Vint Cerf is a remarkable leader, and I believe that his role in the success of the Internet is, if anything, underestimated.  While he is a fine engineer, he is first and foremost an outstanding socio-political leader.  Vint created the Internet community, and he guided the community’s design of governance institutions, for technical standards (IAB/IETF), for itself (ISOC), and for system regulation (ICANN).

That said, there were some not-so-nice periods in ICANN’s history, and Cerf’s brief comment here glosses over two of them.

First, the most significant directors on ICANN’s first board were the people who were *not* there.  As mandated by the NTIA at ICANN’s founding, almost half the directors were supposed to be elected.  However, those elected seats were kept empty for years;  the NTIA mandate was never fully implemented.  Instead a partial board was appointed, the elected seats were left empty, and the initial subset of directors quickly began making policies (e.g. the UDRP).  That violated the spirit of ICANN.  The board was packed with directors chosen by insiders, and representative mechanisms imposed by NTIA were circumvented.

Vint’s second gloss concerns the actual people who were appointed as directors.  While the original directors were people of high standing, they were also mostly people with little background in Internet names and numbers.  Their lack of expertise left them dependent on the staff and other insiders for advice on how to decide things. In effect, the staff ran ICANN, while those original board members merely lent their reputations to legitimize decisions.

These combined tactics of blocking the elected directors and filling the appointed seats with dependent directors left the staff and the “old guard” (Vint and others) effectively in control of ICANN.

These issues reflect a tension in Internet governance.  There was tension between top-down governance (by Vint and a handful of other outstanding individuals) and bottom-up governance (by the mythical “Internet community” and by the IETF.)  In his comments here, Vint has glossed over how the folks at the top employed some not-so-nice tactics to assert control over ICANN.  Some might say that those tactics were necessary, but in any case they were employed and should be remembered.

Thanks for compliments and comments. The early ICANN was unfunded and at considerable risk as it tried to fashion a framework within which to function and to sustain operation. Not all players in the Domain Name business welcomed the arrival of ICANN. I remember tough business model debates and some lawsuits. It is fair for the writer to draw attention to the early and difficult period of ICANN’s birth. I am more sympathetic to the ICANN side of the story but agree that it would be historically interesting to have a factual accounting.