[CPWG] Meeting Details - Today: The Future of .ORG: Community Engagement' Webinar

[Bill Woodcock]

> On Mar 1, 2020, at 12:50 AM, Evan Leibovitch <evan at telly.org> wrote:
> All infrastructure is enabling technology. But is it noteworthy that elsewhere the providers of infrastructure are never the same ones who provide the enabling technology. Airports don't build airplanes, the power utility doesn't make LED bulbs. Yet in DNS space the same industry promises to do it all, the infrastructure and the enabling technology on top.

That may be over-simplifying, in two ways…  First of all, not all of the DNS industry is vertically-integrated.  There’s registry/registrar separation, most of the large DNS operators aren’t also registries or registry services providers, etc.  Second, your definition of the “DNS industry” may be tautological, in the same way that you could include both airports and turbine manufacture within the “aviation industry.”

But if your general point is that things work better when there’s competition but also layer separation, such that organizations don’t compete with their own customers, I agree completely.

> Compare this to ALAC, which has been designed to fail from the start, When has it ever been resourced with the tools to enable it to know what global end-users want from ICANN? The expectation that 25 part-timers -- many of whom are here because of political expertise rather than subject-matter expertise -- are going to have an adequate voice in an environment dominates by fulltime lawyers and lobbyists is simply more baseless wishful thinking. And any time At-Large DOES come up with a cogent point we're challenged with the "who the hell are you?" retort.
> 
> Yes, I would agree that the way that the non-ICANN world solicits end-user feedback, in order to improve itself and innovate, is very very different from how ICANN does it.

Agreed.  Perhaps more generally, ICANN has become captured by a stagnant industry, in very much the same way that the FCC has become captured by a stagnant telco oligopoly, and the fig-leaf nature of the ALAC is one symptom of that.  I believe the larger problem is unfortunate but not irreversible.

> The At-Large system was designed as a smokescreen to hide ICANN's lack of public accountability after it eliminated direct public voting for the Board.

ICANN completely blowing off the “Empowered Community” oversight is an even more blatant example of this trend.

                                -Bill

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