For what it's worth, ICANN's been pretty clear from the start that the
initial board would be doing policy, too--this from the Nov. 14 meeting
(I'd been thinking of "interim" and "initial" as interchangeable before this):
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/archive/transmembership.html
3 MR. ZITTRAIN: Well, if I may, I think
4 you're making at least two points. One is, and it
5 was made earlier, you have to know what the
6 organization as a whole is doing before you can
7 actually define how the membership would play a
8 role in it. And secondly, more specifically, to
9 the extent that what it's doing is operational and
10 those are the decisions that require
11 accountability, you want to even say is it the
12 Board doing it, is it people appointed by the
13 Board, is it the president or people under --
14 MR. CLARK: Right, I was just stressing
15 the second question, you know, that -- I'm -- the
16 question of how the Board is selected has a lot to
17 do with what -- the role they play versus the
18 subsidiary organizations and so forth and so on.
19 MR. ZITTRAIN: Yeah.
20 MS. DYSON: Yeah. Well, with -- yeah,
21 not everything is clear, but clearly we are more
22 than -- we will be making policy decisions; Mike
23 Roberts will be -- and his successor, as a more
24 permanent president, will be carrying out the
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1 operational side of the business and making things
2 run and so forth and so on. So it really is a
3 combination. But we're an -- we are an initial
4 Board right now. That's why we're called initial.
5 It wasn't actually interim. And one reason we're
6 an initial Board is because we are initiating a
7 lot of these policies about how we are governed
8 going forward. So especially this initial Board
9 is very much concerned with defining exactly what
10 we're talking about here: Membership,
11 accountability, procedures, the structure of the
12 supporting organizations and so forth.
Given the aggressive timetable established between the USG and NSI for
running the testbed on multiple registrar registrations, and the
expectation in that agreement that ICANN would establish accreditation
guidelines, it doesn't seem off base to publish draft guidelines without a
DNSO yet in place, no? Or is this an argument for the speedier recognition
of a DNSO to keep pace with these developments? ...JZ
At 04:20 PM 2/14/99 , Jay Fenello wrote:
>At 2/10/99, 11:35 PM, Dean Robb wrote:
>>>We have heard "It's just temporary" over and over again, used to silence
>>>fears and criticism. If the bylaws didn't stipulate that the ICANN Interim
>>>Board was just temporary, and that they wouldn't make policy decisions, who
>>>among us would have accepted their "temporary" approval by the NTIA?
>>
>>I seem to recall that in international politics, many a "temporary"
>>violation of agreements was later renamed "fait accompli".
>>
>>I have not been involved in this process from the beginning, I'm not a
>>world-renowned expert on the 'Net, I'm just a user (although I'd like to
>>think more clueful than most).
>>But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that ICANN appears to be
>>setting up a takeover of the control of the Internet and make their
>>"temporary" approval by NTIA "permanent" via fiat.
>>
>>EVERYTHING I've seen from ICANN and their procedures has been a manuvering
>>to make themselves de facto NewCo, rather than setting the stage for NewCo.
>> All their decisions, procedures, actions, etc. seem to be more intended to
>>position themselves as the 'Net Authority so they can then turn to the USG
>>and say "we've done all the work...why bring someone else in now?"
>>
>>May I suggest that some of these complaints voiced here regarding ICANN
>>find their way to the people in the USG who will be making decisions on the
>>transition of power?
>
>
>To which I would add . . .
>
>The proposed draft guidelines for ICANN "registrars"
>makes our wranglings over the DNSO substantially moot.
>
>Virtually every policy that would normally be considered
>by a DNSO is *already* decided in these draft guidelines.
>
>
>Respectfully,
>
>Jay Fenello
>President, Iperdome, Inc.
>404-943-0524 http://www.iperdome.com
Jon Zittrain
Harvard Law School
Executive Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu
Lecturer on Law
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/is98
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj
+ 1 617 495 4643
+ 1 617 495 7641 (fax)
