Who’d be Paul [tag]Twomey[/tag]? It would be the job of one man just to keep track of the [tag]ICANN[/tag]’s current feuds and lawsuits. Two of them have popped up again: [tag]CIRA[/tag] and [tag]ICM Registry[/tag].
Three months ago, CIRA – Canada’s registry owner – wrote to Twomey saying it had “grown increasingly concerned with ICANN’s departure from a number of its core values”, in particular the VeriSign dotcom contract. And so CIRA said it was going to stop contributing to the organisation, sending no money, pulling out of working groups, and ending any “accountability framework” discussions – at least until ICANN started becoming more transparent in its processes.
Twomey’s response both in public and in response to CIRA’s letter with his own letter [pdf] was dismissive. He noted that CIRA was still planning to attend ICANN’s meetings and that he and Vint Cerf would gladly have a meeting to discuss their concerns but it was quite clear that he had no intention of making any changes as a result. The risk was that other countries would follow CIRA’s lead but they haven’t, so the issue died down.
CIRA has re-opened it with a letter in response to Twomey’s letter, sent last week. In it, CIRA says that ICANN “must demonstrate willingness to reform” and if it did it would “go a long way toward persuading CIRA that its ICANN participation should be fully restored”.
In particular it recommends “that ICANN engage a non-governmental, independent consultant to conduct a wide-reaching, public review of ICANN’s transparency, accountability and the fairness of its processes and to provide a road-map for ICANN’s reform”. I suspect ICANN’s response will depend entirely on what other countries’ responses are.
.xxx
Meanwhile, ICM Registry is still trying to find out what exactly happened between ICANN and the US government over its porn top-level domain.
The material that ICM has already uncovered in the Freedom of Information Act has already demonstrated beyond any doubt that despite the brick-wall assertions of both the US government and ICANN that the USG did in fact massively interfere with the process, raising all manner of questions over Internet governance.
ICM is already suing the DoC and the State Department to get them to provide the “redacted” information that was cut out of the documents provided. What is contained in them could be political dynamite. But ICM is not content with just that – it has sent a new FOIA request [pdf] to the DoC this requesting that it provide all information pertaining to any meetings between Paul Twomey and John [tag]Kneuer[/tag], the [tag]NTIA[/tag] top dog in the 45 days prior to [tag].xxx[/tag] rejection by ICANN, in which Twomey and Vint Cerf’s sudden u-turns was the deciding factor.
The justification for this is that ICANN announced it had turned down .xxx on 10 May and then the NTIA said it planned to hand ICANN back its overseeing role of the Internet on 19 May. ICM Registry wants to know if there is any “interrelationship of these events”.
We all know there is, but the big questions are: was .xxx explicitly mentioned in the meetings and if it was, was that fact included in the minutes? Expect the usual stalling tactics from the DoC. But we will know the truth of it when those documents turn up. If they are redacted, Kneuer, Twomey and the USG are in big trouble. If ICM then wins its existing lawsuit against the DoC and gets the original redacted material reinstated, it’s game over.
It’s all down to the US legal system.
