"First off, ICANN has been glacial with regard to new top level domains - on average about one per year. That is a long way short of "barely comprehensible" and certainly not even close to "infinite soon"."

Hi Karl;
Tell us the story again when you were the only board member elected to the ICANN board and they had these secret "executive" meetings without you and your prime goal there irc was to look at the books to see where they spending all those millions. And how you had to sue them they'd let you be able to see the books.

Imagine a world where directors of a corporation weren't allowed to see the company books. Enron anyone?

Postel articulated a set of functional criteria from 96-1999. Both core and the others had their own ideas about how to implement them but didn't differ on any thing major. Instead, ISOC in making a "deal with the devil" caved in to big business/IP special interests and gave ICANN to them. It's now, (as it was originally!) captured by old white dudes that aren't INTERNET people.

Magaziner told he he was going to settle the debate between the gtld-mou and free market people, and hindsight says "why not give half each" - give CORE 100 tlds to play with and take 100 from the other alternative root zones. Worst case if one fails miserably the other can pick up the pieces. Worst case, plan C, NSI could run it all if we're not capable. Which I doubt.

ICANN was formed to make a procedure to create new tlds. A decade ago. In the meantime cctlds pop up all over the place with no years long studies about "stability" or "trademark polity" and the net doesn't crash and the world doesn't die. The "experimental" tlds added at marina del rey in 2000 are a joke and who ever thought "we'll see what happens" means "ten years". Come on people. Hello?

If in the ICANN formation meeting at Harvard they'd said "we'll let the TM guys stall this process 10 years. And by then you still won't be able to be a member, you still won't be able to vote. Process will not be transparent and you have two layers of government bureaucracy ro get through: the US federal government - the secretary of commerce can do anything he wants to the root zone - and governments of the world, who have a cabal like group called "the GAC" that has absolute veto power and meets in secret and it's government people only.

Plus it costs $80M a year to run, and consumes 75 cents of each domain you buy or renew and is going steadily up. The CEO for $1M a year roughly for 8 years to run this mess and salaries alone for this old boys network is a huge figure.

ICANN has become the very thing ORSC and BWG warned about, and Hans Klein from CSPR summed it up best:

"Regulatory Capture ICANN suffers from regulatory capture, mostly to the benefit of US-based corporations. To cite the main episodes:

• Capture of International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) (1998): The process by which the Internet community was to design ICANN was captured by powerful industry and technical stakeholders. They boycotted public meetings and successfully proposed their own secretly-written bylaws for ICANN.
• Capture of ICANN Board (2002): The same industry and technical interests eliminated user representation on the board. (This remains the case today.)
• Capture of the Internet Society (2002): In 2002 ISOC revised its bylaws to ensure that the society would be governed by its largest corporate members. This has led to two derivative acts of capture:
  • Capture of .ORG registry. This registry is now managed by ISOC.
  • Capture of ICANN’s At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC). Nearly 60% of certified user-related
  organizations in ICANN are chapters of ISOC.
• Capture of .COM by Network Solutions. This US corporation has extended its very profitable control of the most popular domain name

You really think this is something that "work" if even "roughly" ? Do you really think it's possible to "reform" some monster like this? Obama seemed to be able to make that change.gov blog idea-pool work. Maybe that's the proper way to make a new ICANN. Or an alternative ICANN. Or something. Because what we have now absolutely does not work and I'm not convinced can be repaired.