> The real issue is that, under US law (and IANAL), my understanding is that
> a vendor can not have BoD seats with the contractor's company.
You have made an important point. As you say, there is a glaring fault with
the setup ICANN has proposed, where people are selected by the Board of one
corporation (the DNSO Names Council) to sit on the Board of another (ICANN)
with which they have a contractual relationship on the same subject but
independent liabilities.
But that is not the only anomaly. There is also the question of overlapping
memberships. If the memberships are substantially the same (and no mechanism
for separating them can be reasonably envisaged, I think, unless ICANN will
have no membership and become an unaccountable authority like IANA was),
added to the Board members overlapping (fifty percent from the SOs), there's
no way they are going to pretend to have separate liability. It doesn't
wash.
The SOs were intended not only to be part of ICANN, but to be ICANN. This is
why the present proposal made by Joe Sims and Michael Roberts, by itself
illegal since it was never put into any bylaws but instead announced in a
press release, won't work.
Of course, the real motivation behind all this hocus-pocus is the same as
that behind the unannounced, non-public meeting in Washington on January 21,
the same as that behind the separate negotiations last summer between IANA,
NSI, and the Internet business consortiums: divide the opposition, conquer
dissent, and control the Internet.
Of