Why ICANN Needs To Go
from the it's-just-bad dept
Salon is running an interesting interview with John Gilmore where he talks about why ICANN is screwed up and why it needs to be seriously reformed (in the opposite direction, at least, of the reforms they've proposed). The most interesting part of the interview, though, is his history of Network Solutions. It's a story you might not have heard about how huge government contractor SAIC bought them for $3 million, pulled lots of strings, took the company public with shares that had virtually no voting rights, and then (when they realized the monopoly game was up) sold it to Verisign for $21 billion. Quite a story. The rest of the stuff about ICANN has been covered elsewhere, but it's worth reading about again. He talks about why he's helping to finance Karl Auerbach's lawsuit against ICANN. Auerbach, if you haven't been following the story, is on the board of ICANN (though, they wish he weren't) and simply requested access to the company's financial information (a completely legitimate request for a board member), and ICANN is refusing. I've read some of the claims from the ICANN's main lawyer-in-charge, Joe Sims, and I still can't understand how ICANN believes they serve the public any better by keeping everything they do completely secret. If someone can explain that to me, I'd appreciate it.
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