Bill Thompson, the Grizzly Adams of the UK net community, has written up Esther Dyson’s exasperated apologia for ICANN at the Oxford ‘Politics of Code’ conference Thursday so I don’t need to bother. ICANN was born out of such a narrow political/ideological context (American geek-libertarian) that it was always bound to struggle to acquire legitimacy outside of the USA but I’ve always been more sympathetic to the project and to its early leaders than cynics like Bill. ICANN was and is the first ever attempt at Global Governance (unless you count Alexander the Great). We should support the latest attempts (by ICANN itself and by outside critics like Dyson) to assemble an ICANN 2.0 from more diverse materials – even if only to see what you get when you try to legislate for an essential resource at the planetary level without a Government in sight.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.