of
ICANN's massive outflows of money to the law firm that created ICANN.

Attacks on me made by ICANN in their legal filings were, to my mind,
personal, gratuitous, unprofessional, and, of course, unfounded.  A
decade has passed and I can't remember whether we moved to exclude those
on the grounds that ICANN's "evidence" was not relevant to the case at
hand or whether we left it in as demonstrative of ICANN's way of
reacting to those it considered hostile.

Even after the court threw out ICANN's defenses and granted me nearly
every thing that I had asked ICANN's press releases tried to
characterize their utter defeat as if they had won a great victory.

And I am still ostracized by many former ICANN board members for taking
(and, of course, winning) that completely justified legal action.

Many of the case materials are online:

> https://w2.eff.org/Infrastructure/DNS_control/ICANN_IANA_IAHC/Auerbach_v_ICANN/

What surprised me the most was the degree to which ICANN was, and I
believe remains, an entity that does not comprehend the role of its
board of directors, both as a collective body and as individual members.

The larger consideration is that ICANN has always had an institutional
paranoia the engenders an automatic, visceral hostility to things that
are not delivered wrapped with almost sycophantic deference.

	--karl--




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