Whistleblowing and ICANN

by kierenmccarthy on May 16, 2013

A curious email appeared in my inbox this morning. It was titled ‘Concerns at ICANN’, was addressed to the Board, signed ‘A Concerned Employee’, and came through an anonymous Hushmail email account.

Broadly, the email provides, in some detail, this person’s concerns about an influx of management at the domain name system overseer ICANN. It lists nine recent additions to the ICANN staff and highlights their connections to the CEO and COO which range from “former co-worker” to “former neighbor”.

It is widely known that the current CEO and COO worked with one another in the same roles at their previous company. Given the extraordinary complex and fast-moving world that ICANN inhabits, this has been seen by the Internet community as a good thing: a strong personal relationship at the top. But the email argues a significant downside.

“The normal checks and balances that exist between a CEO and COO do not exist at ICANN because of the long standing close and personal relationship between Fadi [Chehade, CEO] and Akram [Atallah, COO],” it states.

It goes on to outline a series of concerns: staff are reluctant to take concerns direct to the CEO; senior hires have not gone through a proper interviewing process; loyalty is valued above competency; groupthink is appearing as a problem.

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Is the dark side of new gTLDs starting to emerge?

by kierenmccarthy on April 18, 2012

Last week, I received a highly unusual email claiming that an article on my personal website was libellous and insisting I take it down within a week.

Even more unusually, the article was from 2002 – yes nearly a decade ago – it is called “Domain scam merchants get legs sucked by toothless OFT” and it tells how the same man had had his knuckles rapped by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in the UK having been caught trying to sell domains for top-level domains that do not exist. Examples were dot-brit, dot-sex, dot-scot.

The OFT had failed to do anything until the two people at the heart of the story crossed the line in the United States by using 9/11 as a way of advertising “patriotic” dot-usa domains (which also do not exist). The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was not at all amused and got a temporary restraining order against them, even putting out a news release on the matter. There were a series of other news releases as the FTC fought them, winning “as much as $300,000 for consumer redress”. Clearly selling non-existent domain names can be a profitable business done right.

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Who should control the Internet?

January 15, 2012

It is going to be a particularly crazy year in terms of Internet policy and governance, maybe even more than so than 2005, when the World Summit on the Information Society happened. NPR used the launch of the new gTLD program last week to cover the other big issue – actual governance of the Internet. [...]

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My analysis of the broken ICANN culture

January 13, 2012

I wrote an extensive review of the dot-jobs saga earlier this week on .Nxt called: The case study that could kill ICANN. This afternoon, I saw the Stephane van Gelder had referenced it in a blog post: What ICANN is doing wrong. I wrote a lengthy response to Stephane’s post, but for some reason it [...]

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Xmas vid about my little girl

December 2, 2011

We’re heading to the UK for Christmas. I’ve been meaning to try out this online video/picture tool at Animoto for work reasons. The two combined…

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Why won’t my van start?

November 13, 2011

I need your help. And I am counting on you and the power of the Internet to fix an issue dear to my heart. I have a gorgeous 1966 split-screen VW camper van. And rather cruelly I have left it on its own for basically a year at my mother-in-law’s house because the practicality of [...]

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ICANN public comments: a glacier moving in the wrong direction

September 6, 2011

I am both happy and depressed to see a public comment period open at ICANN talking about making changes to ICANN’s public comment period process. With appalling inevitability, everything about the comment period highlights the problems that exist with the public comment period process. No one really knows about it, and it’s not being promoted [...]

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Threatening faxes, dot-xxx and an angry Vint Cerf

May 14, 2011

One of the more bizarre situations I have found myself in while covering domain name system overseer ICANN, both outside and inside the organization, was at the Vancouver meeting in December 2005. It was a particularly difficult meeting. For one, ICANN was under intense scrutiny because it was about to sign an extension to the [...]

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I wish [bang!] ICANN would [bang!] read its own [bang!] papers

February 25, 2011

Sorry to always be harping on about ICANN; it’s the not exactly the most important organisation in the world. But it is the one bureaucracy I have come to know really well and so just can’t help but rail against all the things that infuriate people the world over when they come up against unthinking [...]

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United Nations continues to undermine Internet Governance Forum

February 24, 2011

The first preparatory meeting for the 2011 Internet Governance Forum has ended with a significant degree of uncertainty thanks to ongoing bureaucratic delays. Over two days, representatives from business, government, civil society and the technical community met in Geneva in order to decide the path forward for the sixth annual meeting of the Forum, dedicated [...]

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