Gilmore has never been afraid to speak his mind on any issue, but the politics of Internet governance are particularly close to his heart. And right now, that means keeping a close eye on ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN is the international body in charge of managing the Internet's domain name system -- the numbers and names that identify Internet addresses.

Critics from across the political spectrum have claimed for years that ICANN is secretive, slow, inefficient and, worst of all, firmly in the pocket of special interests. But in recent weeks, the rhetoric has gone up a notch. Suddenly, ICANN is at a crossroads.

Defenders of the organization, including former chair Esther Dyson, have long argued that ICANN simply needs time to grow, develop and earn Internet users' respect. But four years after it was first created, ICANN is more unpopular than ever. ICANN's decision in March to abandon a system of at-large elections that resulted in ICANN dissidents being elected to the board of directors may have been the last straw. Now many observers have given up on reform -- they want the organization shut down entirely. The Senate even convened a hearing during the week of June 12 to discuss ICANN's problems and later announced that it would step up oversight of the body.

	Mick Jagger, in Salon's new feature, 'Masterpiece' presented by Lexus

ICANN isn't accepting the criticism quietly. On June 20, the organization, not known for its openness, published a report justifying its own existence. And it is continuing to deny publicly elected ICANN director Karl Auerbach the right to inspect ICANN's books.

Via e-mail, Salon talked with Gilmore, who, along with EFF, is currently helping to fund a lawsuit filed by Karl Auerbach against ICANN, demanding that the organization open its books to him.

In March, you took your complaints about ICANN to a new level, writing a letter to Vint Cerf, a member of ICANN's board of directors and seminal figure in the history of the Internet. You criticized him and ICANN in very strong terms. Why?

I had already been biting my tongue for a year, trying to figure out how to say what I needed to say without losing a friend. When he was quoted defending ICANN's withholding of basic information from a duly elected member of the board of directors, I realized that there was no future for that friendship, so I might as well go ahead and say what I had been withholding.

I had some hope that in response he would actually tell me why he was doing these terrible things. Like, that maybe someone had threatened his relatives if he didn't play along. I hoped that it would touch him somehow, spark his conscience.

Have you heard from Cerf since sending the letter? What's been his response?

He hasn't said boo to me, hasn't called, hasn't sent e-mail. That isn't a big surprise. It's not like our kids grew up together or anything. We worked together on the Internet Society (ISOC) board for a few years, and got to know each other. We swapped e-mails a few times a year after I left ISOC.

But he took the private e-mail that I had sent to him, as a friend, and filed it in the court case, making it a public document. I had not wanted to take him to task publicly, preferring to focus my public comments on the issues rather than on his personal ethics. But he published it.

And he published it in an attempt to discredit the lawsuit, by claiming that the people behind the suit were just trying to tear down ICANN. No, we're trying to make ICANN accountable to its public for its actions. That isn't treason, it's a basic principle of governance. If ICANN is abusing its power, then the public, not me, should tear it down and rebuild it better.

By casting Karl and me as destroyers, Vint seems to be assuming that if a dissident board member actually gets access to the records of what ICANN is doing, that board member will be sufficiently horrified that he will publish it as a whistleblower. And that once the public finds out what ICANN has been doing, it will be torn down. If ICANN's internal dealings were lily-white, then Vint would have no need to keep them away from the public. If there were no secrets that a board member couldn't be trusted with, then ICANN wouldn't have spent two years stalling Karl and trying to get him to sign nondisclosure. What do Vint and Stuart Lynn know that we, the public, and our elected representative, Karl Auerbach, haven't been allowed to know?

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