Mr. Pickering and House Science Committee Members- I had a long talk today with Mark Harrington, staff on the U.S. Congress House of Representatives Committee on Science Subcommittee on Basic Research, overseers of the Internet privatization process until authority passed to Tom Bliley's Commerce Committee and organizers of the hearing on October 7th at which Beckwith Burr and Joe Sims appeared as witnesses. Mark told me that you, Mr. Pickering, who chaired the March and October hearings, have moved onto the Commerce Committee, although not as chairman. However, Tom Davis, Gil Gutknecht, Connie Morella and the other congressmen and women who sat at the hearings and asked Ms. Burr and Mr. Sims all those embarrassing questions about ICANN are, according to Mark, still on the Science committees. Mark and I hypothesized about what all those honest and concerned representatives of the American people might be thinking these days about the process that they worked so hard to learn enough about to be able to ask the right questions of the right people, but we came up with no satisfying theory about your current state of mind, other than to surmise that you must be as perplexed as some of us are about Commerce's inactivity, their absence of follow-through. And then there's the matter of the unanswered Bliley letters, those missives that, six months ago, seemed to echo the thoughts and preoccupations of so many of us on these lists: what authority does the Department of Commerce have for transferring the A root to ICANN?; how was the interim board chosen?; who will take responsibility if things go wrong? What ever happened to William Daley's reply to those letters from Tom Bliley? No one seems to know. Mark had seen the posting I did yesterday, asking for the record to be corrected so as not to carry the untruth that the ICANN interim board was elected. He told me that the committees had nothing to do with that, and he was the editor of the official record so I guess he ought to know. According to Mark it was Joe Sims himself who wrote that preface to his replies to the follow-up questions. Yup, Joe wrote a little ditty in the third person, style of "Joe Sims this" and "Joe Sims that", just as if it was the official word of the editor of the record, and snuck it in as a preamble to the Q&A. It's all there on page 350. So it was apparently Joe Sims who wrote "the interim At Large members of the ICANN Initial Board have been elected". It figures. I should have known that no one on the committees, much less Mark Harrington, would have stuck in something as odious as that phrase, which might yet become somebody's epitaph. No, I was in error yesterday when I suggested that the Committees had been at fault. It was Joe Sims just being his normal self, telling lies. I guess when you've lied under oath to the elected representatives of the American people in front of the press and the Internet community, a few more lies for the record just seem like a good day's work. Michael Sondow
