Well, CORE was an attempt to stop the process, by creating a genuinely disinterested body that would provide domain names at cost, and a global network of hundreds of retail outlets who would compete on price and quality of service. No, it didn't work; Ira Magaziner derailed it so NSI could keep the monopoly.

Why hasn't Auerbach been able to turn ICANN around?

I'm not privy to what goes on in ICANN board meetings. But steering any organization from the board level, particularly if the board has divided opinions, is very hard. The only real power a board has is to fire the CEO. The rest of its power is exercised by advising the CEO (if he or she will listen). It's a delicate relationship, and it's very disruptive to the organization when it breaks. If the CEO is unresponsive to guidance from the board, and the board is divided and thus can't fire the CEO, then the whole organization goes dysfunctional.

	Capote's 'In Cold Blood' -- in Salon's 'Masterpiece' presented by Lexus

I've also been on boards that were merely too big to make good decisions. By the time everyone has had their say on an issue, two hours have gone by and you still haven't made a decision, yet you have a dozen issues to resolve in the meeting. To make any decisions possible in a big board, most board members have to sit back and not participate, except in issues where they have personal knowledge or serious interest. Such boards can't resolve hard issues, unless the members will defer to wise leadership (if it's available).

When a board is loaded with yes men who'll support management whether they're right or wrong, it's tough for dissenting board members to do anything to prick the conscience of the organization. Their best role may be in being information conduits and whistleblowers to outside stakeholders. If the board is so snowed by the staff that it lets the staff get away with murder (like not revealing the books) then there isn't even much information for a dissenter to convey.

Your question is like asking how one honest person could have turned around the Nixon White House. There was one such person, who kept calling reporters in the middle of the night to blow the whistle. She was Martha Mitchell, wife of the attorney general. She didn't turn it around. "Deep Throat" didn't either -- but at least Deep Throat brought it down, so it could be replaced. Of course, the U.S. had the benefit of elections, to pick Nixon's successors. ICANN has abolished those.

What do you hope to achieve by helping to bankroll Karl Auerbach's suit against ICANN?

I hope to force ICANN to actually be accountable to its directors for its actions. I sit on half a dozen boards of directors today, and have been on more than a dozen through my life. I have never been on the board of an organization that tried to deny me access to its financial information -- never. ICANN has done exactly this to Karl and other directors.

I believe it's because there is information in there about how ICANN has misused its money, and/or has favored people who lent or gave it money. For example, how much has Jones, Day (ICANN's lawyers, primarily Joe Sims) been paid by ICANN?

ICANN will tell you that they only want a veto over whether Karl can see or copy or publish "certain" information. The catch is that the ICANN staff works for the board of directors, not the other way around. They are trying to tell their boss what he can see and what he can do. It seemed a bit uppity to me, particularly when the nonprofit in question happens to run the global monopoly on domain names.

Not only are they wrong under California law, but they are wrong as a matter of public policy. The only way the public can affect what the otherwise secretive and unaccountable ICANN staff does is by electing directors who are responsive to the public. If the unelected ICANN staff can thwart those directors, it can thwart the public will, despite free elections of directors (which they have also abolished).

What about broader solutions? Esther Dyson, writing in the Wall Street Journal, suggested that the organization needs more money and staff. Do you think this would help or hurt the organization? Why or why not?

Again, I can't peer into a secretive organization. If not even board members can see where the money goes, how could I tell whether they have raised or spent too much or too little?

The Department of Commerce promised several years ago to withdraw completely from Internet governance, but then ended up maintaining what it called "policy authority." Now the Senate is threatening to curtail ICANN's powers. What do you think the international reaction is to the U.S. government asserting control over Internet governance?

I'm no expert on the international reaction; ask some international people.

I think the international reaction on U.S. Internet dominance is a lot like the international reaction to many U.S. topics: They wish the U.S. didn't try to treat the world as the U.S.'s own private playground, but then again it's not wise to piss off the world's only superpower. So they demur politely while fuming privately. You will note that only two country-code domain registries have signed the ICANN agreement, and at least one of those (Australia) was done with full arm-twisting applied, by ripping the domain away from the person who had actually created the .AU domain and run it for 20 years, to a pliable company who would sign the contract in return for the local monopoly.

Some in Congress have suggested that the U.S. Department of Commerce take over running the domain name system. What do you make of this proposition?

I objected to the U.S. government retaining any control over the DNS, at the time. But at least the government does have to follow the Freedom of Information Act; the citizens have a right to see what the government is doing. And it doesn't have the power to suppress speech, as ICANN can do by taking away the names of people's publications.

For U.S. citizens, this would be preferable to ICANN. But for the rest of the world, U.S. government control would not be a good thing. That's one scenario in which a credible alternative root zone could emerge: The rest of the world could decide that the real root zone is not the one that the U.S. government controls, but some other one that they would set up.

Do you think it's feasible to set up alternative-root name servers?

Alternative roots would need to have a credible governance structure, or they just become "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" power structures. None of the people who had set them up a few years ago were credible to me; they were just squatters hoping to have landed on a gold mine.

Are you familiar with Milton Mueller's account of Internet governance, which portrays ICANN primarily as a tool for trademark protection. Would you agree with that assessment?

I haven't read Mr. Mueller's account. However, I do agree that ICANN and domain name policy has been perverted from the start by the machinations of trademark interests. Actual trademark law gives zero power to cancel or seize domain names, prevent their issuance, etc. Actual trademark law lets hundreds of people use the same name, both in different jurisdictions, and for different kinds of trades (e.g., computers vs. soap vs. ships). Trademark owners only have power over others when the others misrepresent themselves as the trademark owner.

But the trademark "maximalists" distorted both the WHOIS issues and the Uniform Dispute Resolution issues at ICANN. After the trademark lobby got only 70 percent of what they wanted from ICANN (after massive public protest stopped the other 30 percent), they then lobbied the U.S. Congress, which passed a terrible "trademarks trump domain names anyway" law. It specifies that jurisdiction for all domain disputes is in Virginia (where Network Solutions was located) and thus conveniently located where U.S. law applies, rather than the policies carefully hammered out internationally. There are still lawsuits in process over this; one I think involves a Swede and a Canadian who both have the same trademark and are trying to snatch the domain name from each other.

How would you like to see ICANN organized and run? What's your vision for the organization?

Regarding domain names, the policy that would actually satisfy the public interest would be to have thousands of top-level domains, in which anyone could register a name. The whole monopoly problem arose because everyone wanted a name in ".com"; ditto for the squatting problem and the trademark problem and the price problem. If squatters had registered your favorite name or your trademark in a thousand TLDs [top level domain names], just use it in one of the other thousands of TLDs. This would let every trademark holder register their name as a second level domain; if Sun Microsystems got sun.com, Sun Oil could have sun.oil and Sun Photo could have sun.pix or sun.photo or sun.camera or sun.inc or any other one they wanted. You couldn't use the DNS as a White Pages directory, but you can't do that now anyway. If the guy who registers names in .oil wants too much for the domain, get sun.oilco or sun.gas or sun.petrol or petrol.sun instead.

How to get to that solution is the problem. Benevolent dictatorship by Jon Postel would have gotten us there, but Jon was unwilling to stand up to pressure from the White House. Ira Magaziner threatened him ("You'll never work on the Internet again") and he didn't have the spine to tell Ira to take a flying leap. But Jon's initial design would have expanded to dozens of TLDs long before ICANN, and increased them by 50 or 100 a year until demand slacked off.

Do you think this will ever happen? What will ICANN's fate ultimately be?

If we are lucky, the current ICANN will be scrapped as a failed experiment. Its assets and powers will be handed on to some new experiment, hopefully with transparency, openness, accountability and respect for human rights built in deeply, not only in its corporate structure but in the people who we elect and hire to run it.

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