One could make the point that it's notable that Roberts and Rutkowski cite security from a presidential directive in their recent NTIA/domain submissions, Rutkowski even goes as far as saying the precepts of the white paper than in theory bind ICANN are no longer relevant because of this new presidential directive. Suddenly the appearance of a DHS guy to head ICANN makes sense.

But, one cannot help also note in Obama's speeches in Cairo and Ghana where he stresses that "development depends on good governance" and articulates 4 principles for Africa which seem to also translate to the DNS arena - security is only one of them:

• Democracy
• Opportunity
• Health (of the DNS, which really means security)
• The peaceful resolution of conflict

It would be a grim task to ask how how well ICANN is doing in these areas.

The president articulated further: "history offers us a clear verdict - governments that respect the will of their own people - that govern by consent and nor coercion they are more prosperous, they are more stable and they are more successful than governments that do not"

If we look at what Mueller has written about ISOC and the Trademark lobby influence, or Froomkin's analysis of the various legal vulnerabilities of ICANN the picture becomes even murkier as ICANN years for independence from DoC oversight. I don't think the DoC's continuing role is appropriate any more either.

And this is saying nothing about the very expensive trips around the world for face to face meetings because the somehow this internet regulatory nexus can't seem to be able to work online, at a time when the swine flu is "widespread" in California and New York where yesterday's ICANN IRT meeting was held. ICANN has now gone from being annoying to an out and out health hazard.

If nature takes its course now, either the expansion of the domain name system gets impeded arbitrarily by the trademark lobby or ICANN itself blows up into a bunch of little starfish because of anti trust action, or the network relevance of ICANN tends toward zero because of new ways of addressing phones and games.

So maybe this is the sort of thing Obama was talking about when organizations that are "open and transparent" in words but not deeds begin to falter, inevitably, and maybe it is time to finally put ICANN to bed.

There doesn't seem to be any shortage of people technically proficient enough to execute the tasks at hand and an estimated 15,000 jobs hang in the balance ready to be created.

So if ICANN is really going to be a debating society and recycles the same intellectual property arguments over and over again - apparently while using our domain tax dollars to act as human tape recorders - then is there any sense in doing this any more? Fourteen years of hearing the same arguments from the same paid actors - poeple - if you haven't figured this out now you're never going to.

Move the discussion over to the FCC and move the IANA contract to NIST and be done with the damn thing and lets get back to work.