Turcotte’s CIRA answer to ICANN

Those who know Bernard Turcotte, President and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), can fully appreciate his undeniable wit, intelligence and integrity.

The ICANN, on the other hand, isn’t so reliable.

Accountability, transparency and a general inability to properly conduct consultations continue to be documented weak spots, among others.

It so happens that the ICANN invited the CIRA to answer its Request for Public Comments regading the ICANN’s performance. That was on May 8th, 2007. Three days later, Turcotte answered that… he wasn’t going to answer!

Turcotte hits all the nails on the head, in his carefully crafted answer to the ICANN. On every account, Turcotte is right on the money. The ICANN needs to clean up their act before bothering every domain name authority into providing them with valuable feedback they’re likely to entirely disregard.

Here’s part of Turcotte’s letter to the ICANN:

“In the past we have raised concerns over the transparency and accountability of governance at ICANN including how it conducts its public consultations. More recently, we have been encouraged by the steps ICANN has undertaken to increase transparency, and have stated this opinion publicly at the ICANN Lisbon meeting.

Although improvements have been made, ICANN’s recent Request for Public Comments represents a clear step backwards in ICANN’s journey towards becoming a truly transparent and accountable organization.

That’s exactly how many Canadian domain name owners feel about the way the ICANN is currently handling its business. Furthermore, Turcotte adds:

“Due to the poor design and implementation of this Request for Public Comments we, as most serious stakeholders should, see few – if any – advantages to contributing to this effort which cannot produce any usable results while potentially further alienating constituents.”

Everybody wants the ICANN to improve but the way things are going nowadays, it’s better for the CIRA and other country-level domain name authorities to focus on helping the ICANN get back on track than sending out recommendations that aren’t likely to be properly handled.

The domain name business, worldwide, needs more professional administrators like Bernard Turcotte to bring back absolute accountability and transparency to the way domain name matters are dealt with.

Tags: domain names, cira, icann, bernard turcotte, accountability, public comments