[NA-Discuss] Fwd: "Domain Protection Racket" Promotion on Network Solutions Home Page

John R. Levine johnl at iecc.com
Tue Aug 30 21:11:45 UTC 2011


> In other words: "Please don't practice armchair quarterbacking, if you
> do not like the way the ICANN policies are going, join your respective
> community and participate in the consensus building process!"

Been there, done that, got several nice shirts.

In case it's not obvious, ICANN is about as egregious a case of regulatory 
capture as you could imagine.  Despite pious noises to the contrary, ICANN 
exists to serve the registries and registrars who pay its bills.  It 
doesn't help that a chronically weak board has never been able to exert 
more than nominal supervision over the staff.

While the ALAC and other peripheral groups have some modest effect around 
the edges, e.g., we might get them to say that pre-registration is bad, 
the bottom-up stuff is mostly a way to try to deny the authority that 
governments, particularly the US government, have over ICANN.

At this point, effective changes to ICANN will only come via government 
directives and lawsuits in US courts, not through bottom-up wishful 
thinking.

R's,
John



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