Ex-ICANN chief spotted in low earth orbit

Esther's back!

By Andrew Orlowski in London, 27th July 2002

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

Esther Dyson has made one of her occasional swings past Earth, with Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo making radio contact as her low earth orbit took her over San Francisco.

The former ICANN chief has lost none of eccentricity on her on her voyage through the galaxy.

"Let's get real!," she proclaims - an alert for regular readers to take cover, to avoid being hit by a flock of birds flying backwards.

"I want to fix it."

Esther weighs in on the subject of the At Large board - that's the 17-strong body who in ICANN's original charter should now have been elected by the public. As it is, only four posts were offered for election, and shortly before CEO Lynn and attorney Sims jettisoned themselves in their own escape pod, they decided to abolish the whole nasty business of elections altogether.

To widespread relief, Esther opines that the existing board are, in fact, reasonable people. Only with one exception - Karl Auerbach - "...who unfortunately has some good proposals and it's counterproductive how he goes around trying to achieve that."

(Look, we never said this would be easy, navigating through clouds of Esther antimatter and strange vortexes of nonsense.)

"Let's get real!" she again demands.

"I can't think of anything better than elections..." she says, before er, dismissing the idea of elections as a "near term mechanism". Elections are a long-term goal, you see. Just one that's rapidly disappearing over the event-horizon.

Are you still following us?

Dyson last passed within radio contact in March, when, after the plan to abolish the board had been made, she baffled observers by embellishing the news with the message that it had been a "hard fought" triumph for democracy.

Esther's father, the great British-born physicist Freeman Dyson, once planned a spaceship powered by nuclear bombs.

But Esther's found her own release, free from the surly bonds of reason: a vehicle so elusive no mortal can hope to plot its progress. Can Auerbach and Gilmore muster a light sabre between them? ®