Notable Quotes

”One of the advantages of leaving MMX is that I am finally done with ICANN ... one of the single worst organizations I have come across on this planet."--Fred Krueger

"... In my STRONG opinion, ICANN is a corrupt racketeering organization. It's a crime syndicate that advances interests of a few insiders at the expense of the masses and the general good. They have abused their power and their role .... Is ICANN Corrupt??? Many think so! Count me in that camp!"--Rick Schwartz

Comment to NTIA (pdf): ICANN Is Unfit, The IANA Transition Should Be Unwound:
"ICANN is incompetent, corrupt, and unfit for the role it was given by the U.S. government in 1998 ... The IANA transition was a mistake and a fraud upon the American people and the global internet community."--John Poole
* * * * * * *
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose -- the more things change, the more they stay the same -- ICANN.dysfunctional | Computerworld.com Dec 12, 2011: "... ICANN today is a dysfunctional and self-justifying organization that is in need of limits." 
ICANN, Domain Names, New gTLDs:


""I really can’t see a legitimate upside where new benefits [of the new gTLDS] outweigh costs, and everyone I mention this to feels the same way. People just shake their heads. It’s all about the money. They [ICANN] are creating these extensions because they can." University of Pennsylvania Wharton School marketing professor Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (source: Knowledge@Wharton).

“ICANN is obligated to manage gTLDs in the interests of registrants and to protect the public interest in competition. ICANN appears to have assumed that the introduction of new gTLDs necessarily will enhance competition and promote choice and innovation, without offering any evidence to support that assumption.”U.S.Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, December 3, 2008 (pdf).

"The free-market triumphalism of the 1990s, and the intensely deregulatory political climate fostered by Bill Clinton’s Democrats and Newt Gingrich’s Republicans, framed full private ownership of the Internet as both beneficial and inevitable .... But the fight is not over. The upcoming ICANN handoff offers an opportunity to revisit the largely unknown story of how privatization happened — and how we might begin to reverse it, by reclaiming the Internet as a public good."--Ben Tarnoff, JacobinMag.com (emphasis added)--News Review: Post-Transition ICANN & The Global Public Interest | DomainMondo.com.

"ICANN has a conflict of interest in pursuing the global public interest since its own financial interests are at odds with keeping costs down for Internet users and businesses," Castro [Daniel Castro, senior analyst for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation] said. "Without US oversight, ICANN has the potential to grow into the world's largest unregulated monopoly." source: InformationWeek

"If one wanted to capture ICANN on a single issue, or a group of interrelated issues, the most practical tactic might be bribery" -- John C. Coffee Jr., Columbia University Professor of Law, IANA Transition advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce (NTIA). See News Review [24Jul]: IANA Transition & ICANN Corruption, Capture, and Control.

"ICANN has made a lot of mistakes and ICANN has not really been a good steward.” - Garth Bruen, Internet fraud analyst and expert, security fellow at the Digital Citizens Alliance;


ICANN Board of Directors, Conflicts of Interest: "Business groups and some others have long complained that ICANN’s decision-making was dominated by the interests of the industry that sells domain names and whose fees provide the vast majority of ICANN’s revenue." - Washington Post

Ethics Fight Over Domain Names Intensifies: "A boardroom dispute over ethics has broken out at the organization that maintains the Internet address system after its most important supporter, the United States government, reproached the group for governance standards said to fall short of “requirements requested by the global community ...”"--The New York Times March 18, 2012

How Donuts Is Playing a Big Role in the New gTLD Era: "We think of the new TLDs almost like vanity license plates." -- Jon Nevett, Donuts co-founder and executive vice president of corporate affairs

"Advocates of Internet freedom contend that such an expanded address system [new gTLDs] effectively places online control over powerful commercial and cultural interests in the hands of individual companies, challenging the very idea of an open Internet." New York Times, August 17, 2013

“'The public at large, consumers and businesses, would be better served by no expansion or less expansion' of domains" said Jon Leibowitz, former chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission in the New York Times."

"... we are not running out of domains. This is a “way for registries and registrars to make money,” says Dyson. She also points out that “there are huge trademark issues. I just think it is offensive... It will create a lot of litigation.”" [see: Esther Dyson Told ICANN new gTLDs were a mistake in 2011(video)].

Tim Berners-Lee: "....when a decision is taken about a possible new top-level domain, ICANN's job is to work out, in a transparent and accountable manner, whether it is really in the best interest of the world as a whole, not just of those launching the new domain. It also means that ICANN's use of the funds should be spent in a beneficent way..."

“The introduction of new TLDs is likely to increase the value of the gold-standard ‘dot com.’ Adding more side streets only increases the value of a main-street address.” –Karl Ulrich, Vice Dean of Innovation and Professor of Operations and Information Management, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania - Knowledge@Wharton

"ICANN destroyed the value of new gTLDs by flooding them into the domain name ecosystem -- no one will remember hundreds of new domain name extensions -- but every internet user in the world already knows and uses .COM domain names, and anyone in the world can easily register, buy, and sell a .com domain name using multiple currencies. That's why 'every Fortune 500 company and the world’s fastest-growing companies have a .com domain name'." –John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo June 11, 2014

Focus, Innovation:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”― Steve Jobs

Disintermediation:
The Battle Is For The Customer Interface | TechCrunch: "The new breed of companies are the fastest-growing in history. Uber, Instacart, Alibaba, Airbnb, Seamless, Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google: These companies are indescribably thin layers that sit on top of vast supply systems ( where the costs are) and interface with a huge number of people ( where the money is). There is no better business to be in. The New York Times needs to write, fact check, buy paper, print and distribute newspapers to get their ad money. Facebook provides a platform for us to write our own content, and Twitter monetizes the front page of newspapers, which happens to now be the Twitter feed.... The Internet age means building things is nothing other than code. We’re going to see a non-stop battle to leap ahead of each other. And also get more wide, Twitter may have started out as a microblogging platform, but it’s now aiming to be a way to exploit its audience to distribute TV content. Facebook’s attempts with news content now make it a news channel and thanks to Autoplay video, soon a way to watch TV content. Snapchat’s discovery features turned the IM platform into a way to consume TV content. In the modern age, having icons on the homepage is the most valuable real estate in the world, and trust is the most important asset." - Tom Goodwin @tomfgoodwin, TechCrunch, March 3, 2015

"Early adopters win. If they continue to stay the course. If you’re planning on being a YouTube star today, forget it. Same deal with imitating Katy Perry or Miley Cyrus. You’re too far behind the curve. You’ve got to catch the NEXT wave."--Bob Lefsetz

General:
Expected Risk: “The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.” -Benjamin Graham

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win” - not Gandhi

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?" - John Maynard Keynes

"Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking." - John Maynard Keynes

"You can't just leave those who created the problems, in charge of the solutions." - Tyree Scott

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." - John Maynard Keynes, (attributed) English economist (1883-1946)

MSM 'news'--“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”--Mark Twain

Ambush, Distract, Disrupt, Inform
"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and 
as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical." --Thomas Jefferson

Domain Mondo archive