Whatever might be said about outgoing ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom, Internet users worldwide should be thanking him. Last week in Costa Rica, at the organization's 43rd meeting, Beckstrom blew a harsh blast of cold Arctic reality into the room about the board's conflicts of interest. You can read about the details here, here, and even in the New York Times.
I was there listening to Beckstrom's speech, and I wasn't surprised. I had watched in Singapore when almost half the ICANN board recused itself from the final vote on approving hundreds of new domain names, citing personal conflicts of interest.
But I am surprised it took an outgoing CEO to point to the hundreds of conflicts of interest, both real and potential, mingled into ICANN's DNA. The California nonprofit has two bureaucratic apparatuses in it that are supposed to represent the general Internet user. Both of them have been largely silent. One is preoccupied with fighting trademark interests, and the other, of which I have been a member for five years, is mired in its own processes and often seems capable of little more than self-analysis. The members who have bucked the bureaucracy and spoken out are in the minority.
Unfortunately, the apparent conflicts of interest go deeper than the recent headlines.
The chairman of the ICANN board's governance committee, Bruce Tonkin, is a senior executive at Melbourne IT, a domain registrar. The governance committee's conflict-of-interest guidelines mention a fiduciary relationship to ICANN as a conflict, but less directly a financial interest in a company that stands to make or lose money depending on ICANN's contracts.
Steve Crocker, a member of the ICANN board's executive committee (along with Tonkin, Beckstrom, and Cherine Chalaby, an investment banker), recently disclosed that Afilias, a registry, has invested in his company, Shinkuro Inc. -- a startup focused on information sharing across the Internet. That means half the executive committee has declared conflicts of interest when it comes to new top-level domains.
The board's structural improvements committee has five members, two of which have declared conflicts of interest with new domains.
The chairman-elect of the ICANN nominating committee, one of the most powerful and least accountable of ICANN's inner bureaucracies (and whose structure Beckstrom referred to as a significant threat to the organization), is the CEO and founder of Momentous, a Canadian registrar with $30 million in annual revenue. In Costa Rica, when questioned about the conflict, he said none existed. In reality, that's true, since the loosely written guidelines only address fiduciary relationships with ICANN itself. Among other duties, the nominating committee selects members of the ICANN board.
The chairman-elect of the nominating committee also happens to be a member of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement's negotiating team. Yes, the registrars more or less get to negotiate their own contracts, for the most part behind closed doors.
Most of these people are on limited terms, so the makeup might be quite different in a year or two. But there should be tighter rules governing who gets to occupy the seats, regardless of term length.
One compliment I will pay to the few rebellious voices: Five years ago, it would have been impossible to talk about topics such as fraud, phishing, criminal abuse of the domain name system, and dozens of other issues now common to panel discussions at ICANN meetings. Back then, you would have been told such issues were "outside ICANN's narrow technical mandate." But you know what? They aren't.
The truth of the matter, buried for years, is that the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, a document ICANN uses to bind registrars to certain behaviors, contains provisions that relate directly to many of the problems users experience on the Internet today. It's in the best interest of the conflicted parties within ICANN that it remains "irrelevant," or limited in scope, because a cursory look under the rhetoric reveals that some tough negotiations on the content of this document, and how it's enforced, would go a long way toward improving the state of the Internet in the public interest. But that public interest is not well served by a structure and executive leadership that's conflicted by the same industry it's supposed to oversee.
— Beau Brendler is chairman of the North American Internet user advisory committee to ICANN (NARALO) and was a voting member of its executive committee (ALAC) for three years.
Interesting, though, that while Farell discredits Beckstrom, she acknowledges that conflicts exist in the ICANN board and that the organization has its problems.
Still, her scathing assessment of Beckstrom may be worth a closer look.
Beau, to what do you attribute such bad feeling about Beckstrom? Is it really widespread, as Farell claims?
I know what you mean. But for ICANN, where much of what is seen in public is scripted and controlled (with the exception of the public forum), it was pretty radical stuff.
Once you reach that level in ICANN, it's not hard to parlay your position into a lucrative consulting gig, so I wouldn't worry about him. He has his own publicist.
I don't know enough to say whether he was much better than the last ICANN CEO, who was getting paid a salary plus expenses paid to a consulting firm he was running on the side throughout his tenure. Nice work if you can get it.
From a news story at the time:
ICANN documents indicate that five months after Dr. Twomey became ICANN's President and CEO, ICANN agreed to pay up to $20,000 to Dr. Twomey's consulting firm for expenses related to his recruitment and hiring.
In what appears to be an unusual arrangement for obtaining the services of a chief executive, ICANN did not directly hire Dr. Twomey but instead entered into a Managerial and Consulting Services Agreement with ArgoPacific, the consulting firm of which he was Managing Director. Dr. Twomey's compensation is paid to ArgoPacific.
The relationship between ICANN and ArgoPacific was not mentioned in either the Preliminary Report from the March 18th 2003, Special Meeting of the Board at which Dr. Twomey was elected President and CEO, or in the Minutes of the Meeting. Instead, the Preliminary Report and Minutes discussed the terms of "Dr. Twomey's employment." Similarly, ICANN's March 19th, 2003, press release announcing that Dr. Twomey had been "appointed" as ICANN's President and CEO, made no reference to the organization's having retained his services through a consulting contract with ArgoPacific.
In addition to electing Dr. Twomey as ICANN President and CEO, the Board at the March 18th Meeting also approved a "salary" for Dr. Twomey of $260,000 per year as well as "the other terms and benefits to secure Dr. Twomey's services..." The nature and cost of the "terms and benefits" is not discussed in the Minutes or Preliminary Report.
I wasn't sure what to think from the post and the linked articles so I found Beckstrom's remarks on YouTube and just finished listening to them.
http://youtu.be/YITsP6Thfqk
OK. So he may have come close to lighting the bridge on fire but he wasn't exactly inflamatory with his remarks.
I suppose he is putting his money (or career) where his mouth is and creting the transparancy and openness being advocated. I don't know many people willing to take that kind of approach with their careers even on the way out.
So is he crazy? Stupid crazy? Or just backed by a really good parachute?
The conflicts are there. That the outgoing CEO chose to point them out in this way may be offensive, but the organization's ethics problems have had consequences. We all have a stake in this because if ICANN fails, the alternative is government-managed Internet resources through the ITU, UN or some such. The famed "multi-stakeholder model" (which itself has problems the way ICANN practices it) would be gone.
An eye opening insight into ICAANs working and organisational structure Beau. No wonder ICAAN appears so toothless in adressing the problems faced by internet user.
Thanks. What do you make of Maria Farell, a former ICAAN executive, response to Beckstrom's speech:
""Beckstrom's speech was not only inaccurate and mean-spirited, but a transparent attempt to wring personal, tactical advantage at the strategic expense of the organisation he still purports to lead," she wrote on her blog."
Paul, I don't know Rod Beckstrom well enough to address what his true motives might have been. Most of the people I know in the ICANN community dismissed his comments as sour grapes, including the board and the nominating committee, which both just basically said the CEO's opinion is just that and declined to comment further. But there are others who have noticed ICANN's conflict of interest problem -- part of the reason it lost the IANA contract was, in essence, having too many conflicts of interest with the industry ICANN is supposed to "govern."
"Beckstrom blew a harsh blast of cold Arctic reality into the room about the board's conflicts of interest. You can read about the details here, here, and even in the New York Times."
So why does it take a farewell speech for Beckstorm to bring to light these ethical conflicts? What is he trying to archieve? What did he do to correct the situation during his tenure?
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