2010/1/13 Christian de Larrinaga <cdel@firsthand.net>
ICANN is chartered to co-ordinate the management of a few of the Internet's unique resources. Above all ICANN does not own any of these resources. So it operates through rough consensus of the community at hand.
As a personal observation based on my relatively short time as an At-Large participant, I'd say that this view of ICANN's mandate ("rough consensus of the community at hand") is -- and has probably been for a long time -- a romantic myth. The experience with .xxx demonstrated that -- community and common sense be damned -- ICANN has operated mostly through the consent of the US Department of Commerce. Recent pressures brought to bear on ICANN by the DoC related to intellectual proprerty protection have simply re-enforced that reality. The experience of my own (so far unsuccessful) efforts to get the "Morality and Public Order" clause purged from the new gTLD creation process has further reminded how little the end-user is in control. The denial of the ALAC Review request for two At-Large-appointed directors is another example. Many others within the At-Large Community have their own stories of frustration. With the expiration of the JPA and its replacement by the "Affirmation of Commitments", power evolves from one government to many. But this is still a far far distance from the notion that ICANN gets its mandate from the Internet end-user. I say this not with approval, but as what I believe is a realistic evaluation of what I have encountered. We can't properly plan strategy unless we have a clear picture of what we're dealing with. - Evan