ICANN

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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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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Broken deadlines, broken bylaws, broken ICANN?

February 23, 2011

Where is ICANN’s 2010 Annual Report? It is typically produced at the end of the calendar year. The 2009 Report was published on 24 December 2009, and the 2008 Report on 31 December 2008. It is currently 23 February 2011 and so far no 2010 Annual Report. Two months late is sloppy by any measure, [...]

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USG Submission to the GAC Scorecard re New gTLDs

January 31, 2011

Background: At a meeting in December, the ICANN Board and GAC agreed to a special session to be held in February that would be dedicated to trying to find a way to deal with GAC concerns over the new gTLD process and the dot-xxx application. The GAC has been preparing documents for the meeting – [...]

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So what does that weird GAC wording actually mean?

January 27, 2011

UPDATE: The ICANN Board just published the minutes from its meeting on Tuesday and intriguingly it has formally “triggered” the GAC-Board consultation that is explained in greater depth below. That means the Board is prepared to say it disagrees with the GAC on 17 March and then, presumably, will approve the Applicant Guidebook at its [...]

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