ICANN’s processes are not open. You may believe they are because you have ready access to the information and the people with the information. Things are changing but ICANN cannot claim to be open as yet. For instance:

* Agenda of Board meetings. For a long time no one had a clue when they were of what was going to be discussed. That is partially solved now, with the agenda and dates going up on the website, but there are still sudden meetings and things are still added to or removed from the agenda at the will of the chairman, sometimes without explanation.
* Board meeting minutes. We are constantly told that free-ranging and intelligent debate is held during Board meetings. But people don’t buy it when the final decision appears to go against what everyone has been saying. Everyone is simply not willing to accept the word of people within the meeting with the most to gain – and nor should they be. The little that we have seen of Board meetings, appears to demontrate that half the Board gets involved in debate and the other say nothing or contribute nothing – and then vote in the way the chairman wishes them to. That’s how it looks from the outside. If it’s wrong, ICANN needs to prove so.
* If there is a bottom-up consensus, why doesn’t ICANN publish the papers produced by ICANN staff summarising issues? Surely this is just a case of boiling down what people have said if there is a bottom-up process? The problem is, and we all know it, that the ICANN staff frequently provide a one-sided brief to the Board which pushes ICANN staff’s best interests. And the Board has been very weak in bringing this distortion of the decision-making process to account.
* It is nigh on impossible to find relevant information. ICANN now recognises that simply posting something to the website (where it can’t be found even if you knew it had gone up) does not justify the constant refrain that “it has been up for public comment”. But that is a very recent development. The black hole of the ICANN website has been carefully used for years to push through changes that ICANN staff know people won’t like.
* The process that decides who gets what role within ICANN and ICANN constituencies is opaque at best and downright corrupt in some places. The same people have been in the same job – and here I mean mostly committees and constituencies that the process is stale and self-contained. There is an in-crowd to the extent that everyone goes along with bad decisions because they don’t want to incur displeasure. That is a poor way to reaching consensus.
* ICANN pays no attention to public comments made on the website and as a result no one bothers to post any, which is then used as an indication that everything must be fine. Everyone *knows* that is what happens and yet everyone also pretends they don’t.
* The first instinct within ICANN at the moment is not to give information. It is then referred to an over-burdened legal department in a permanent state of anxiety, slowing the process down even further and causing a culture to be created of just not bothering to provide information.
* There is no appeals process. It is a phantom. And everybody *knows* it, except everybody pretends not to. That is ridiculous and has caused – and it always has done and always will do – an element of corruption because people ultimately know they can do what they want anyway. It breeds contempt for people that argue whereas in fact what ICANN should be doing is encouraging debate, not stifling it.

I’m sure I have more, but there are some real-world problems with ICANN at the moment.

Kieren

My concern is that is exactly what will happen, so it’s in everyone’s interests to make sure there is no secrecy and there is open discussion so the best choices are made and so people that may not agree with the decision can at least respect the fact it was arrived at by consensus.

Kieren

Problem is that there are so many interests behind ICANN, that sometimes it’s funny to see how exactly these interests are the loudest speakers asking for transperancy on the Board level, but there’s no transperancy at their own level…

So, my suggestion would be – let’s change ICANN towards better, but let’s do it wisely.

What you suggest in your second paragraph does not change anything, except that it will not be called ICANN.

Let’s stay focused on the positive things we can do. Destruction is easy.

As for IANA. I think there’s three groups that could run IANA *today* if they had to. ICANN, CENTR and the loose conglomeration of existing root server managers. You could even just take the ICANN staff dealing with IANA, pull them out, stick in a few managers and a board of top-DNS engineers and IETF people and 90 percent of IANA would be done.

But as it is, it makes more sense to stick with ICANN and try to iron out all the problems.

Kieren