Tales from the Internet World Cup: ICANN tell nothing will change

NetMundial's internet conference, the much-hyped, over-excited lovechild of Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, has been significantly more subdued than people thought it would be. After the first day of the two-day internet shindig in São Paulo, Brazil – the Global Multi-stakeholder Meeting on the future of Internet Governance …

[Neil Barnes]

Amanhã...

It's Brazilian Portuguese for 'mañana' but without the same biting sense of urgency.

[Fred Goldstein]

The Internet is ungovernable, so why waste money?

People who don't understand the Internet assume that it must be governed by somebody, and since ICANN is based in the US, it must be a US government thing. Which is pretty silly. The Internet is ungovernable. It is not the telephone network, which the ITU oversees; it's a private activity. ICANN is technically just advisory, and anyone can start their own internet if they want to, or run their own DNS. So let's have people spend money on luxury hotels and meetings that can't do anything meaningful; the hotel business appreciates them.

http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2013/12/27/364884-why-internet-by-definition-ungovernable.htm

[Yes Me]

Internet governance professional??

Well yes, sadly there actually *are* Internet governance professionals. It's a completely redundant profession, of course. And since NSA/GCHQ etc. surveillance of telecommunications is at least 75 years older than the Internet, it's no surprise that NETmundial has uttered nothing relevant to the Snowden revelations. Blah blah governance blah as usual.

But please don't knock,or mock, Steve Crocker. He's done a great deal to make the Internet work better, including taking his turn in the ICANN barrel. If ICANN didn't do what it does, somebody else would have to do it anyway. (Agreed, they have scraped more money off the side of the "new gTLD" frenzy than is seemly, but for whatever bizarre reasons, the money is there for the scraping.)