Brakeman's Blues

-- Jimmie Rodgers

Slender and Bespectacled. That's how the mainstream media has described Harris Miller. 

On another topic, here are a few words on the ICANN Miller connection that I keep coming across.  No big revelation, just another story of crazy doings.

Just about every tiny window of opportunity involving IT, money and power seems to be connected to Miller in some way.  In October 1999 AT&T's Marilyn Cade sent out a rather shrill email to her friends.  And who is Marily Cade?  Well, find out for yourself, but the first article I ran across was an April Fool's spoof: "AT&T Sells Marilyn Cade to FBI for $10 million."  And remember that AT&T is represented on ITAA's board of directors. 
Harris Miller and ITAA board member, David Olive, were among the many recipients of that email.  A quick google search on just about any one of the recipients starts to get interesting. For instance, Karen Possner of BellSouth Corporation is currently on the board of the United States Internet Service Providers Association (USISPA).  Like ITAA they are a trade organization except USISPA is "representing the common policy and legal interests of Internet Service Providers."

Here's what Marilyn wrote:

Subject:  Your help is needed immediately to help Rick White get elected to the ICANN board

Rick White, former Republican Congressman, Washington, has been nominated by Jerry Berman for the ICANN Board seats to be elected by the Names Council. AT&T and other commercial companies also support his candidacy, and your help is needed immediately.

Please consider endorsing Rick's candidacy by going to www//dnso.org and going down to the endorsement section.  Rick needs as many endorsements from as wide a variety of players as possible to help to show that he can draw support from a broad number of constituencies.

It is essential that you take the step of supporting him today and early tomorrow. The ability to make a difference ends tomorrow and we need to ensure that he has the needed endorsements - at least 10; the more, the better. I am also working with Barbara Dooley to gry to get ISP endorsements from other countries, and have asked Sheila O'Neill, ITAA, to help with WITSA members....

The poster of this email  asks

If ICANN is only going to do boring and unimportant technical work, why does a former US Congressman want to run for its board of directors, and why does AT&T, Microsoft and others lobby so hard to put their people on the board of directors? 

What is ICANN?
From wikipedia, ICANN (pronounced "I can") is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, ICANN is a California non-profit corporation that was created on September 18, 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. Government by other organizations, notably IANA.

The tasks of ICANN include managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of new generic top-level domains. The technical work of ICANN is referred to as the IANA function; the rest of ICANN is mostly about defining policy.

Note the creation date of Marilyn's email.  That means that when Ms. Cade sent out her email, ICANN was barely a year old. 

And who is Republican Rick White

From trusty wikipedia:

White first won election in 1994 against Democrat Maria Cantwell. Part of White's campaign focused on his being married while Cantwell was a single female. While in Washington he divorced his wife. He won re-election for a second term in 1996, but was defeated by Democrat Jay Inslee in 1998, and was believed to be one of the Republicans removed from office due to his vote in favor of President Bill Clinton's impeachment.

Nice guy, that Rick. Rick White did not get the seat on ICANN, and here's a paragraph from Third Seat Filled On ICANN Board Amid Controversy and Hush

Cries immediately went up that the US has been shut out of the elections, but it should be pointed out that under ICANN's geographical splits, Cohen is representing North America; Asian and Africans are probably equally peeved that they didn't get anybody on the board at this stage. The US voices are especially loud because Rick White, a former US Congressman was put forward to stand for election late on by influential forces within the DNSO, presumably with the expectation that he would win a seat. The other two supporting organizations (SO), the protocol SO and IP address SO will also hold elections soon among themselves. The protocol SO will no doubt pick one representative from each of the three IP registries, representing North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

More ICANN Controversies

I was only vaguely aware of the early ICANN power struggles, and that was only because I was linux user.  What you may remember though, is the Verisign debacle.  Verisign and Miller's ITAA continue to be deeply intertwined

In September and October 2003 ICANN played a crucial role in the conflict over VeriSign and its "wildcard" DNS service Site Finder. After an open letter from ICANN issuing an ultimatum to VeriSign, the company voluntarily shut down the service on October 4 2003. Following this step VeriSign filed a lawsuit against ICANN on February 27, 2004, claiming that ICANN had overstepped its authority, seeking through the suit to reduce ambiguity over ICANN's authority. The anti-trust component of Verisign's claim was dismissed in August 2004. VeriSign's broader challenge that ICANN overstepped its contractual rights is currently outstanding, although a proposed settlement would drop VeriSign's challenge to ICANN in exchange for the right to increase pricing on .COM domains.

Here's Harris Miller,  back in October 2005, attacking the EU (we've already seen him publicly chastizing China and threatening the Clinton White House).  The web is chockful of Harris Miller making nasty sarcastic statements to entities with whom he disagrees.  The MSM writer who mentioned that Miller is slender also thinks he "has a self-deprecating sense of humor."   I wonder if the Eurpopeans found this amusing.

In a statement released last week, Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) President, Harris Miller, blasted the European Union for compromising Internet governance in catering to China and other smaller countries while ignoring the needs of the United States, Canada and Japan.

"In attempting to act as an advocate for developing nations, the EU has instead done little more than compromise its own common sense," said Miller.

Harris Miller Runs for Office
Remember that ICANN is an internet governance body, and thus clearly involved in any internet power struggle.  As a matter of fact, it turns out that Miller himself ran for office in ICANN.  He wanted it so badly that he reserved not just one but at least two domain names for his campaign millericann.org and harrismiller4icann.org.  Both appear to be defunct now.

Harris lost.  There's lots of backstory, but here are the results of the 1st round of voting for the at-large position:

Karl Auerbach 1,074
Lyman Chapin 127
Donald Langenberg 83
Lawrence Lessig 725
Harris Miller 179
Barbara Simons 771
Emerson Tiller 490
TOTAL 3,449

Not to go to far down the sidetrack, but ICANN subsequently shut down at-large voting in order to retain and maintain corporate interests.  Auerbach had to sue ICANN in conjunction with the Electronic Freedom Foundation in order to see the financial records.

So Auerbach won the ICANN at-large and was shut out anyway.

Well I haven't got a nickel
Not a penny can I show
Get off, get off you railroad bum
And he slammed that boxcar door.
-- Jimmie Rodgers

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