Question: I am a voting member of ICANN At Large, and would like to know the Board's position on the apparent conflict of interest involving Afilias' attempt to hijack the .web TLD from Image Online Design. I hope that ICANN will not be corrupted by massive corporations and special interests.

Nominee Replies

Karl Auerbach - posted on 2000-10-09 09:16:57 I have cavebear.web in IOD's registry. IOD has, I believe, the earliest claim to .web and has operated .web continuously for the last couple of years. I do wonder why you use the future tense when saying that you hope that ICANN will not be corrupted by massive corporations and special interests. Personally I would use the present and past tenses and recognize that ICANN has indeed been compromised by special interests. Lyman Chapin - posted on 2000-10-08 15:55:07 Ken Stubbs has a clear conflict of interest with respect to any decisions of the DNSO or its Names Council that materially affect Afilias (or CORE), but the ICANN board, not the DNSO, will make the final decision on the new TLD applications (so we should be more concerned about the potentially conflicting interests of board members). The DNSO, because of the way in which it has been constructed as a consortium of constituencies with, by definition, significant interests in the outcome of ICANN decisions, cannot avoid including many people who hold positions that would conflict with their ability to make impartial decisions. I think that need not be a problem as long as (a) there's full disclosure of the conflict (because whether or not the DNSO/NC actually makes the decision on new TLDs, it will certainly be advising ICANN), as there seems to be in the Stubbs case, and (b) the person with the conflict appropriately recuses himself (as one of the ICANN directors from the DNSO, for example, has already done because of his relationship with a TLD applicant). It's interesting, by the way, that the DNSO has no formal conflict of interest policy; in their bylaws (http://www.dnso.org/dnso/aboutdnso.html), they have only the placeholder (k) Reserved for conflicts of interest policy, if necessary. ICANN does have a CoI policy (http://www.icann.org/general/coi-policy.htm), which looks reasonable to me. It's entirely possible - even likely - that .web will not be among the small number of new gTLDs that ICANN is expected to approve in November; but if it is, ICANN will have a hard time explaining its decision if the approved registry manager is not Image Online Design. I'm a natural optimist, so I'm hoping for the best. Emerson Tiller, J.D., Ph.D. - posted on 2000-10-07 14:43:05 There needs to be a full airing of this issue. Any conflicts of interest by the current board should be revealed. Prior TLDs in use should be an important factor in the granting of new TLDs. Lawrence Lessig - posted on 2000-10-07 06:22:58 I do not know about the specifics that you refer to. But the sole reason I am running for ICANN is to make sure it does not become captured by the same, predictable interests that capture governments everywhere.