For most users of the Internet, there are simply tiny little magic gnomes who
travel very quickly through the wire plugged into their modem, carrying little bits of their banking data, emails, and graphics from the server to their computer. Although that is, in fact, true, those of us in the business understand that the little gnomes are actually governed by a number of organizations with all-capital letter initialisms for names.

In Canada, registration of .ca domain names is governed by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, or CIRA. CIRA is a member of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, who oversee the registration and management of all of the world's domain names. ICANN is also in charge of blessing companies to become official Domain Registrars, which is a big-time money making business and a key part of the success of the Internet (imagine, for a second, how big a hit the Internet would have been if no one had invented the concept of domains: "Sure we have a website! It's at http://216.154.221.43!").

Back on March 17th, 2006, CIRA sent an open letter to ICANN, calling them out on not following good governance practises (you can read the letter as a news release on the CIRA site). The letter basically called for three major changes, which I agree with completely:

1. Accountability: ICANN should change its structures and by-laws to make ICANN and its Board accountable to stakeholders and implement "formal checks and balances". They specifically suggested that Board decisions be subject to a veto by a super-majority of Supporting Organizations, including CIRA. I agree - all public institutions, especially ones as important as ICANN, should be held accountable for their actions and need someone to answer to.
   
2. Transparency: ICANN currently holds a number of closed door meetings in which official minutes are not kept. This leaves no paper trail behind and no record of and how decisions get made, which is problematic both for the consequences of those decisions and for the ongoing health of the organization. Without proper record keeping, it becomes very difficult to dispute issues after the fact, and it becomes an almost certain conclusion that the same problems will arise in the future without a documented history to learn from.
   
3. Fair Process: "ICANN must establish and follow publicly documented and formally approved processes." Public institutions need approved processes if they are to remain impartial and unbiased in all situations and to avoid the taint of scandal and abuse of power. It is impossible to prove impartiality when your meetings are held behind closed doors and your procedures are not documented.

CIRA backed their letter up with some pretty serious firepower, basically amounting to a withdrawl of their support for ICANN if their issues were not dealt with (including voluntary fund contributions, hosting or sponsoring ICANN events, and to cease chairing the Country Code Names Support Organization (ccNSO)'s Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Working Group). ICANN responded to the letter on March 23, 2006 (pdf), confirming that they take CIRA's statements seriously and that they would like to meet at the ICANN meeting in Wellington to discuss.

That meeting did indeed happen, and CIRA has now posted a response to ICANN's letter (keeping up with me here?), which you can read as a news release on the site. They have confirmed that they are not disengaging from ICANN but rather limiting their role until the issues they raised have been dealt with - think of it as a peaceful protest. Their response boils down to one major point:

CIRA recommends that ICANN engage a non-governmental, independent consultant to conduct a wide-reaching, public review of ICANN’s transparency, accountability and the fairness of its processes and to provide a road-map for ICANN’s reform.

No deadline is given for that action, but it sounds pretty reasonable to me. I'd like to see some specific objectives attached to that review (e.g.: comparing ICANN against a given set of metrics, definitions of the terms, etc.), but I think it's a promising first step. It's a bad idea to confuse the gnomes or they end up carrying the wrong bits to the wrong places and your personal financial information will end up on someone else's myspace profile. "Hey! You got your finances in my myspace" is not nearly as good as your chocolate in my peanut butter.