How on earth do you go about changing this -- you're one man on a board of 19.

Yeah, well, I'm going to lose a lot. However, there are other things that a member of a board of directors has. The first thing can be seen in the word "direct" -- a director directs. That's an action word. A director must act, a director must direct, must make well-informed decisions. To do that, a director has the right to inquire about and examine all the records, documents and procedures of a corporation. Very little is hidden from a director's eyes.

This gives a director an enormous power to know what's going on in the corporation and to expose improper activity.

Also, by my behavior, I intend to exemplify "open, transparent and accountable." I intend to be a standard by which other board members will be measured.

What else do you bring to the table?

Well, ICANN is moving into a realm where knowledge of technology is actually going to make a difference. And I know the technology. For example, all this business about top-level domains and how many the Net can support -- there's been no technical discussion of how many it can actually support. And most people don't understand the issues of content management, which is very definitely changing domain names from being globally meaningful to locally meaningful.

A lot of people think "domain name" uttered anywhere means the same thing. They think a name is just a name is just a name. Yet it costs a lot of money to move content around the network, both in terms of bandwidth and in terms of time. Users get really tired of waiting for stuff to get dragged across the Net. The idea is -- and Akamai and other companies are doing this -- you move content, you spread it around so it's replicated, so when somebody asks for it, you intercept the domain-name query and you look at it and say: "Where is this user coming from? Where is the closest place he can get the content?" And your DNS [domain name system] answers, then points the user to the place that's closest. Therefore, we've got geographically sensitive domain names.

And there's this strong financial pressure by data providers and ISPs to manage the content so it can get to the users more efficiently, in terms of not generating so much bandwidth consumption. This is big bucks -- we're talking billions of dollars here. ICANN doesn't understand this. It's assuming that domain names are this globally unique name space, when in fact they are evolving to become more of a personal domain space.

So unless one understands the technology and the implications of it, when one enacts rules regulating it, you essentially pour concrete around the technology. You inhibit, if not prevent, innovation. By creating all of these laws about rights to names and structures and DNS, we don't know what innovation we're impeding.

Do you remember the Hushaphone decision back in 1956?

No. I'm much too young to remember anything that happened in 1956.

Ah, it's a very interesting case. In the 1950s, AT&T was The Phone Company, this huge monolith, and it and the Federal Communications Commission -- which was pretty much subject to AT&T's whim -- had an iron fist of control over the telephone system in the United States. But there was a little company called Hushaphone, which built a plastic and aluminum widget that clamped onto the mouthpiece of the telephone. As with when you put your hand around the mouthpiece, it cut out exterior sound and helped focus your voice into the microphone. It was a totally passive piece of equipment. AT&T went ballistic. It said, "You can't sell that product; it will damage and destroy the telephone network."

And the FCC said AT&T was right. "We can't have linemen blown off the telephone poles from a high-voltage shock because someone's using a Hushaphone" -- that sort of thing. It actually took something like 20 or 30 years to get to court, but the U.S. District Court took a look at this thing and said, "AT&T, you're full of it. This little widget cannot possibly harm the telephone network. Plain common sense tells us that."

So the District Court enacted a standard that said any action that is privately beneficial is permissible on the telephone network, as long as it's not publicly detrimental. That's an important standard; that was the crack that broke AT&T apart. Hushaphone was the start.

We need to revisit that rule. We need to realize that large technical entities sometimes don't tell us the truth. We have to realize when we're being subjected to a snow job. It takes some technical savvy to look at something and say, "This emperor has no clothes."

Where does your relationship with Cisco fit into this?

I don't speak for Cisco and I never will. Cisco is not like the old companies where the president gives an order and everyone marches off wherever he says. We are more of the cats. And most of us are financially independent, so we don't have to follow orders anyway.

Are you going to have enough time to do for ICANN what you would like to do?

Yeah, I think so. It will of course interfere with my work, but it's been interfering with my work for a couple of years. I'll probably continue about the same kind of schedule, which is work, then say "Hi" to my wife in the evening, then go do ICANN stuff. She doesn't like that.

Aren't you also doing DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] research?

I'm not sure how much of what I'm doing is yet open for public release, so I'll be a bit vague. But I'm doing research with folks at UC-Berkeley on means to build what I like to call "autopilots" for the Net. The idea is to add intelligent control systems and make use of process control principles to exercise that control and keep the Net operating within limits established by the network administration. This kind of thing will become increasingly important as the Internet moves toward providing "lifeline" services and time-sensitive applications, such as I.P. telephony.

OK, let's get into some of your more specific gripes about ICANN. What do you think is ICANN's biggest flaw?

First of all, ICANN is not a legislature, yet it is enacting what amounts to a law that is above all other nations on the planet. The Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy [for domain names] supersedes U.S. trademark law or any other trademark regime in any other country. ICANN will claim that it is merely private and contractual, but the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit was not imposed by federal law directly. It was imposed by the federal government saying to the states, "We will withhold money unless you -- the states -- enact a 55-mph speed limit." So just because it's done by contract doesn't mean ICANN is not enacting what amounts to a worldwide law.

And ICANN doesn't have the structures associated with classical government: a full-participation review, a tension between various opposing forces -- a separation of powers. It doesn't even have a notion of due process. It essentially is an oligarchy that operates on the same principles that Louis XIV did. So it's an inappropriate body to enact what amounts to worldwide legislation.

Look at most of the UDRP cases. We have the Brazilian soccer team taking away Corinthians from someone in the U.S., for example. I'm just waiting for the second shoe to drop, which is when the city of Corinth in Greece goes after the soccer team in Brazil.

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