This article from Toll.free:ICANN GENERAL ASSEMBLY
CHAIRMAN SPEAKS
by Danny Younger, Chairman of ICANN's Domain Name Service
Organization General Assembly
When the wholly-owned subsidiary of ICANN's second-largest
accredited registrar makes a policy decision to begin accepting for auction domains
from the largest alternate root, this is a noteworthy event...
What we are witnessing
is the "consensus" of the market-place, a consensus that is more far-reaching, more
representative and responsive to community needs than the "consensus" that ICANN
purports to have. The ISP community has reached a preliminary market-place consensus...
they are supporting the New.net initiative -- Earthlink, @Home, prodigy, Juno, Netzero
and many others (such as the American Alliance of Service Providers with over 550+
member ISPs) have partnered with this registry. No wonder that our own ISP constituency
has remained silent on this issue... they want to be able to supply that which the
market demands, and that which New.net has offered to the public, new TLDs, now.
The secondary domain market has recognized this "consensus" and is moving to capitalize
on the opportunity for further profit... many of ICANN's own new TLDs won't even
be going "live" until 2002, and the public has not exactly clamored for the choices
being offered -- .shop, .web, .club are choices far superior than that which ICANN
has chosen.
The public has responded to the New.net initiatives because ICANN
has not met their needs. The ccTLDs are withdrawing from the DNSO primarily because
their needs have not been met. Congressmen craft legislation to establish a .kids
domain because the needs of their constituents have been ignored.
The consensus
that I am hearing is not the consensus that ICANN purports to have. We, in ICANN,
bandy about the word "consensus". We claim that our policies are based on the bottom-up
consensus process, and yet a policy paper (ICP-3: A Unique, Authoritative Root for
the DNS) was issued without the necessary bottom-up process, without any public comment,
without constituency input, and without a vote by the Council...
We can continue
to bury our head in the sand (like those in the NC that argue that roots are beyond
our scope), or we can move forward to responsibly deal with the issues that face
us. Alternate roots have become a part of the landscape... to attack them, or to
ignore them, is folly.
To the same degree that the White Paper recognized that
the earlier IAHC process was insufficiently representative and that important segments
of the Internet community remained outside the process, so too are we in ICANN now
guilty of becoming an exclusionary cartel. Letters between attorneys have already
been published. We are potentially on the brink of a very ugly situation. It is time
for Mr. Lynn to withdraw his paper, and time to recognize that if we lay claim to
a consensus process, we had better start using it.