ICANN Marrakech is over, save the Board meeting. And this fact was – as it always is – sufficient reason for everyone to head to the bar and mull things over while consuming (un)healthy quantities of booze.

What was the upshot of this week-long meeting in Morocco? Well, the general bottom-up consensus was that not much had happened. Except really it had. And the feeling was that it had been a very amiable meeting. Which, in a deeper sense, it hadn’t.

The reality is that ICANN Marrakech has, albeit pleasantly, lived under the shadow of the US government’s MoU renewal. What really is shameful is that there wasn’t a single public meeting in which this vitally important contract was discussed. Instead, we have had a semi-official, parallel and secret ICANN process instituted to discuss the matter, and a long series of constituencies pondering how best to deal with it, which will most likely contribute little or nothing to the final result.

While I’m being negative and grumpy about a meeting that most people seem to have enjoyed, here’s a list of wrongs. After that, it’s time to discuss the prostitutes.

Wrong: No public meeting about the MoU
Wrong: Poorly attended and poorly run open Board sessions
Wrong: A failure to recognise and prioritise what people were trying to say about ICANN
Wrong: A lack of plain speaking and a series of fixed debates (excusing the excellent domain name workshop)

There are more but it’s best not to dwell. What everyone noticed – and the reason why they are still coming to these meetings – is that things are beginning to change (again). ICANN has bought in a lot of new, and talented, staff and since the recruits haven’t had time to soak up the staff bunker mentality, there is a refreshing feeling of optimism and openness.

Roll-call

ICANN staff have managed to gain some respect from the wider community for the first time in a long time. The new head of IANA, David Conrad, is widely seen as the right man to grasp the poisoned chalice. Tina Dam is gradually winning people over. The new regional liaisons had a dramatic effect on people by speaking in the languages of the regions where they have been assigned and then instantly translating it into English. The new head of communications has been listening to people. There is a real sense that ICANN might just been transforming into something to be pleased with and proud of, rather than appalled and disgusted with.

And ICANNWiki has come of age. In fact it is now probably the best source of information on the Net about ICANN and it has come about with the simple application of small bits of efforts from large numbers of people. Yes, remember that? It used to be called Internet culture.

The weak point of ICANN however – and it remains dangerous to even mention this – is the man who has become the figurehead of this organisation and, in many respects, the Internet itself, Dr Vint Cerf.

ICANN Marrakech is the first meeting where I have seen people openly – albeit still in relatively hushed tones – criticise the “father of the Internet”. The fact is that the commanding respect that Vint has enjoyed for so many years is ebbing away. This always happens with strong leaders. They are effective by being single-minded but the single-mindedness separates them from the current of thought, and leads to their eventual usurping. Dr Cerf is out of touch and it is beginning to show, and people are beginning to comment on it. He has noticed this and reacted aggressively, which has, of course, only reinforced the feeling.

Here are some comments I have heard this week wrt Vint Cerf:

• How come is it that Google isn’t video-casting this whole thing?
• How dare he talk to me like that. If he does it again…
• I’m sick of this demagogue status
• I don’t think he even knows what open-source software is
• Isn’t it time he went?

The good news is that Vint will stand down next year as no one is allowed to serve more than three terms. Since this is widely known and because it isn’t too far away, Dr Vint Cerf will get the rapturous applause and respect he is due when he does indeed step down without the ugly confrontation that came with, for example, Margaret Thatcher’s demise. But there may be some unpleasantness in the meantime.

The ice! The ice!

Talking of unpleasantness, there has been a long series of illnesses in Marrakech. Following the Tuesday Chez Ali meet-up, a number of people decided to spend the next day in their bathrooms rather than the conference centre. The same happened following the Wednesday .mobi event at a local restaurant, and a number of ICANN regulars were spotted the next day looking very tired and green.

This led to a regular exchanges as people attempted to locate the culprit: did you eat the chicken in the cous-cous? Did you eat the skin of the lamb? What did you drink? Where you sat on the toilet, or clutching it? And so on.

Eventually, it was Mrs Michael Palage – who had spend the night nursing her husband while feeling rotten herself – who figured it out. The ice cubes! she cried. And sure enough, the culprit has been found. A moment’s silence then for all the bodily fluids expelled in the past few days thanks to dodgy frozen water.

Bars and prossies

I hate bars and clubs with lots of local prostitutes. The worst are in Cuba where they actually make it impossible for you to talk to your friends by constantly squeezing you and more often than not trying to get on your lap. It is somehow demeaning for both the girls themselves and for you because you are treated as if all you need is a wink and a flash of clevage and you’re willing to spend daft amounts of money of someone you don’t know and most likely wouldn’t like if you met them socially.

I’ve been told by female friends that this discomfort is healthy for my soul: it gives a man an insight into how women are often treated merely as sexual organs on legs. But if I’ve being really honest, the worst thing about such bars is that when you arrive and a series of extremely good-looking women turn and smile at you, that you know they are professionals. How? Because you never have that impact on women normally. The perversity of feeling less attractive while being eyed-up by doe-eyed maidens is too much for a simple-minded sod like myself.

A lot of men are of course happy to believe this fantasy, and are willing to pay heavily for it, but us lot – the people with the obsessive minds who are self-selecting ICANN delegees – don’t like it. The girls, bless em, must have thought all their birthdays had come at once when a huge conference of men descended on the hotel under which they ply their trade. But you can imagine that tonight, when everyone has gone home, they will be moaning to each other in Arabic: “Bah! These Internet men are no good. I even promised him two girls for same price and he said no!”

Incidentally, one delegee put this investigative reporter to shame and embarked on his own fact-finding mission. 300 euros, apparently. Of course, this being Morocco, that was only the start of the bartering. No doubt she would have been insulted if he’d agreed to that price right away. It’s the culture, you know.

Jon Postel repercussions

ICANN is in for some very, very big changes in the next few years and everyone is trying to get a handle on it. My response has been to consider “what ifs…”

Jon Postel what ifs are the most intriguing. The biggest: what if Jon Postel had not died when he did? Dr Postel believed that the Internet space should have been hundreds of top-level domains right from the word go. Just imagine how different the Net would be now if there was a .news, .house, .glass, .mac, .monkey, .sleepy-bye-bye. I have a rough estimate in my mind that 60 percent of all the controversial created on the Internet and forced upon ICANN since 1998 has come about through unnecessary scarcity of domain names, and the resulting power plays by rich companies keen to defend their position.

Another big one: what if Jon Postel had had a sturdy lawyer when he was told by Ira Magaziner that he would face criminal actions when his “test” shifted half the Internet out of the control of the US government? If he had told Mr Magaziner where to stick his threats, the US government would never had gained control and another 30 percent of the Internet’s woes would have been avoided.

What if ICANN hadn’t decided to kill all the At Large Board members thanks to the distracting appearance of Karl Auerbach? Would the public inclusion that ICANN is now so desperate to seek have happened automatically? Would the influx of people outside the existing ICANN-Internet community have made it all work better?

What if George W Bush’s swinging chads had swung the other way, if 9/11 hadn’t happened? Would the USG still stubbornly be insisting on keeping control of IANA and ICANN? Would it still be disrupting the flow of ICANN’s processes for its own ends?

The what ifs are a good check on where we are, and where we could have been. Do any of them point to a better internet, to a more effective ICANN? Because if they do, what if the Internet community decided that was where it wanted to be anyway?

Marrakech has become, for almost arbitrary reasons, one of the hubs of the Internet’s history. The meetings held here in the past 20 years have decided the fate of a medium that is almost certain to revolutionise and alter every aspect of our lives on this planet. There is an odd sense that somehow this meeting has added to that long history.

How, no one has yet figured out.

It’s difficult to know if there is anything more frustrating that being unable to get on the Internet at an ICANN meeting, but then I’m certain that the greengrocers of Georgia or undertakers of Uxbridge have an anecdote or two to put that in shadow.

While it’s nice having a much bigger conference venue than usual – no more cramming on plastic chairs – its size has made it increasingly difficult to find anyone. I know for a fact that a series of people I want to catch up with are here somewhere because everyone keeps telling me they’ve seen them. But can I find them? Everyone has ended up communicating with email which is fine except for if you can’t get an Internet connection at which point you realise that you have rudely stood-up three different people without even being aware of it. And it’s still only 11am.

I would, of course, have popped out of the meeting I was in without Net access and with held my laptop under the nearest access point were it not for the fact that the domain name workshop proved to be fascinating viewing. And it wasn’t just me – everyone in the room was amazed at how these building blocks of the Net have now become such an advanced industry that people are making millions from simply owning obscure domains for five days.

Everyone in the room was stifling the same thought: hang on, I could do this. It’s not illegal and frankly I’ve always fancied a second home in the Seychelles. But such is the proud moral standing of the Internet community that such thoughts were washed from our minds. It didn’t stop the pannelists from having a bit of argy-bargy over systems, changes, even lawsuits going on between them. It was great theatre and, amazingly, hugely informative.

There was only one thing missing from the session, however: it needed someone to hold up large cards behind each speaker outlining just how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they had made that month from the particular practice they were now defending with vague love-terms such as “innovation”, “competition” and “fat wallets”.

The reality

The simple fact is, as everyone knows, that the existing system of getting hold of domains has to change. Currently less than 20 companies in the world bombard the same server millions of times over a two-hour period every day and remove any chance that anyone else in the world will ever have to get hold of a particular name on the Net. It’s not exactly hard to see why the companies that have invested in highly technical, advanced systems just to achieve this goal are unhappy about changes but then it’s much easier to see why the system will have to change.

Steve Crocker – one of the men that actually built the Internet – was scathing about the current situation and won a rare round of applause. The highly respected Sabine Dolderer from Denic – representing the second-biggest registry in the world following dotcom – also asked why on earth the system was as it was. The simple answer, as we all know, is profit. As the immortal John Berryhill pointed out: the Internet is unique in that it makes money even when it doesn’t do anything. Has there every been a more enticing pitch?

Chez Ali

It was Tuesday night, so it must be ICANN local culture extravaganza night. Every meeting, the local hosts put on a cultural event which involves eating, drinking, chatting, gawping in wide-eyed amazement at the entertainment and then eating, drinking and chatting some more.

For those that have been to Marrakech before, they had already had the Chez Ali experience – something which apparently is classic tourist fare. What happens is this: you drive for 20 minutes out of Marrakech, drive down a dark road into a huge constructed Moroccan courtyard where you are greeted by men on horseback, man with long trumpets and women ululating (love that sound). There you take a few snaps, take a seat and then tuck into what appears to be an entire lamb plonked on the table followed soon thereafter by cous-cous and veg.

And then the show starts…

Being a miserable sod, I found the horse tricks, belly dancing and men charging with their horses and then firing guns terrific – but only the first time I saw it. After the woman had rotated on the cardboard fort for the 600th time, I headed to the bar, where you had the opportunity to pay three times normal beer prices in return for sound-proofing.

It was in the bar that even Sir Milton Mueller revealed the depths to which a few hundred traditionally dressed Moroccans can drive a man. I proposed loudly (over the gunfire) that the Moroccans must be out of touch with the real world because one of their biggest money-spinners was to take snaps of you at dinner and then try to sell the pictures for 20 euros an hour later. Didn’t they realise that 90 percent of people now had digital cameras? Sir Milton sheepishly pulled out his table’s photo. But it wasn’t just him. My table – comprising the freak element of the top-level domain market: .cat, .xxx and .berlin – all got one and loved it dearly. Fortunately I found a voice of sanity in a fetching OECD representative who had never been to an ICANN meeting before and so remained unsullied from the madness that it clearly induces.

The biggest disappointment of the night though was that Vint Cerf wasn’t put through the normal mildly humiliating experience of having to join in with the festivities. Seeing the father of the Internet charging along on a horse, with one foot in the stirrups, swing down and scoop up an item off the ground would have made ICANN Marrakech. The strange thing is though that you wouldn’t put it past him to pull it off.