With the approval of the VeriSign deal, the ICANN Board let the world know it has only one principle — the Pillow Principle, by which it takes the imprint of the last heavy thing that sat on it.

The ICANN Board’s famous, time-tested, and widely-attested willingness to ignore its membership and constituencies, its own rules, and its stated principles in exchange for dubious benefits from those with money and power has finally begun to bear fruit.

Everyone now knows the ICANN Board can be pushed around.

After VeriSign did it, the Chinese government did it, and now the Canadian registry CIRA is doing it. VeriSign had commercial aims, the Chinese have linguistic reasons, and CIRA has policy reasons. Whatever the reason, the ICANN Board can no longer wrap itself in whatever shreds of principle it had pretended to retain. The pretense of consensus is no longer tenable — it’s all about power.

The approval of the agreement with VeriSign has broken open the floodgates. VeriSign might have been a bit more civic-minded, but they’re a commercial company. If VeriSign’s demands were excessive, it was ICANN’s job to say no.

But ICANN has long since become a shiver looking for a spine to crawl up.

In return for the dog’s share of an estimated $3 billion giveaway to Verisign, and the removal of the threat of further litigation (for now), the ICANN Board decided to alienate those those who still believed there was some good there. Its almost-plausible CEO Paul Twomey has characterized the most vociferous protest from its constituencies as meaning that they were “generally happy.”

Since the VeriSign deal was announced, the Chinese have made official their three non-Roman-character top-level domains. In response, Twomey has announced that ICANN will begin testing internationalized top-level domains (IDN TLDs). These new domains would consist of non-Roman characters. Pillow, take imprint.

ICANN is concerned about three things with regard to IDNs, according to Twomey: technical stability, language character sets, and the question of who is going to run them. Only one of these criteria (technical stability) was put forward as a concern for the introduction of regular TLDs, and since ICANN began we have had a near net loss of top-level domains. As Twomey says, “We are much closer to the end for the answer.” Um, right. Note to users of other alphabets: better start your own if you want one.

The Chinese TLDs have been there for some time. But now they’ve announced them officially. Why does that matter? Now that it’s clear that ICANN ignores the ICANN community, as well as its own policy-development processes, the Chinese have realized that they need to sit on the pillow if they want to get anything done. It’s an open invitation for others to follow suit. Any bets on Arabic-speaking countries?

And what about those who retain the vision of an accountable, transparent, consensus-based ICANN? They too must sit on the ICANN pillow. CIRA has written an open letter (PDF), in which the Canadian registry says that until ICANN shows some sign of becoming accountable and transparent, it will:

• Suspend its voluntary contribution of funds to ICANN;
• Hold in trust CIRA’s voluntary contributions to ICANN;
• Suspend consideration of any Accountability Framework;
• Decline to host or be a major sponsor of any ICANN event; and
• Cease chairing the ccNSO’s IANA Working Group.

You don’t have be in a back room drinking a cosy glass of Bordeaux with Vint “Vintage” Cerf to understand what’s going on. The roosters are beginning to roost. It has become obvious that the only way to work with ICANN is to sit on it — or ignore it altogether.

The majority of ICANN’s Board and its current CEO ignored the almost unanimous objections and concerns of the ICANN community about the VeriSign deal, as if the Board were anything other than the community’s servants. Soon they will feel the need to stanch the flow of support toward alternate roots — only this time not roots started by commercial hopefuls, but by governments.

Now, as the ICANN Board looks around for friends, it will find that it has very few. Who believes them any more? Since its inception, under the guise of a narrow remit of “technical stability”, the ICANN Board has resisted innovation and democritization, even while it has singlemindedly pursed increases in its budget and bureaucracy. It is no longer possible to perform the mental gymnastics that are required to reconcile the vision of what ICANN might have been with what it has become. The cognitive dissonance is too great.

At a long-ago Berlin meeting of ICANN, the same meeting at which the ICANN staff unilaterally exploded the old consensus by “updating” RFC 1591 and calling it ICP-1 despite widespread protests, Paul Twomey was Chairman of the execrable Government Advisory Committee. He told me in a public forum that even a genocidal government (Cambodia was the example) had the sole right to speak for “its” people with regard to the Internet. I wonder if he will still stick to that line when the next government breaks the line and creates its own alternate roots and the balkanization of the Internet accelerates.

Until someone with power sits heavily on the ICANN pillow to insist that it follow its own rules, the only way to deal with it is to try your own weight. It’s unfortunate, but hats off to CIRA for understanding the game and doing what needed to be done.

God help us if WSIS is the only answer.

Tags: ICANN, CIRA, IDNs, WSIS, RFC 1591, Paul Twomey, Vint Cerf, alternate roots, balkanization, Pillow Principle, VeriSign

Posted by Antony in: Domains, Internet Governance