The NRO Issues Inspection Request to ICANN Concerning .ORG Sale | Hacker News Reader

The NRO Issues Inspection Request to ICANN Concerning .ORG Sale

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198 pointsmiles22 comments

First comment under the article:

> Good Luck!

> Karl Auerbach – Dec 31, 2019 2:07 PM PST

> I hope they have an easier time then I had when I, as a sitting Director on ICANN's board, tried to exercise my legal right to take a look at ICANN's financial records:

> Auerbach v ICANN https://www.eff.org/cases/auerbach-v-icann

Thats depressing... Good luck indeed.

Auerbach did win the end though, although it took a 1.5-year legal battle and EFF backing.

Just the idea of having to sue the organization your a director of to do your job...

the downside to ICANN's history of stonewalling (Auerbach v ICANN and the 22.7 bylaw) is that it erodes trust in ICANN as an agency of any value. Eventually it could be that ICANN TLD's are just as untrusted as HTTP without TLS. This is already largely true for .biz and .info. If it gets bad enough, the internet has shown time and time again it is not only willing, but capable of eschewing monolithic and aged appendages in favour of freedom. 'trustless' is exactly the concept that delivered things like DoH, Signal, and the http/2 requirement of TLS.

My take (speculation):

Eschewing ICANN would likely not be freedom in any sense, any replacement would not be the work of open and trustless bodies, for any serious replacement would have to come from a swift coup by google, cloudflare and Amazon.

I predict any replacement would likely be open in name only and instead tightly controlled by those three entities at least from the outset. It would be no more "open" than AMP is; even if protocols and specifications are open that's irrelevant if there's a de-facto central source.

It is only by a quirk of history that ISPs not google handle most DNS and DoH "fixes" that.

It would be easy for google to remove ICANN from the loop, it would be almost impossible for anyone else to do so without google's backing. That doesn't lend itself to an open and trustless replacement.

The internet hasn't proven it's "willing or capable" to do anything not delivered via Chrome for a very long time now.

> It would be no more "open" than AMP is; even if protocols and specifications are open that's irrelevant if there's a de-facto central source.

I don't understand that definition. Following the logic, Mozilla isn't open.

This deal is dirty as hell and I hope they have better luck than Auerbach, but I fear the money to the principals is gone forever. That will mean there's still a pound of flesh to account for, and the next target in line is everybody else.

Technically it could be recovered if a judge orders the deal annulled. If they don't cough up then there could be pretty bad personal consequences.

Was there any trust left to lose then? I've always been under the firm impression that ICANN is a mixture of unhealthy commercial interests and the US government in disguise, neither party inspires a lot of trust in me.

ICANN bylaws[0] 22.7b states

“ICANN may decline an Inspection Request ... relates to documents that are not reasonably related to the purpose specified in the Inspection Request or the Inspecting Decisional Participant's interest as a Decisional Participant in the EC”

This and the overall wording of 22.7 makes it unlikely that they will even get this request granted.

[0] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/governance/bylaws-en/

I'm no fan of ICANN in general nor do I agree with their decision to allow price increases for .org registrations which ultimately led to this deal happening but ICANN may be correct if they deny this request under the terms of 22.7.

"Any Inspection Request must be limited to the accounting books and records of ICANN relevant to the operation of ICANN as a whole, and shall not extend to the underlying sources of such accounting books or records or to documents only relevant to a small or isolated aspect of ICANN's operations or that relate to the minutiae of ICANN's financial records or details of its management and administration (the "Permitted Scope")."

This request certainly seems to be one seeking documents relevant to an isolated aspect of ICANN's operations.

Here's the original on their web site: https://www.nro.net/aso-issues-inspection-request-to-icann/

Does this mean that ARIN, lacnic, AFRINIC, RIPE NCC, and APNIC (the members of the NRO per https://www.nro.net/about/rirs/) are behind this? That makes no sense to me, I thought they were highly conservative bureaucracies heavily influenced by national governments. Do China and Russia, for example, want this to go through? Do we have any idea why?

Does anyone know anything about the NRO's goverence, on paper or in practice?

> Does this mean that ARIN, lacnic, AFRINIC, RIPE NCC, and APNIC (the members of the NRO per https://www.nro.net/about/rirs/) are behind this?

Yes. They have taken the highly unusual step of expressing an opinion on the DNS system.

> That makes no sense to me, I thought they were highly conservative bureaucracies heavily influenced by national government

They are extremely conservative, which should add to the weight of this action. However they answer to their respective memberships, not governments - despite being "regional" registries they stay out of geopolitics for the most part.

The NRO is essentially just a brand the five RIRs use when they want to make public statements of this sort. So read this as a statement from the CEOs of these five orgs.

With this request, I suspect they are more concerned with ensuring proper processes were followed within ICANN rather than the outcome. I think they are primarily concerned with maintining trust in the wider "Internet governance ecosystem" (that they are a part of). This is a concern as there is greater pressure from governments that want to make the case that the current model is not working and should be reorganised along UN/ITU terms.

Does anyone have any insight into how this relates to the Obama administration’s push to relinquish American control over ICANN?

I am starting to get the sense that the sale of the .org TLD is not just coincidental. It’s starting to smell like any number of the massively corrupt international organizations like the IOC (Olympics) or FIFA (Soccer/football).

Maybe it’s just my cynical side, but all this seems way too convenient and sequentially timed to be coincidental. But please, I welcome anyone to assuage my concerns with rational argument.

There is a lot that seems stinky with this deal... but The Register has reported that it was pressure from the US Government that led to ICANN's decision to remove the price caps from .org (without which the sale of PIR likely wouldn't have gone ahead). So it's hard to see how the transition away from US oversight would have been a factor here.

In fact, possibly it's quite the opposite - the NRO only has the power to request this information from ICANN due to additional community powers that were put in place as part of the process to end US oversight. So now the Internet community can steer ICANN in ways it couldn't before this change and (in theory) doesn't have to rely on vague threats from the US Gov to keep ICANN honest.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/01/org_domain_icann/

>Worse, the decision to push ahead with the contract change and ignore opposition to the price caps appears to have been made solely to appease two of the most powerful internet registries that ICANN is supposed to be overseeing, and in response to subtle pressure from the US government.

[...]

>One of the very few comments in favor of lifting the price caps specifically noted comments from the head of the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division about how it supported "reducing regulation, by encouraging competitive markets" and then noted in the same paragraph that ICANN "had its contracts reviewed by the DoJ’s antitrust division, which concluded that only .com had market power in the domain space."

>It was a clear message that ICANN would be crossing not only its main funders but also its own government (ICANN is based in Los Angeles) if it did not approve the changes.

Am I the only one who read NRO as National Reconnaissance Office?

Same, and I thought that was an odd thing for them to be interested in. They use .gov and .mil.

n.b.: it's "Number Resource Organization".

I went to the National Review (the conservative magazine) probably because they're @NRO on twitter.

Nope.

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