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posted by CoolHand on Sunday May 03 2015, @12:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the icann-do-it-yes-i-can dept.

Mismanagement and greed continues to plague the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which doesn't know what to do with over $58 million it has collected from gTLD auctions.

The International Centre For Dispute Resolution (ICDR) has issued a ruling that says ICANN has acted in a way "fundamentally inconsistent with the requirements in ICANN's Bylaws for it to act openly, transparently, fairly and with integrity." The ruling relates to an ICANN dispute with DotConnectAfrica, which wants to manage the .africa gTLD. The ICDR has demanded that two ICANN officials, Cherine Chalaby and Heather Dryden, appear at a Washington D.C. hearing to answer questions. However, ICANN has other plans:

How can the Panel ensure that the parties to this [Independent Review Panel] are treated with equality and that each party has the right to be heard and is given a fair opportunity to present its case with respect to the mandate the Panel has been given, if as ICANN submits, "ICANN's Bylaws do not permit any examination of witnesses by the parties or the Panel during the hearing"?

The Register notes that "the issue is of particular interest at the moment since ICANN is going through a formal process of review on its accountability before it is allowed to take control of the critical IANA contract from the US government." In fact, the Senate's Judiciary Committee has told the White House's "IP Czar" Daniel Marti that "there are longstanding concerns within both the business community and the Congress regarding ICANN's transparency and accountability mechanisms with respect to its existing functions and responsibilities." Specifically, intellectual property concerns such as "the 'whack-a-mole' problem that plagues copyright holders online, where illegal content or sites are taken down only to spring back up again moments later in a new location." Meanwhile, ICANN has spent $7 million in an attempt to secure the IANA contract, raised staff wages 10% over two years to a new average of $187,000, and expanded its travel budget by 85% to $17 million in just a single year.

Finally, ICANN has confirmed that misconfigured Salesforce software resulted in at least 330 instances where confidential information about 96 gTLD applicants was exposed:

ICANN said it realizes that "any compromise of our users' data is unacceptable," and that it "deeply regrets this incident." It pledged "to accelerate our efforts to harden all of our digital services."

Incredibly, however, it appears to place blame on the [19] users that used the advanced search feature: "ICANN is contacting the user or users who appear to have viewed information that was not their own and requiring that they provide an explanation of their activity. We are also asking them to certify that they will delete or destroy all information obtained and to certify that they have not and will not use the data or convey it to any third party."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AnonTechie on Sunday May 03 2015, @12:35PM

    by AnonTechie (2275) on Sunday May 03 2015, @12:35PM (#178107) Journal

    What would happen if this were the responsibility of another organization ? In the end, I think that Peter's Principle applies to organizations as well. Whether it is ICANN or whether it is handed to over to United Nations, there will be abuse of power.

    --
    Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
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  • (Score: 2) by gringer on Sunday May 03 2015, @12:43PM

    by gringer (962) on Sunday May 03 2015, @12:43PM (#178108)

    So for it to work properly, it needs to be completely decentralised. I presume that would mean something like spammers grabbing domains for eternity, and the rest of us just have to get used to ipv6 addresses.

    --
    Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @01:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @01:20PM (#178111)

    Sure, there will be organisations trying to game the system. Really the ITU or IETF should be looking after the DNS root system with proposals evaluated purely on technical merit. The new gTLDs appear to be bogus, there's no reason for them -- market forces can be used to defeat domain squatting and free up the namespaces we already have by a trivial increase in registration fees.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @03:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @03:28PM (#178128)

    In the end, I think that Peter's Principle applies to organizations as well.

    This isn't the "Peter Principle"; it's the "Pecker Principle" where the people running things keep acting like dicks. They don't know how to secure their data, they don't know how to manage their budget, and they have no clue how their actions (or lack of actions) affects everyone else.

    I think best course of action would be to let a random usenet group manage it. They couldn't do any worse.

    BTW, if using the advanced search feature in saleforce requires users to "provide an explanation of their activity" then you're doing something (or perhaps everything) wrong. And 19 users caused 330 instances where confidential information was viewed of "about 96 gTLD applicants"? That math doesn't seem to add up to me.

    • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday May 03 2015, @10:35PM

      by deimtee (3272) on Sunday May 03 2015, @10:35PM (#178247) Journal

      BTW, if using the advanced search feature in saleforce requires users to "provide an explanation of their activity" then you're doing something (or perhaps everything) wrong. And 19 users caused 330 instances where confidential information was viewed of "about 96 gTLD applicants"? That math doesn't seem to add up to me.

      19 users used the feature an average of about 17 times each. Each compromised gTLP applicant was viewed by an average of about three and a half of the users.

      --
      If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 03 2015, @11:26PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday May 03 2015, @11:26PM (#178273) Journal

      BTW, if using the advanced search feature in saleforce requires users to "provide an explanation of their activity" then you're doing something (or perhaps everything) wrong.

      ICANN taking a page out of the "fiddling with a URL is a crime" playbook.

      And 19 users caused 330 instances where confidential information was viewed of "about 96 gTLD applicants"? That math doesn't seem to add up to me.

      http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=7279&cid=178247 [soylentnews.org]

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @04:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2015, @04:15PM (#178145)

    There will always be abuse of power, yes. How it will be dealt with is the interesting part.