ICANN Senate hearing

There is a hearing going on in the US [tag]Senate[/tag] as I write this, but I’m having terrible trouble getting the audio feed to work.

I have also missed big chunks of it because I was in Southampton this morning meeting, among others, Tim [tag]Berners-Lee[/tag], Danny [tag]Weitzner[/tag], Wendy [tag]Hall [/tag] and Nigel [tag]Shadbolt[/tag] – basically some of the best Web minds in the world – and their plans to create an entirely new discipline of “Web Science”. I think they are absolutely right – but more about that later.

Fortunately at the [tag]ICANN[/tag] Senate hearing they have stuck up the remarks from Communications Secretary John [tag]Kneuer[/tag] [doc], ICANN CEO Paul [tag]Twomey[/tag] [pdf], FTC Commissioner Jon [tag]Leibowitz[/tag] [doc], [tag]VeriSign[/tag]’s Ken [tag]Silver[/tag] [pdf] and I believe GoDaddy’s lawyer Christine [tag]Jones[/tag] [pdf] is talking at the moment – but the sound is breaking off all the time.

I also may have to leg it because .mobi is having its grand opening in London tonight at 6pm.

There’s alot happening in September it seems.

Update: Okay, I have the audio feed up, okay? And I’m listening to Ken Silver from VeriSign, okay? Who is trying to justify the price increases in the dotcom contract, okay? And it would seem that whenever Mr Silver know he’s talking rubbish, okay? He says ‘okay’, okay?

I’ve grabbed a short clip which you can listen to here as an MP3 file.

[https://www.kierenmccarthy.co.uk/mp3s/verisign-silver-okay-20sep06.mp3]

Actually it’s just finished. It was interesting to catch the end of Silver’s piece because it was pure VeriSign. VeriSign survives and revels in its ability to paint a different version of reality to US politicians – and it does that very effectively by throwing tons of money and lobbyists at the Senate.

This is the whole crux of what everyone is complaining about with US governmental control of the Internet. VeriSign has got the ear of the US politicians and so it gets its way despite everyone else in the world knowing that it is talking rubbish.

For example Silver put down GoDaddy’s Jones by saying that while she was doing a good job for her company, she was not a technologist and she had no understanding of the complexity and difficult of running a vast network like the dotcom registry.

This is an age-old VeriSign tactic – “you couldn’t possibly understand”. But with every year that goes past and more and more registries hit the million domains level without their systems falling over, this Emperor’s Clothes argument becomes increasingly transparent.

Now I know from talking to the two people in the world that have comparable experience, namely Jay Daley, the CTO of Nominet who looks after five million domains, and Sabine Dolderer, the technical director at Denic who looks after ten million domains, that there are specific milestones in terms of domains that you suddenly hit that give you no choice but to improve and in some senses rebuild your network to deal with the extra demand.

But you don’t find Nominet and Denic telling anyone that questions any aspect of their costs or their service that they don’t understand what they’re talking about and so they shouldn’t be listened to.

And this is the other thing: if it wasn’t a US Senate hearing, if it was an international body having a hearing over the dotcom agreement, you can bet your bottom-dollar that Daley and Dolderer would be there. And if VeriSign tried any of its usual technical smokescreens or stretched the truth too far, they would be exposed in seconds.

The other VeriSign tactic is the Orwellian “security and stability” mantra. And it came across yet again with Silver saying “when I spoke to the CIA about this, they were impressed”. This is classic dick-waving. Silver knows full well whatever was said or not to the CIA will never be disclosed so he can allude to whatever he wants. It’s cheap and it’s transparent and it would only ever hold water within the US political system.

I will read the others’ statements on my way into London and get back with what they say later.

Also there is another Senate hearing on ICANN tomorrow – this time mostly about the MoU with the US government. VeriSign is there in its guise of the “Association for Competitive Technology” (I should really make a list of VeriSign lobbying shells for future reference).

It could prove interesting, although the MoU has already been tied up – to the extent that I just missed US Ambassador David Gross yesterday when I called his office trying to get him to do an interview. He was off on a week’s travelling, I was told.

  1. Bitacle Blog Search Archive – ICANN Senate hearing…

    […] There is a hearing going on in the US Senate as I write this, but I’m having terrible trouble getting the audio feed to work. […]…

Comments are closed.