Obviously, the alleged needs and wants of the proverbial user cannot and should not be the trump card in every aspect of ICANN's decision-making processes. "Users," to the extent that they exist at all outside of userland, are notoriously fickle except for just generally wanting things to work without having to understand how they work. Since the net became a popular phenomenon, this tension between (to use a cheap metaphor) the surfaces of its "functionality" and the depths of its technical potentials has been a major factor in every aspect of its development, from the lowliest dialup tech support issue to the headiest speculations about the Next Big Thing. DNS is, of course, no exception.

But failing a more user-centered policy, one would hope that ICANN would at least fall back on the mass of technical expertise and, maybe more important, prestige it had at its disposal. No such luck: little of that expertise has been brought to bear in ICANN's development. Instead, the prestige associated with its technical savvy has been squandered as ICANN sought to tiptoe through terrain increasingly riddled with political mines on its way to establishing itself as the dauphin of DNS. The result, as Clay Shirky put well in an essay cited by Hwang: "The fact that ICANN is a political body is not their fault (though the kind of political institution it has become is their fault)." Had ICANN emulated the style of the figure it persists in paying dusty tribute to, Jon Postel, it could have delegated decision-making authority to various "stakeholding" groups and ratified their decisions. Instead, it used the froth of debates in these communities as cover to cut deals with the ever-expanding rump NSI-VeriSign-Network Solutions and rentier forces like intellectual property zealots, thereby exacerbating many of the problems it claimed to want to resolve.

In trying to explain the diminishing interest in DNS, Hwang notes that "ICANN pales in comparison to the new crop of acronyms -- MPAA, RIAA, DMCA, TIA, USA PATRIOT -- menacing us today." But it remains to be seen whether ICANN will be able to maintain a healthy distance from these forces. As the old saying goes, he who snacks with the devil must use a long spork. Unfortunately, ICANN brought something else.

As to the article it is right on and I've said similar for quite some time here and elsewhere. I do much work with end-users and it makes less and less sense for them to use the DNS, or trust it. Cybersquatters, domain dropgrabbers, and ICANN's inability to follow the curve on new TLDs which made some sort of sense, have all combined to render the DNS increasingly irrelevant (and with the WLS or similar that will get much worse). -g