> "When its controlled by the government, it will be lobbied into a capitalist tool of consumer exploitation. Profit at its best"

Wake up, it's already happened. At the end of one meeting 4 years ago the head trademark lawyer for IBM bragged they'd spend 2 years of their $30M a year Washington lobbying budget to make sure no new top level domains had been created to protect their intellectual property interests. Dave Farber was at that meeting (as was Vint "Darth" Cerf).

Roger Cochetti, then a VP of IBM, helped Ira Magazier pick the "interim" ICANN board in secret - when that was supposed to have been done by the internet community. Cochetti is now an NSI VP and figures prominently behind the scenes of ICANN.

The IFWP effort, started in Becky Burr's (US Department of Commerce who have oversight over ICANN) office at the suggestion of Kathy Kleinman and Mikki Barry and had 3 meetings worldwide - Reston Va, Geneva, Singapore to determins consensus points to use as guidelines to create bylaws and elect a board for the organization that would replace IANA. While this was going on Cochetti and Magaziner were running around in secret getting the likes of Ether Dysan and Mike Roberts on board. Mike Single handedly tanked the IFWP effort (notice he has Farbers ear) and became the first president of ICANN and his organization was the recipeint of the "intellectual infrastructure fund" - the domain tax fund that we all paid into back then, and and .edu. Nice little payoff. Esther was by her own admission clueless about the whole thing and did nothing. It's probably just a concidence she was in IBM commercials at the time.

(" Esther Dyson says that she was approached by Roger Cochetti of IBM and Ira Magaziner in Aspen, Colorado and asked if she would be interested in joining the ICANN Board. The IFWP wrap up was finally completely derailed by ICANN's refusal to participate in the meeting."

ICANN was created to do one thing: make new tlds at a time when it seemed (at least to the US government) the US government had to step in to solve the war between the IAHC camp (who had just been shut down) and the alt root camp (who seemed to be making progress). Magaziner met with us all and created the "white paper" that was going to create 7 new tlds immediatly. Trademark lawyers and the EU freaked and when it was revised as the "green paper" it had punted to "ICANN will create a method to elect a board and a process to create new tlds". Instead they spent 3 years futzing around with the UDRP and other things trademaek laywrs wanted and didn't get round to new tlds till the fall of 2000 and it must have had all of ten minutes thought put into it and was intentinally lame as hell. To this day the new tlds that were picked are still viewed by ICANN as a "feasability study" to deteremine the effect of net stability when adding new tlds. Never mind in that period 100 new cctlds were added almost all of which were commmercial in nature.

Then you have the "Government Advisory Committe" the well named GAC of ICANN. Governments of the world get to meet in secret and "advise" ICANN.

Govrernments and the Tradmark Lobby have already coopted ICANN. It's foolish to worry that the ITU/UN will let this happen if they're in control, it's already happened.

So, don't move control of the internet to ineffective treaty organizations, move it to your own nameserver where it belongs.