ICANN has pinned on a badge declaring itself Internet Sheriff and then rode out into the sun never thinking that that glint makes a helluva target in the light of reason. The concept of the internet was built, largely voluntarily, through collaboration: rough consensus and running code. By setting themselves up to succeed, the powerbrokers and spinmeisters failed to grasp the concept that that also makes them a single point of failure, a stunning faux pas for an organization that spent its most recent annual meeting supposedly learning about the security and stability of the internet.

I used to bemoan the lack of cohesion within the opposition to ICANN's status quo. It turns out that that may be its greatest strength. Like the internet, a distributed, non-hierarchical structure is very difficult to destroy, its antithesis has now, for reasons best known to itself (if at all), chosen a flat earth old-world model in the hope it will allow them to be first to circumnavigate the globe. The sight of them being eaten by their own imaginary sea monsters will be a blunder to behold. Rejoice, the fun has just begun. -g

All posters are requested to play nice.

I do not currently plan to down moderate the repetitive and relatively content-free comments cloned in this and related stories, nor the equally cloned replies. I note, however, that they don't have a whole lot of reasons, and are being repeated in comments to several stories. Subject to consultation with the other editors, this hands-off policy might change if they become overly repetitive in a given story; at that point they amout to a type of denial of service attack.

FYI, in general I personally tend to cut more slack to signed, or even 'nymed, comments than anonymous comments.