My error re "The interim At Large members of the ICANN Initial Board.

[Michael Sondow <msondow@iciiu.org>]

Mr. Pickering and House Science Committee Members-

I had a long talk today with Mark Harrington, staff on the U.S.
Congress House of Representatives Committee on Science Subcommittee
on Basic Research, overseers of the Internet privatization process
until authority passed to Tom Bliley's Commerce Committee and
organizers of the hearing on October 7th at which Beckwith Burr and
Joe Sims appeared as witnesses.

Mark told me that you, Mr. Pickering, who chaired the March and
October hearings, have moved onto the Commerce Committee, although
not as chairman.  However, Tom Davis, Gil Gutknecht, Connie Morella
and the other congressmen and women who sat at the hearings and
asked Ms. Burr and Mr. Sims all those embarrassing questions about
ICANN are, according to Mark, still on the Science committees. Mark
and I hypothesized about what all those honest and concerned
representatives of the American people might be thinking these days
about the process that they worked so hard to learn enough about to
be able to ask the right questions of the right people, but we came
up with no satisfying theory about your current state of mind, other
than to surmise that you must be as perplexed as some of us are
about Commerce's inactivity, their absence of follow-through. 

And then there's the matter of the unanswered Bliley letters, those
missives that, six months ago, seemed to echo the thoughts and
preoccupations of so many of us on these lists: what authority does
the Department of Commerce have for transferring the A root to
ICANN?; how was the interim board chosen?; who will take
responsibility if things go wrong? What ever happened to William
Daley's reply to those letters from Tom Bliley? No one seems to
know.

Mark had seen the posting I did yesterday, asking for the record to
be corrected so as not to carry the untruth that the ICANN interim
board was elected. He told me that the committees had nothing to do
with that, and he was the editor of the official record so I guess
he ought to know. According to Mark it was Joe Sims himself who
wrote that preface to his replies to the follow-up questions. Yup,
Joe wrote a little ditty in the third person, style of "Joe Sims
this" and "Joe Sims that", just as if it was the official word of
the editor of the record, and snuck it in as a preamble to the Q&A.
It's all there on page 350.

So it was apparently Joe Sims who wrote "the interim At Large
members of the ICANN Initial Board have been elected". It figures. I
should have known that no one on the committees, much less Mark
Harrington, would have stuck in something as odious as that phrase,
which might yet become somebody's epitaph.

No, I was in error yesterday when I suggested that the Committees
had been at fault. It was Joe Sims just being his normal self,
telling lies. I guess when you've lied under oath to the elected
representatives of the American people in front of the press and the
Internet community, a few more lies for the record just seem like a
good day's work.


Michael Sondow