Having myself spent "untold hours" of volunteer time within ICANN, and subsequently many years looking at it from the outside, I assert that it is a legitimate question to ask *why* it matters whether or not End Users should care, let alone know, about ICANN or its mission.

The DNS is part of Internet infrastructure, albeit an increasingly legacy part. Most end-users don't know or care about their local electrical or water utility's mission beyond "provide your infrastructure reliably, scaled to the population, for as little cost as possible". Why should ICANN be different? Why can't ICANN just quietly do its job of making sure that the DNS is reliable? Why does the public *need* to know about it so long as its function is served?

ICANN didn't need to re-invent protocols for unique name allocation, countries have agreed among themselves how to allocate trade names and even codified it in what is known as the Berne Convention. The early decisions that DNS name allocation was a resource to be financially exploited rather than public utility separate ICANN from most other components of public infrastructure. By encouraging and profiting from this exploitation, ICANN has been able to finance itself to a level not known by other forms of infrastructure, Internet or otherwise. But this conflict of interest -- becoming financially dependent on the resource it is supposed to manage/regulate -- has truly morphed ICANN into an organization far too preoccupied with its own inflated sense of importance. What its bubble calls multistakeholderism, the rest of the world calls self-indulgent, financially-conflicted industry capture. "Empowered community" is a cruel joke, that I think is more appropriately named "Entitled Community", having ICANN decision making accountable to ... only its own self-appointed bubble.

Indeed, I find that UA is such a perfect manifestation of the bubble's delusion of its own self-importance.

(Thankfully the California Attorney-General has demonstrated ICANN's true limits of non-accountability, for better or worse.)

I call bullshit on that assertion, having been part of At-Large for a decade -- serving as NARALO's very first chair and later Vice-Chair of ALAC. I know intimately how the sausage is made.

Had At-Large cared about End-Users rather than itself it would have demanded public education initiatives such as:

• awareness how dot-com is not the same as dot-co, and they are governed totally differently
• more-widely publicizing domain-abuse information
• explaining why a single bookseller owns the entire .books TLD (etc)
• surveying what end-users actually want from the DNS so that At-Large can better understand and advance their interests

Let's be very clear and honest about this. Any time that At-Large has determined that an ICANN action goes against the public interest, it has been ... dissuaded ... from pressing its case. The mere threat of ICANN withholding travel and other funding has been enough to get At-Large to quietly drop initiatives and self-censor. Were an At-Large education (or any other) campaign to threaten the growth of domain name sales, it has no chance to happen. Real public service might be part of At-Large's mission, but by design it will never rise beyond the cosmetic and aspirational.