I don’t see ICANN as a perfect… or even really good… answer.

But when I imagine an Internet run as efficiently as the UN, I see nothing but dark fiber. By comparison, ICANN’s nonsense actually makes sense.

When you come up with an alternative that resonates with growth-oriented, freedom-loving technologists, instead of power-grabbing dictators and petty bureaucrats, let me know. I’ll be the first on the bandwagon.

Until then, keep clogging the issue with boilerplates. They’re hilarious.

There is one downside to your technique. Reasonable discussion is buried under the molehill of garbage… Or was that the objective?

[Private note. DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE NOT DR. MILTON MUELLER: I provided footnotes to other Email Battles articles to help readers understand EB’s perspective regarding ICANN. It’s a shame that you didn’t read them before unleashing a thoroughly unprofessional and uninformed tirade. In the future, I’d suggest that, if you’re going to bandy your doctorate about, you live up to the title.]

You say if you were NTIA you’d throw out all campaign messages. But is that what NTIA did when the Family Research Council generated a few thousand of the same messages by whipping their pavlovian supporters into a frenzy about .xxx and Internet pornography? No, they didn’t throw them out, they assiduously counted them, day by day. And by doing so, they showed that US supervision of the root is subject to the same kind of sleazy politicking as any other government. IGP is simply reminding them of this. The message is a serious one, of course — far more serious and reasonable than the hysterical emails over .xxx — but anyone with a bit of history in their mind can’t avoid the historical overtones.

I suspect they are doing the same counting with IGP’s campaign. Well of course, political oversight of the DNS root doesn’t get the masses lathered up the way porn does. But you — and NTIA — can’t have it both ways. It’s perfectly acceptable for people who agree with a message to express their support for it by sending an email, and it’s dishonest to complain about this practice when it is part of a campaign you don’t agree with while condoning or ignoring it when it’s part of a campaign you like.

At the latest ICANN meeting, the ?US government showed once again that it manipulates ICANN’s policy making processes when it threatens to go in directions they don’t like. Basically the entire world thinks something needs to be done about this artbitrary power. Unless you think the .xxx affair was one of internet governance’s finest hours, you’d think so to.

This distinction might be a bit too subtle for you, but let’s give it a try: IGP and the people who sent in the messages are not “anti-ICANN.” In fact, we are the ones standing up for the original model of DNS privatization, which called for getting all governments — including the US — out of the technical coordination of the internet and letting the private sector, public interest groups, and the technical community self-govern, subject of course to appropriate legal and political accountability. Until the problem of unilateral oversight of ICANN is solved, the governance of the internet will never be stable.

ICANN dumb, but not that dumb.