IETF chairman fires broadside at Icann

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has put the boot into proposals by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) for more government involvement.

Randy Bush, co-chairman of the IETF, and chief engineer at a number of internet service providers (ISPs), wrote an open letter to the Icann board detailing his thoughts. "Icann is running out of money. Icann needs $20m, half to run the root servers. Governments will give Icann money," he said.

He also claimed that the new top level domains are a failure, that the domain name registry market is "not usefully competitive", and that the uniform dispute resolution policy only got in with the skin of its teeth.

Bush attacked Icann for being more interested in, and totally focused on, arranging power rather than providing simple stewardship and service. "Icann is brilliant at rearranging the deckchairs on Titanic. The problem is that they have the internet on board," he explained.

According to Bush, Icann is also being frivolous with its money. "Why does Icann have to spend $10m to run the root servers when it never used to cost anything? They're run voluntarily," he pointed out.

Bush reckoned that Icann could be run for $1m to $2m a year if the organisation scaled down operations and "fancy meetings" and got back to simple stewardship and management.

"The idea that governments will give Icann money is probably flawed," he said. "The criminal mob would be more likely to do so, and would be likely to extract less of a price."

"Explaining reality to the current Icann powers that be is extremely hard," he added. "Explaining it to governments which, under this plan would be given vast power, will be virtually impossible. Clueless bureaucrats can actually break the internet."

Bush's proposed solution is to get Icann under control by shrinking it back to something small and persuading it to "serve the internet" rather than "trying to rule it".

But he suspected that only the combined voices of ISPs, the IETF and registries "can insert some rationality into this craziness".