The report of the second public forum is up.

I'd like to edit and extend my remarks -- there were some transcription issues.  Here's what I said:

Good morning, I'm Susan Crawford with Cardozo Law School in New York City.

I wonder how many of you remember the Spruce Goose? The largest airplane in the world -- designed at the time to carry two Sherman tanks across the ocean and 750 troops. Development dragged, and in fact, the airplane wasn't finished. It was planned to help out in World War II. It wasn't finished until after the war was over at enormous cost.

Now, the Spruce Goose's core mission was to fly. It didn't focus on that mission. It focused on flying big. And as a result, it wasn't much of a help during the war.

I believe that we are engaged in a titanic battle for the future of the internet right now. This is playing out in many fora across the world. Obviously, the WSIS process is a major part of this.

George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, announced yesterday that in his mind, only authorized users should be allowed to access the Internet. Only people who are worried sufficiently about security. How about that; right?

Pushed by law enforcement, intellectual property and sovereignty concerns, people are fighting about the Internet all over the world. And ICANN's role in this is a very small part, actually, but nonetheless a key part of the battle.

And I believe ICANN is on the right side of this battle. Netizens, if you will, are on one side versus authorities who seek to control the Internet on the other.

Listen carefully to the language of the U.N. They refer to ICANN as "the present arrangement." Something that can be reformed, should be reformed, so that new blood can come in and run the allocation of IP addresses and the insertion of domain names into the root. That language is key, and part of this battle.

Governments, in a sense, have an advantage over ICANN when it comes to regulating the Internet, because all they can do is pass laws. Otherwise, their inaction has no effect on how the Internet is used or what innovation occurs.
The consensus policy process was designed to give ICANN that same advantage, suggesting that some consensus policies would be created if they were supported by global consensus. Everything else would be left to local control.

ICANN should claim this advantage energetically with both hands -- claim this competitive advantage it has to allow innovation unless consensus policies exist to the contrary. Otherwise, the risk is we -- and ICANN is us -- ICANN will look worse than governments for its core mission, which is avoiding collisions in the root, handing out new Top-Level Domains, and allocating IP addresses.

So I have two suggestions. Just as the core mission of the Spruce Goose was to fly, the core mission of ICANN is to, in fact, expand the TLD name space. We had a dramatic discussion about that yesterday. It's clearly not easy, but ICANN could release a lot of the pressure on this conversation and help in this battle by setting up a process for regular insertion of new Top-Level Domains into the root. And I'm convinced that you're working on that. I see that happening.

But a second thing that hasn't been adequately discussed, I think, in connection with the strategic plan that's under consideration right now is that ICANN very clearly needs to tie its considerable financial goals to its inward processes. That is, as Mouhamet has said several times, its key functions of opening up new TLDs and allocating addresses. Those central things have to work right, just as the Spruce Goose really should have flown earlier.

I'm not convinced at the moment that the financial goals of ICANN as expressed in the strategic plan adequately tie to these core inward missions. Rather, they seem to be aimed at fighting this battle outwardly, setting up ICANN as sort of an alternative to other substantial intergovernmental organizations. I think that's a mistake and I hope there will be a lot of examination of that strategic plan.

You have many friends across the Internet, many people who care about your side of the battle. The question is are they going to align with you? Are they going to see ICANN as a failed experiment or as a timeless embodiment of net values, which is what it was supposed to be.

Will your friends, these other friends of the Internet, care if you carefully preserve the TLD string space so that nobody else can use it? I'm not sure they will.

Will they support you and applaud you if you manage in a very careful way the business models of the registries and registrars who have contracts with you? I don't think so.

On the other hand, if you join with them to protect the net from the sources of control that seek to constrain access to the Internet and control what kinds of things can happen online, you have a tremendous group of people who will help you, who will applaud you and go into battle with you.

So don't let the forces of intellectual property, sovereignty, and just all-out greed destroy the net. Join with your colleagues on this side.

The Spruce Goose project was killed. The plane was kept in flying order until Howard Hughes died. It's now kept in Oregon.

I don't want to see ICANN fail. Thank you.