You wrote: > > Good to see you alive and kicking, Michael! ;-)
What good is being alive without kicking? > The original 1998 agreement mandated that nearly half of the ICANN board > would represent users (9 of 19). True enough. Sims admitted as much to the Congressional committee. But what the DoC mandated, and what ICANN says, don't amount to a hill of beans. Neither has any intention of implementing what they say. What the DoC and ICANN say is spin, pure PR scam. We're dealing with liars and cheats here. That's what needs to be understood. > Had that commitment been honored and had > it been implemented fairly (i.e. through elections), then ICANN would have > had much to recommend it. But that's precisely the point. It wasn't implemented, and neither the DoC nor its ICANN stooges ever had any intention of doing so. They don't now, and never will. Appealing to them to play fair is like asking your tormentors to have a heart. They don't, and if you expect them to, you are caught in their game, a victim of their con. The US Congressmen on the committees that held hearings on ICANN understood. They saw exactly what was going on: a fix, packaged with a transparent shuck for those who needed it, the bleeding heart lefties and liberals who are willing to let any travesty get by so long as they have an excuse for doing nothing to stop it. And that's what happened. When the Congressional committees heard, from Sims own lips, that they and we had been lied to, why didn't they do something about it? Simple: they're used to the way the gov operates. It's not just the DoC, it's all the executive agencies. A small group of people, maybe only one or two, decide on policy, usually anti-popular policy. Then they package it for mass consumption. The packaging for the Internet governance coup was the Green Paper. The DoC, knowing there was not yet any organized Internet community to create a democratic base for a democratic Internet government, got some operatives to claim they represented the Internet. Who could say they didn't? It was well played. You ask the DoC to get ICANN to reform? You're wasting your time, except for maybe giving the DoC a good laugh. ICANN is the DoC's baby. It's the DoC who pulls the strings. If the DoC wanted users in ICANN, there'd be users in it. They don't, and there aren't. It's as simple as that. M.S.
