Daniel R. "Dan" Tobias

Nominee for the ICANNAtLarge Panel

I was recently surprised to receive a notification that I had been nominated for the panel of the ICANNAtLarge organization, a group of Internet users who have been attempting to form a group to serve as the representation of the "common user" to ICANN, in the face of the latter organization's continuing attempts to disenfranchise "commoners" in favor of letting insiders and big-money interests run everything. Surprised, that is, because although I had signed up as a member of ICANNAtLarge, I hadn't actually participated in it, or expressed any interest in running for any official position within it. But somebody out there must have seen my ongoing participation in such forums as ICANNWatch and judged me worthy.

I thought about taking the "If nominated I won't run; if elected I won't serve" tack... after all, I'm not even sure exactly what this position actually entails. What would I be getting myself into if I actually won? However, I decided that I ought not pass up this opportunity; after all, my participation in online discussion and debate about domain name policy issues has been motivated for years by my desire to stand up for the DNS as a logical namespace, in the face of others in all directions with more "crass" economic motives (ranging from speculative greed to overextended intellectual property "protection"). My views on domain names are presented in great detail in my Domain Name Site. Keeping this logic-based view a part of the discussion is a good motive to seek a position on the ICANNAtLarge panel. Whether it's a good motive for anybody else to vote for me is another question... one I won't know the answer to until the election!

When this ICANNAtLarge organization began, I refused to be involved in it because it offended one of my big Domain Pet Peeves: it used icannatlarge.com as its address, despite being a noncommercial initiative (and thus more suited to the .org domain). I only joined when the issue of renaming the organization and its Internet address came up for vote, with most of the possibilities on the ballot having a proper .org TLD. Ultimately, and to my great relief, icannatlarge.org won and became the official name and address of the group. However, to my great mystification, icannatlarge.com reared its ugly head again, with the ICANNAtLarge forums resurfacing there "unofficially" after being banished for unknown reason from the official site. Since then, the .org and .com sites have operated separately, each one generating various e-mail messages urging participation in discussions, surveys, elections, and the like, at least partially disjoint from one another. This gives ICANNAtLarge a somewhat schizophrenic image to the outside world... the appearance is that of two different loose-cannon webmasters acting in an only sporadically coordinated way to promote what they still all claim is only one organization (any suggestion that some sort of schism has taken place is vehemently denied). Given that I haven't actively participated in this organization or either of its (official / unofficial?) sites, I still consider myself an outsider (despite being nominated for an inside position), and I must tell you that the view to an outsider is mighty confusing. If ICANNAtLarge hopes to make a serious stab at reforming ICANN, it should start by reforming itself into a much more coherent, understandable, unified body.

"Unified" doesn't mean that everybody in ICANNAtLarge must have the same opinion on all issues; as the representative of the general Internet public, ICANNAtLarge must inevitably represent an extremely wide range of views. However, there should be more coherency about just what the nature and purpose of ICANNAtLarge is... if it's just going to be a ragtag bunch of people each going their own way, then there's no point to having an organization at all. I'd like to see a revamped Web site, under the proper .org address of course, with good explanations of what ICANNAtLarge is, and what it's up to, as well as all the polls and discussion forums that can currently be found in that abomination of a .com address, which ought to redirect to the proper .org one.

Anyway, that's what I stand for... I'm not a politician, so I'm not going to go on with elaborate platforms or promises... vote for me or not as you wish.

P.S.: The e-mail message informing me that I was nominated was malformatted, in violation of the standards in RFC 2822 -- the lines were arbitrarily long instead of being kept within 78 characters. I just wrote a Web page on that subject. Let's try to follow all Internet standards! (This Web page validates!)

webmaster@icannatlarge.dan.info