Re: <nettime> ICANN - Info Alert #1

[ronda@ais.org (Ronda Hauben)]

sam <sam@myspinach.org> writes:

>Some have described ICANN as the World Economic Forum of the cyberworld.
>Others say that  ICANN embodies corporate takeover of the Net. ICANN itself
>will say that it is a non-profit organisation doing the best it can for the
>growth of the internet.  ICANN is meeting in Melbourne from March 10 to
>13th, 2001.

Yes it is good to point out that instead of the Internet continuing
its tradition of creating good institutions that welcome feedback
and spread decision making and input into these decisions among 
the people they will affect, the Internet is now adopting the 
kinds of centralized institutional forms that are run by and 
for the interests of corporate entities like the Worldbank and 
the World Economic Forum and the ITU.

ICANN is the step in this direction.

>The purpose of this email is to encourage further investigation of ICANN.
>Some of the information presented is speculation and scenario driven - but
>I feel that there needs to be more people looking at ICANN and its
>functions. Apologies for its length.

Well you should know that there has been investigation of ICANN
and much protest (in the US and around the world) against its
creation as a way to privatize public policy and to illegally
transfer public assets that belong in public hands to a private
entity created under the laws for a charity in California.

ICANN is an inappropriate form for the protection and scaling of 
the essential functions of the Internet's infrastructure.

However the fight against ICANN has made some progress as the 
effort of the US government under the Clinton administration 
to transfer public property to a private entity was at least
postponed and the news blockade against the problems with 
ICANN was broken thru to some small extent.

I have some of the posts online about the fight at 
http://www.ais.org/~ronda

Also the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report 
about ICANN saying that the US government couldn't constitutionally
transfer public property to ICANN as it was planning on doing.

Also there were some good articles in Telepolis on this situation, 
and in recent issues of the Amateur Computerist over the past two 
years. See http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn for the issues on
the DNS transfer beginning with the special supplement in Summer of 1998
and search at Telepolis for the articles there that several people,
including John Horvath wrote about the problems with ICANN.

Ronda

Also see http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other

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