[wg-review] Reply-To: sotiris@hermesnetwork.com

[Sotiropoulos <sotiris@hermesnetwork.com>]

Excerpted from Jonathan Zittrain's Testimony:

" IV. Conclusion 
 ICANN has inherited an extraordinarily difficult situation, with high 
  expectations all around, and with almost no discretionary room to move. The 
  set of realistic options for substantive policy making and procedural structure 
  is quite small. For better or worse, ICANN faces swift dispatch if it strays 
  too far from the desires of any of the mainstream Internet technical community, 
  the United States and other governments (including executive, legislative, and 
  judicial branches, which in turn may not agree) and powerful corporate interests. 
  Indeed, those representing the "little guy" and/or those wanting a 
  maximally unregulated Net-one where political concerns have no place in technical management-are 
quick to worry about capture of ICANN by one or another of these 
  powerful interests.

The key in this critical transition period is for those entities more powerful 
  than ICANN-governments, large corporations, the technical community-to give 
  ICANN enough rope to demonstrate either that it can operate to foster trust 
  and respect among disparate interests (the kind of respect that has even the 
  "losers" in a given policy question know they got a fair shake), or 
  show a conclusive inability to rise to the challenge.

<...>

"ICANN's power could evaporate quickly, whether through adverse litigation 
  outcomes that trump its decisions, legislation by sovereigns seeking to seize 
  or control the intangibles ICANN tries to manage, or through an attrition of 
  attention by which network operators or users could seek to substitute a new, 
  separate domain name system or set of naming databases in place of the old. With this evaporation 
may go the notion that a medium as distinct at the Internet 
  calls for a commensurately distinct mode of governance, one that aspires to 
  the best of private and public rather than the worst."


Seems to me as if this is a pretty fair summation of where ICANN stands at the advent of the the 21st 
Millenium.  


Sotiris Sotiropoulos
          Hermes Network, Inc.