On July 2, Salon published an interview with John Gilmore, a software entrepreneur and longtime Internet visionary, that called for the outright abolition of ICANN. Gilmore is also helping to fund a lawsuit by Karl Auerbach, a popularly elected ICANN board member, that is demanding access to ICANN's financial books.

In response to the Gilmore interview, Salon received an angry letter from ICANN's chief counsel, Joe Sims, and was also approached by Esther Dyson, who sought an opportunity to explain some of the "nuances" of ICANN's operations.

Salon: John Gilmore says we should have thousands of top-level domains.

Dyson: If people are redesigning the system from the start you'd probably do it entirely differently. But why could God build the world in only seven days, you know? Because he had no legacy systems.

In the long run you could create thousands of top level domain names, but you'd end up with the same issues. As long as you have names you're going to have scarcity, and artificial scarcity. ICANN should create a whole lot more top level domains and take the artificial scarcity out of the market.

In response to the Gilmore interview, Salon received an angry letter from ICANN's chief counsel, Joe Sims, and was also approached by Esther Dyson, who sought an opportunity to explain some of the "nuances" of ICANN's operations.

Dyson: You've got structures that make elections real, and one argument against them is -- I've heard from members who say "In my country we've had too many elections where you just go out and round up a few hundred thousand peasants and you pay them and get votes." And that's what the ICANN board in part is scared of.