What’s interesting, and heartening, about this episode is that the complaint was made by a man, John Berryhill, and he’s taken to blog comments to make this a more broadly teachable moment:

“Guys, you might do something which, after a few drinks and alone in some exotic place with one of the women of the ICANN community, may seem to you to be a “misunderstanding” or simple social faux pas. You may find that, well, obviously it wasn’t all that bad because the next day she had the discretion not to make a big deal out of it, or otherwise call you out and embarrass you.

Please do not make the mistake of believing that what you did was okay, understandable, or that you were just having an unlucky evening. The reason you are not called out at the microphone for exactly what you are is that she has to continue to be a cooperative member of the community of which you are unfortunately a part. It’s part of what she has to put up with here.”

John puts his finger on exactly what can happen at these gatherings, and why it continues. Of course there’s a continuum of risk when a woman manouevres herself out of the power of a sexual predator, going all the way from a clumsy pass to attempted rape. I’m not the only woman to placate and flatter her way out of a ‘date rape’ situation and, once safe, be livid that the tactic I used to escape allows the predator to keep thinking he’s a nice guy who just didn’t get lucky.

What’s striking to me about John’s intervention is how happy I was to see it. I asked myself why it’s such a big deal when a man calls out the daily sexism women deal with simply as a cost of doing business.

Partly, it’s tactical. Just as John says, most women put up with this nonsense because they don’t want to be branded a whiner. We don’t call this stuff out publicly because it harms our reputations. And I know a lot of guys in our community will be given pause and listen this time, simply because another man is speaking. But, more than anything else, it’s good just to know someone else is noticing.

It reminds me of a light bulb moment I experienced as an exchange student at McGill, in Montreal, when male classmates made it their business to help women get home safely at night. It had honestly never occurred to me that men would feel our struggles were their problem, too. (In fairness, it was 1993.) Here on CT, I always feel irrationally grateful when fellow bloggers or apparently male commenters call out the sexism of some comments. Dan Davies has long been a true gentleman in this regard.

But it’s also troubling that my genuine gratitude implicitly accepts that casual sexism or sexual predation in the workplace aren’t really serious until a man notices. And also that women should navigate patriarchy on the protective arm of a sympathetic man. Once we’ve accepted that, it’s a short hop, skip and jump back to letting them vote for us so we don’t have to bother our pretty little heads.

The position of male feminists is an awkward one, and most of them are both perceptive and gracious enough to realize it. I’m troubled by my own perhaps overly grateful response, but I try to accept the help in the spirit in which it is given.

(Avid readers may remember my intervention at an ICANN meeting in San Francisco a year ago on the lasting damage Beckstrom has done to ICANN’s international reputation and staff. Soon after, the Board of Directors decided not to renew Beckstrom’s contract, and launched a search process that will culminate next month in the announcement of a new CEO.)

People at ICANN meetings have become accustomed to the politically tone-deaf performances of Beckstrom’s opening day speeches, leading to, for example, cringe-inducing public prayer sessions or government reps storming out. So this week’s effort, which painted ICANN’s Board of Directors, Nominating Committee and the entire CEO job applicant pool as conflicted and ethically challenged in-breds, was greeted with amusement and disdain. The outrage Beckstrom has previously parlayed into headlines and Internet buzz has been replaced with patiently gritted teeth.

The fact is there’s a germ of truth in Beckstrom’s searing criticism of the organization he’s been happy to run for the past three years. Conflicts are rife, with several industry-sourced Board Directors needing to recuse themselves from discussions or votes on new generic top-level domains. And ICANN’s standing is nowhere near to recovering from the dramatic act of pantouflage of our last Chairman, who went from chairing the Board meeting that approved new gTLDs to running a new gTLD company within a few weeks.

But things are often more complicated than they first appear. The frequent tendency of Board Directors to recuse themselves speaks as much to their honesty, propriety and the availability of prudent legal advice, as it does to anything unsavoury. For example, one director recuses himself because his company enjoys a silent partnership with another company that has separately developed new gTLD services, i.e. there’s no direct benefit. Many corporations would not require a recusal in these circumstances, but ICANN Directors volunteer them.

Although it’s not the kind of sound bite that appeals to swansong speeches or opportunistic critics, the fact is that conflicts can be managed honestly and fairly when the right behaviours, expectations, sanctions and transparent processes are in place to allow informed decision-makers to share their expertise when appropriate, or just get up and leave the room otherwise. Under Beckstrom’s leadership, ICANN is updating and improving its conflicts and ethics policies. And as a member of the Nominating Committee I’ve asked for and received several tutorials from ICANN’s legal counsel on the changing state of play. I’ve never been involved with another organization where there was such a high level of awareness and concern about conflicts, for better and worse. The declaration of conflicts is not proof of the impossibility of self-regulation, but actually a healthy mechanism for getting stuff done.

So Beckstrom’s self-serving critique of the organization he is leaving might be noted and ignored, while the people thus accused continue to work diligently and in the open to develop a fair, global, self-regulatory model that is still very much a work in progress. Unfortunately, that’s not how China and Russia see it.

As ever, ICANN is engaged in an existential struggle for both the development and the survival of the multi-stakeholder model. Remarks such as Beckstrom’s play right into the hands of governments that have no interest in allowing anyone else into the room when they decide on how to run the Internet. They give credence to uninformed rumour-mongering that has as its goal the wresting of control of the Internet by the very governments who most wish to censor and constrain free expression.

Unfortunately, we can expect more of these ‘bombs’ to be dropped during Beckstrom’s final months, as the CEO and Board Director attempts to paint himself as a courageous contrarian speaking truth to power. But the truth is Beckstrom’s speech was not only inaccurate and mean-spirited, but a transparent attempt to wring personal, tactical advantage at the strategic expense of the organization he still purports to lead. It is a shame that at this point in Beckstrom’s tenure, we have come to expect no better.

As a child, you can completely disappear into the world of the story and experience an emotional and imaginative totality. Many readers continue with that intense immersion through their teens, often through genre fiction (though all fiction is genre, if you ask me). But the high gets harder and harder to find and is nearly always attenuated in some way, not least by the cares of an adult life.

I got to thinking about how books can re-create that lost paradise for me. There are a couple of ways it can still happen; identifying strongly with the main character, being brought into another world, imaginative or historical, that is just strange and convincing enough to make me wistful for it (the Avatar phenomenon), or simply immersion in a ripping good yarn. Some books that have recently made me feel like that rarest thing, a happy teenager, are Tim Winton’s Cloud Street, Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book and Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside (which we did a seminar on last year).

I’m curious about what others think. Can you ever go back? What sort of books do it, and how?

“I’d just like to say that all the ladyblogging about ladyparts and ladyissues only of interest to ladies around here lately has been awesome. I’m learning a lot from it”;

I’m going to share some observations as I near the end of my third round of IVF.

Embryos are not babies
You might think someone so eager to have children as to undergo months of difficult and expensive treatment would have a hard-core view on embryos and babies. You’d be right.

Twice now, I’ve had two embryos placed in my uterus. I have pictures of the precise moment they were ‘put back’. None of them stuck. The fact is, most don’t.

Despite what we went through to create these embryos, I am left with the cold conviction that they were opening gambits, and no more. Certainly, I would have loved them if they’d turned into babies and mourned them if I’d lost them farther along, and I was very, very sad to not get pregnant. But I felt as if the embryos were simply sets of ultimately flawed operating instructions that de-compiled within hours or days. Most embryos are only that. They may succeed, or they may not. They may be carried to term, or they may not. Human agency may intervene in any of these moments, or it may not. This makes me a bad Catholic, but I find it strangely comforting nonetheless.

I believe more firmly now that an embryo is a step along the way to becoming a human, but it’s not a human. It’s a possibility. And a real, live human woman in all her flaws and situational complexity is infinitely more important and deserving of consideration than the mere possibility of one.

Trans-vaginal ultrasounds are really quite invasive
This is a live issue in the US, where legislators are trying to force women who want abortions to undergo ‘just an ultrasound’ to see their babies. The idea is that once women see the fetus, they won’t want to kill it. Religious conservatives can’t seem to conceive that a woman can understand her pregnancy is real and still choose to end it.

During IVF, women have frequent trans-vaginal ultrasounds to see how their ovarian follicles are developing and to measure the lining of the uterus. I have them two or three times a week. It was a big deal for me when I started as it’s basically a dildo with a camera in it, wrapped in a condom, smeared with very cold lubricant, pushing quite hard against the cervix. Towards the end of the cycle it’s quite painful. At any point along, it’s awkward. Even though I can now chat happily about the weather or point out a missed follicle on the screen, the nurse and doctor are still incredibly solicitous of my comfort. They do this scan every day but they appreciate it’s not a normal or comfortable situation for the person being scanned, and they act accordingly.

I want to have these scans. They are getting me somewhere I want to be, and they are administered by professionals I know and trust and who are on part of that journey with me. I believe this invasive scan being forced on pregnant women seeking an abortion would be a violation of their bodies. As someone who gets this scan all the time, I truly cannot imagine the interaction in the room or the doctor/radiographer – patient relationship that would be involved in a woman unwillingly undergoing it from a professional intent on forcing her into something she doesn’t want. I also wonder how there can possibly be consent, when the women are forced to submit in order to be allowed medical care.

Most people are statistically illiterate – probably by choice
The odds in my case are 70 – 80% for failure. That’s unfortunate but normal for my age. Most people I talk to are irrationally optimistic about their chances. The likelihood is expressed as; ‘We have a 20 – 30% chance of success? That’s great!’ And it is great, of course, compared to people a decade or two ago whose chance of having a baby was precisely zero. But if a doctor said you had a 70-80% of dying in the next six months, wouldn’t you start writing your will and marking off that bucket list? The numbers are not kind, but I find it helps to be honest with myself about the glass being less than a quarter full.

Then there’s the Monte Carlo fallacy, which you hear often in IVF circles; ‘I have a one in three chance of getting pregnant each cycle, so if I do three cycles, I’m bound to get lucky’. Again, wishful thinking. Each cycle re-sets the likelihood back to a third. I don’t like to imagine how many cycles I would have to do before my numbers revert to the mean!

There is really very little you can do
It’s good that some women find cutting out alcohol and coffee helps, or doing post-embryo transfer meditation, having acupuncture, giving up work, or any number of things that make them feel better from one minute to the next. (Giving up coffee may possibly help with implantation, but the improvement is vanishingly small.) But none of these things improves outcomes as much as not being fat, not being old, not being poor, living in the right local authority area, picking the right clinic, or, sometimes, just using a different drug or protocol.

Women receive an endless stream of unsolicited advice – largely from other women – that amounts to an implicit and unintentional blaming when assisted conception doesn’t work. It pains me to be ungracious about help so generously offered, but I’ve read too many discussion threads of women torturing themselves for not lying down for long enough afterwards, for drinking that cup of black tea or not making it to yoga, that one time. Or the worst; not relaxing!!

There is only one thing a woman on IVF can do to improve her chances of getting pregnant: be born with a lot of good quality eggs and don’t spit them out too soon. Massages and detox diets have zero effect on the ovarian reserve. Zero. It is hard to accept, but the level of agency involved once you’ve surrendered to IVF is almost nil. Take your shots at the right time, and get enough food and sleep. That’s it.

As a feminist, I believe that irrationally constraining my lifestyle in ways that don’t demonstrably help, just so I can say ‘I did everything I could’, is just another way of staying small and quiet so no one can blame me if, as the numbers so cruelly indicate, it doesn’t work out.

So yes, do all the scented candles, evening primrose oil, positive thinking and lovely long walks you like. They help with peace of mind and overall wellbeing, and can be essential to just getting through it. But they won’t demonstrably help to start a pregnancy, and not doing them doesn’t mean you didn’t want it enough.

IVF clinics (in the UK) are choke points for everyone’s pet public health priority
If I were amongst the lucky majority who fall pregnant by simply having sex, I wouldn’t have to submit to endless checklists imposed by well-meaning public health busy-bodies. But I am not allowed to proceed unless my smear is up to date, my vaccinations can be proven, and I undertake to swallow extra folic acid daily. There are lots more I can’t remember, and they all involve providing the clinic with paperwork in case there’s an inspection. Some of these requirements have to do with pregnancy, but many are simply unrelated trip-switches that shut off IVF to anyone who doesn’t comply.

It’s classic bureaucratic irrationality. Almost anyone can get pregnant without permission, but once you fall into the trap of needing help, you must prove again and again that you are worthy of it.

Practically, it doesn’t make sense. The IVF demographic is a small one, but, I’ll hazard, on the whole a lot healthier than the general child-bearing populace. Chances are you’ve tried a lot of lifestyle improvements before you start on the Gonal-F. So why should I have to satisfy expensive and time-consuming box-ticking exercises to get permission for motherhood?

But the current hot button issue in the UK is single embryo transfers. There’s no possibility of an Octomom scenario in Britain. Doctors here can only transfer one embryo at a time unless there’s a good reason to transfer two, such as the woman being older than thirty seven. Three embryos can be transferred to women in their forties, but this is rare. When two embryos are transferred, the likelihood of a twin pregnancy can be up to 25%. (That’s 25% of the successful 10 – 20% of transfers in the >37 age group.) But the UK fertility regulator, the HFEA, has just told fertility clinics they must bring multiple birth rates down even further, to 10%.This means more pressure on women or couples to transfer a single embryo, no matter what their situation is. If they don’t, they are selfishly risking multiple births and burdening the system.

Like most public discussion of IVF, there is a lot of cant that tries to disguise the unpalatable truth. Hardly anyone wants to carry twins, but we only have a couple of shots at getting pregnant, so the risk/reward calculus is different to that of most people. To support its directive, the HFEA insists that single embryo transfers result only in slightly lower pregnancy rates. But this is only part of the story. (And given what women are already told to do to only marginally increase their success rates, it is striking that the same differentials can be completely dismissed when it suits.)

If you don’t transfer the second embryo, you have to freeze it. When you freeze it, the odds of successfully thawing it drop to around 60%, depending on the facility. So by insisting on freezing the second embryo instead of giving it a chance in utero, the authorities are effectively destroying anywhere between a quarter and a half of them.

This issue tends to be misrepresented as ‘Well, it’s difficult for clinics to say no to pushy couples who are paying for a service / only get one or two cycles on the NHS’. The truth is that individuals opting for double embryo transfers have gone through a lot to create a small number of embryos, and are making sensible decisions based on the full range of relevant information, not just the statistics that serve the HFEA’s case.

What’s at issue is the relative risk calculus of the individual couple versus that of a national health provider, but with the added dimension of time. We are comparing the risk of failure today versus risk down the road with multiple births. Most people get about a two-year window to succeed or fail with IVF. Improving thawing rates of embryos or pre-implantation identification of successful ones are, for anyone undergoing IVF today, merely interesting hypotheticals. Our timeline is by necessity shorter than that of the regulator, and none the less compelling for that.

In short, these are complex and difficult questions that deserve an honest debate based on the full range of available information, and not the patronizing partial truths coming out of the HFEA.

Blaming IVF multiple births for hoovering up scarce public health resources may or not be fair, but it’s probably inaccurate. NICUs are not full of IVF multiples. The NICU population comes from a range of groups, including babies with genetic disorders and the premature children of very young mothers with chaotic lives who would never pass the bureaucratic scrutiny required to darken the door of an IVF clinic. I don’t believe the state has a right to prevent these women conceiving, so why should it be allowed to stop me?

Everyone has a story
Many, many people have had tricky or unhappy times, not just with infertility, but with miscarriage, and the moment you hint you might be one of them, stories just come tumbling out. Infertility is a great leveler, and another lens through which to see that the reality of life is unpredictable, painful but also richer than the happily ever after I would have chosen for myself.

But ‘everyone has a story’ works in another way, too. If many media commentators are to be believed, IVF is a quick fix for sharp-elbowed women who ‘want it all’ but ‘left it too late’ and, let’s be honest, were probably ‘asking for it’. This doesn’t happen to be my story, but I don’t generally volunteer that because a) it’s nobody’s business, and b) if it was my story, would I be somehow deserve this? And would my husband?

It’s horribly commercialized, but if it wasn’t we wouldn’t have it
There is a whole medical/commercial infrastructure that seems to determine that no matter what the cause of infertility, IVF is nearly always the answer. This makes sense for many patients, but the incentive structures for large-scale provision of just one type of treatment may crowd out others.

However, as pretty run of the mill, middle class people living in a provincial city, we would not be able to access IVF without the scaling made possible by the financial rewards of a somewhat industrialised process. So I’m fairly sanguine about becoming grist to the mill of the fertility industrial complex. And, as I hope I’ve indicated, my clinic and the people who work in it are lovely and very, very good at their jobs.

IVF is not all that bad
I won’t generalize my own, relatively easy, experience to those of all women undergoing IVF. But I will share that, even with the bone-tired exhaustion, endless appointments, and recovery from minor surgery every couple of months, I’ve found it all surprisingly ok. It’s human nature that we probably don’t hear as much about the many IVF experiences that are really quite tolerable. But for everyone, IVF is also an emotional rollercoaster, albeit one which defies the laws of gravity with a lot more downs than ups.

IVF is a lot of things. It’s highly political, as I’ve tried to illustrate. It’s unpleasant, tiring and time-consuming. It’s bloody expensive. In all these respects, it’s perhaps not bad practice for the down-sides of parenthood. It’s also a timely counter to the downward supply curve of adoption.

But if I had to sum up all I’ve learnt, particularly for those considering it, I’d say ‘It’s actually not all that bad, considering. And at least it gives us a chance.’

***

A word to the wise, I’ve edited out my thoughts on adoption in the UK, but suffice to say it is difficult, if not impossible, for people in my situation to adopt, and I will zap any comments along the lines of ‘There are loads of needy children out there. Why don’t you just get one?’

***
P.P.S. My belated thanks to the many commenters below for such a generous and informative discussion.

This is too good to just post a link to on FB or Twitter or even that Tumblr I started with such earnest hopes for the unleashing of my strangely bounded creativity. In a column worthy of the Irish Times’ old contributor, Myles na Gopaleen, Frank McNally lists the History of Ireland in 100 Excuses.

It’s almost impossible to cherry-pick because half of the fun is the cumulative effect, and the other half is they’re so damn funny. Still and all:

1. Original sin.

3. The 800 years of oppression.

9. It was taught badly in schools.

10. The Modh Coinníollach.

25. We only did it for the crack.

72. I must have had a bad pint.

80. The money was only resting in my account.

86. The banks were throwing money at us.

90. The Welsh just seemed to want it a bit more than we did.

As they say, words to live by. My sister Eleanor suggests we use it as the rough draft of our next report to the Troika.

Why should a global blog care about American legislation?

For all the talk of the unintended consequences of SOPA’s anti-piracy measures, it is no accident that Crooked Timber could one day end up as collateral damage of this legislation. SOPA/PIPA are the latest in a long line of laws that seek to externalize the enforcement costs of a beleaguered business model.

We could lose our domain name and more, and with no effective recourse, simply because a commenter posts a link to allegedly pirated content. Or because a touchy content owner doesn’t like us linking to them, and doesn’t like what we write. I say these unintended consequences are not accidental because to the intellectual property zealots who privately draft our public laws, Crooked Timber would simply be an acceptable level of road-kill. Funny how ‘tough choices’ are bad things that are done to other people, eh?

More broadly, you should care because SOPA/PIPA are explicitly extra-territorial. SOPA degrades the domain name system in ways that have been repeatedly and explicitly spelt out to US politicians by Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf, two of the guys who invented the DNS the Internet. They were ignored.

(Somehow, it’s ok for law-makers to screw up part of the critical infrastructure while cheerfully admitting they have no clue how it works. Think how that would go down with, say, healthcare or the economy. I know most of them have no clue, but can you imagine them announcing that to a hearing and everyone laughing sympathetically? Yes? Welcome to my world.)

Also extra-territorially, PIPA messes with search results outside the US. And under SOPA, domain names of non-US sites but registered with US registrars could be seized even more easily and without reasonable or timely appeal. There are many, many ways to get screwed by this, even if you don’t live/vote/spend in America.

These are not bugs. They are features. The aim of SOPA and similar laws is to eliminate barriers to the fast and cheap enforcement of private property rights. Abuse is already rife of the currently allowed punitive actions that do not follow due process or include similarly quick and effective channels of appeal. (See notice and takedown under the DMCA, or Whois just about anywhere.) This legislation was created for one narrow commercial interest group out of a whole ecosystem. None of its effects are unintended.

You need to care about this because the infection is spreading to where you live.

Alongside the State Department’s pronouncements on ‘democracy brought to you by Twitter’, and exhortations to other countries to stop blocking the Internet, the US is actually better known abroad for another export: intellectual property maximalism by force.

Via wildly asymmetrical bi-lateral trade agreements, America bullies Australia’s public health system to pay over the odds to US Big Pharma, and threatens to blacklist Spain for not passing laws written by the US film industry. SOPA/PIPA may sound so crazily over the top that they’ll never work anywhere else. Just see how high that one flies the next time the USTR visits your capital city.

But there is hope. Hell, there may even be some common sense.

Finally, the Internet works
The SOPA/PIPA moment is a turning point. Thanks to Wikipedia, this supposedly arcane Internet policy issue has been on every BBC TV and radio bulletin I’ve caught in the past 24 hours. It is mainstream news around the English-speaking world.

(Incidentally, some of the media exchanges are pure comedy gold, as Big Content employees interview each other, trying to be fair-minded but genuinely perplexed that any of this is an issue. BBC Radio 4 interviewer to a Telegraph commentator: “But how can anyone except pirates be against anti-piracy? Surely everyone is in favour of this law, except, of course, for its unintended consequences..?”)

You could see this turning point in neoclassical terms:

•Rent-seekers and gate-keepers coordinate to externalize their costs onto the public and hobble new market entrants, via lawmakers delighted to accept ‘free’ money.
•Citizens face collective action problems in finding out about and stopping it.
•The Internet saves itself at the last minute by reducing the barriers to information
and advocacy, and making it too costly for politicians to stay ignorant and happy.
•Oh, and the whole technology industry also rides in on a larger-than-expected white horse, followed by, possibly, the White House Blackberry User in Chief.

Or you could tell it as the story of the moment people realised the Internet is about more than porn.

Either way, the time is long gone when dreamers could believe the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. The Internet is simply an elegant set of chokepoints being squeezed by anyone who can get their hands around one. The time has come to pick a side.

Movements are formed in moments such as this one. Changes in behavior flow from changes in ideas, and from evolving beliefs about what can be done.

Now, I’m not going to go all Holy Jebus on you, and I realize there are many, many issues we should all throw our weight and our pennies at. But Crooked Timber is a blog, and it depends on a functioning, open Internet. So I ask readers to think about what steps you might take to help prevent foolish, frightened or greedy people from getting themselves lathered up and breaking the Internet all over again.

GET INVOLVED
We’ve already linked to EFF’s SOPA page. If you live outside the US and want to make a difference in what is still a lopsided debate, consider joining or donating to the following organisations:

UK: Open Rights Group (Disclosure: I have recently joined its Board of Directors)

Ireland: Digital Rights Ireland

Europe: European Digital Rights (EDRI), a Brussels umbrella group run by the redoubtable Joe McNamee. Their list of member organisations is also a good source of like-minded orgs.

Feel free to suggest other Internet rights groups below.

• All of us at Crooked Timber agreed/acquiesced to going dark for a day to protest at SOPA/PIPA, for what I imagine are similar reasons. This post, however, represents my own views. Big thanks to Kieran for organizing a URL re-direct at very short notice.

ISOC does essential work campaigning for public policies that keep the Internet open and offering technical training, especially in developing countries. It has hundreds of local chapters around the world that teach people how to build out the Internet and develop their own professional and technical leadership skills. The chapters push for open and ready access in their own countries and feed in information and viewpoints to ISOC’s global advocacy work.

But let me step aside from how ISOC would probably describe itself, and put some less modest flesh on these bones.

Outside the most developed countries, there are probably just a few thousand people in the world who are building out the Internet for the bottom two or three billion. Pretty much all of them will have come up through ISOC. They will have done country code management training days or learnt to deploy IPv6. They’ll have been sent to an IETF meeting or taught how to configure a name-server. Through their local or national ISOC chapter, these individuals will turn enthusiasm and a little knowledge into real professional competence and a set of relationships that make things happen for their countries.

If you look at the development of the Internet, it’s clear that a critical mass of knowledge, curiosity and, above all, relationships are responsible. Each country has replicated this process with its own kernel of people building the country code, routing the traffic and agitating for openness and investment. This all happens long before a local telco incumbent or communications ministry clues in. (Though often these organisations will include people who get involved and informed via the local ISOC chapter.) ISOC has spent the last two decades quietly turning human technical latency into real, live bit-streams, with all the good and some bad that flows through them.

It’s hard to exaggerate ISOC’s reach, but let me give an example. About a year ago I was traveling around East Africa for work. A road trip in southern Ethiopia concluded earlier than expected and I had a free afternoon in Addis Ababa. I contacted the local ISOC chapter and within less than twenty four hours had set up meetings with Internet entrepreneurs and activists. Those sessions were more eye-opening than my previous days of visits to regional IT centres. If you want to plug in to practical yet visionary technologists anywhere, ISOC is the place to go.

But ISOC is more than a social agency for geeks. Let’s take a moment to refresh on the different layers of the Internet; the physical pipes, the interlocking protocols, the software and applications. AT&T or Deutsche Telekom own the pipes. Facebook and Google run software and sell services that go through the pipes. What ties it all together are the protocols and standards in between. Those protocols and standards are a mix of computer code and human behavior. They are developed openly and with the object of maintaining the ‘end to end’ nature of the Internet. The Internet Society is an essential part of this.

Every company that builds its empire on the Internet, and every government that finally gets around to noticing it, inevitably wants to make the Internet proprietary, tame and, ultimately, finite. They give lip service to the Internet as a common pool resource whose value is its limitlessness and ubiquity, but in practice cannot get beyond a mindset of parsing, constraining, monetizing and controlling. Left to their own devices, business and government will devour and destroy the precise characteristics of the Internet that make it a continuing platform for innovation and creativity.

As the legal and philosophical home of the IETF and IAB, ISOC plays a critical role in creating and maintaining the actual and metaphorical middleware; the base protocols that allow anyone’s software to run, or content to flow through. ISOC is an astonishingly important, albeit deeply unassuming organization. I wish ISOC and everyone associated with it many more decades of productive work.

‘Wherever You Are’, the lovely song sung by the Military Wives Choir led by Gareth Malone, is at least worth a hunt through Youtube, along with footage of how it came about. The song’s release follows a TV series about choirmaster Gareth Malone turning a group of women into a proper choir while their military husbands were away in Afghanistan. The women’s letters to their husbands were gleaned for touching – though admittedly a bit saccharine – lyrics to a song written for them. Eventually the men came home, and the choir sang beautifully in the Royal Albert Hall on Remembrance Sunday. There were many tears along the way, not least those of viewers. The song was number 1 in the UK at Christmas and has now been released in the US. The proceeds are going to charities that support ex-service men and women. It is certainly worth a listen and even ordering from Amazon US (whenever they get around to re-stocking it).

The real reason I hesitate just a little bit in recommending this sweet song is a niggling worry about sentiment. We all live in a post-Diana world where the stiff upper lip has given way to increasingly orchestrated and maudlin displays of public emotion. A leader who can’t emote, especially on television, is no good. As soldiers don’t have a choice about which wars they fight, it’s a good thing that citizens of democracies don’t, as a rule, pillory service men and women. But I can’t help thinking all these TV programmes about soldiers and their feelings, army wives singing and crying, and kindly townspeople meeting hearses; they give the rest of us a deliciously tender moment to feel in sympathy, rather than think hard about the reality of an all-volunteer force fighting largely wars of choice.

Seventy years ago, George Orwell wrote that the British ‘common people’ have always distrusted a standing army (a view long-shared by the state, according to Alan Mallinson). Publicans had, in Orwell’s recent memory, often refused to serve men in uniform, and the goose step never took off here because Britain was the rare country where people were unfearful enough to laugh at it. Officers had, for at least a hundred years, changed immediately into normal clothes when they finished work. Today, at least in part because of the need to blend in in Northern Ireland, British soldiers spurn the dramatic and unnecessary buzz cuts of the US military, and quite happily look like civilians when they’re off duty.

In spite of Britain’s historic and rather healthy distrust of soldiers and soldiering, we see a creeping sentimentality in public perceptions of the military. The very good publicity and fundraising on soldiers’ disability and rehabilitation done by Help for Heroes has the unintended consequence of associating the military, in the public mind, with continued pleas for sympathy and support. As the World War II generation dies out, Poppy Day nonetheless goes from strength to strength. Its dissociation from the Great War is almost complete, and the day is now a month-long exercise of the thought police. Ironically enough, the Labour creation of Armed Forces Day – another obligatory show of respect– is seen by many serving as simply more drilling for yet another march down High Street on a weekend you’d rather have to yourself or your family.

All this pomp and sentiment is simply a form of distancing. Mass media omnipresence and fly on the wall coverage of the military has the opposite effects to either honest empathy or critical understanding. It puts the soldiers on a pedestal of sentiment that implicitly says ‘I could never do that’, under-cutting the typical military refrain that they are just ordinary people doing an extraordinary job. It also keeps the idea of soldiering at arm’s length. Our boys are puking with fear before venturing out of the patrol base, but they do it anyway. They’re seldom depicted asking themselves – as they often do and as we should ask ourselves – what are we really doing there, and is there anything more at stake than a face-saving retreat on our own timetable?

Wherever You Go; with its slightly ropy solo, sentimental lyrics and Disney-esque melody, always makes me cry. When my husband deploys next year, I will probably indulge in a few bus journeys into town looking out the misty top window to hide my tears as I loop it on repeat to ease out my emotions in manageable doses. But at least I know this is an indulgence, and not something to be cultivated.

The Bad Karma Diaries is about two girls going into their second year of secondary school, Anna and Denise, or rather Bomb and Demise, in text-speak. They decide to start a business, and a blog, and then also a karma exchange for the bullies and bullied kids in their school. It all goes horribly wrong; adventures are had, lessons are learnt, ways are mended – somewhat – but there’s no moralising at all.

The verdict? “I loved it I loved it I loved it! :D Is there a sequel?? :)”. I’ve had a few misses as we navigate the tricky reading years between much-loved children’s stories and those first steps of her reading grown-up books for real. So it’s very nice to have really hit the spot. If you are looking for a funny, clever, non-preachy but still very enlightening book for the young teenager in your life, look no further.

For Aifric’s birthday next year, I’m thinking of sending Jo Walton’s gorgeous Among Others. If, as they say, Harry Potter is about confronting your fears and doing the right thing, and Twilight is about the importance of keeping your boyfriend, Among Others is about the joy of reading (especially SF & fantasy), surviving loss, thriving as a fish out of water, and the inherent value of thinking long and hard about people in your life, both good and bad. Not just for adolescents, then.

Any thoughts on books – especially recently published ones – for 12-14 year old girls or boys?

Not much else has changed; the vegetable section is either bulging with unlikely and out of season produce or empty like in a zombie movie or communist Russia. The price war turns out to be just lower prices than in August when they were hiked up ahead of time. And there are a couple more self-checkouts barking orders and requiring on average two staff interventions to make each transaction go through.

But the Costa. That’s changed everything.

This is a suburb of Edinburgh about a mile from the nearer villages and with a mix of public and private housing. It’s by no means isolated, but on a wet and blustery day twenty minutes walk feels too far for a pint of milk or the morning paper. I can’t imagine I’d do it more than once a week if I had a buggy to push or arthritis, no matter how lonely or fed up I was. And when you work from home, a burst of fresh air and a face to face conversation with a real, live human is a godsend.

Now, one of my daily highlights is my overpriced, under-caffeinated and much loved light latte sipped at a plastic table under piped music drowned out by the endless cheeping of supermarket scanners. A mix of the same people is there most days.

One is an elderly woman bent over a stick who waits discreetly at her table while the counter staff bring over her tea and biscuits. Another is any one of the buggy-pushing set enjoying a guilt-free sit down before getting on with the shop. My favourite is the older woman I always have to repeat my order to but who always seems uncommonly pleased to be there.

I suppose the point is that however annoying the perpetual encroachment of large corporates and their vertical integrations and tie-in deals, the day to day of mega-commerce can still boil down to people in a community using the place to find, talk to or just quietly appreciate each other.

‘Concerned the female unemployment rate is higher and getting worse’;

‘Troubled that axing child benefit nudges middle class women out of work for good’;

‘Alarmed that women know health and education cuts doom their children to shorter, poorer lives’;

‘Horrified that targeted cutbacks to legal aid mean demonstrably more women will be murdered by the men they love’.

Not at all.

Silly women, the government thinks! Just because of our blue-sky thinking to cut parental leave in the never-ending War on Red Tape, why would women think we have it in for them?

But the UK equivalent of the American soccer mom is deserting the coalition government in droves, and she must be won back. How? The coalition can’t miss this once-in-a-generation chance to destroy the welfare state in order to pay for banks and the imaginary economy they’ve destroyed. The cuts must go on.

Then what shall they do to win women back? How about some cheep ‘n cheerful eye-catching measures that show our hearts are in the right place? Let’s;

• Ban forced marriages, because that’s too simple an issue to cock up
• Pretend we can stop porn on the Internet, because women are too stupid to know it doesn’t work like that, and we can still get ours anyway
• Talk very loudly about how hideous it is to sexualize children, especially working class ones who don’t know any better
• Spend bazillions on our buddies’ flagship ‘free schools’ in west London to show we really care about the kids
• Remind everyone constantly that the Prime Minister’s heart is in the right place; he has NHS frequent flyer miles and he feels our pain

And you know what? Cameron is right to be a little perplexed that women are losing faith in him. Because the government’s faux-regretful gouges at the post-war social contract don’t just hurt women. They hurt everyone who’s not been sensible enough to be born or become wealthy. It’s just that women voters seem to be among the first to cop on to it.

But you can’t play the ‘trust me because I’m a reasonable, personable man with a clever wife I adore’ card more than once. Women aren’t stupid, and neither is the electorate.

A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest.

The letter came via a circuitous route from a tenuous connection; Meg, Edward’s godfather’s wife who was also my mother’s friend Mary’s book club companion. It was prompted by a misunderstanding between a son who was monosyllabic about his social life and a mother who thus assumed he had none. It came from the peculiarly Anglo-Irish practice of proper letter-writing, and directly from that rare person who said ‘I must write them a letter’, and actually did.

For all that, it arrived into an insanely busy household of people who didn’t have time to meet their own friends, let alone pluck new ones from the ether. It languished there for several weeks. And when it finally got to someone with a moment to do something about it, I very nearly didn’t.

The letter said the man in question had been born in Ireland, educated in England, and was now working for some sort of military attaché in the British embassy in Washington. “Spook!” my friends cried.

Apparently, he was finding it a challenge to make friends in DC because everyone in the embassy went home to their families every night. Johnny-no-mates, I thought. Though at least it also said he didn’t know the letter was being written.

And it said twice that he was “a decent, entertaining fellow”, which, added to the very proper, English military thing, made him sound as dull as mud. You see, the thing about receiving a Victorian letter of introduction is that, however romantic it seems in retrospect, it makes the man in question sound about as exciting as the dutiful Dobbin in Vanity Fair.

I said to my sister-in-law, Nicole, if I don’t ring him this evening, I’m not going to. I thought he’s probably a braying Hoorray Henry with jug ears, the height of whose year is the Glorious Twelfth. He’s tall and gangly, with sticky out years, probably red-haired, and hasn’t finished a book since Eton. Nicole said this was quite an assumption. And anyway, I loved red hair.

I phoned him up. It was a Thursday night about half past nine. He was utterly bemused but couldn’t hear a word. He was at the 9.30 Club to see a band. Hmmm. Not a social write-off, then. We texted and agreed to meet the following night.

But on Friday night we were on different sides of the city with different groups of friends. We phoned back and forth with arrangements. I confided my fears about him and he insisted he was a jug-eared ginger who went by Lord Haw Haw. The calls got flirtier, but the logistics got harder. We didn’t meet.

On Saturday, I had lunch with my boss Paul’s boss, Paul. Over a beer and steak near where the buses leave for New York, I told him the story and showed him the letter. Spook! He said. (He would.) And then ordered me out onto the pavement to call the guy, saying if I didn’t I may as well not turn up to work on Monday. Thanks, Paul.

On Sunday, I bought a new, short skirt and rang on the bell of a stranger’s house in Dupont. Ed opened the door and my initial thought was … hmm. Bit skinny, bandy legs. Nice accent; kind of posh but Irish, too. Likes my jokes. Considerate. Lovely brown eyes and golden skin.

There then followed, in short order, a date in a pub to watch Munster play rugby, to which we each brought reinforcements. I later found out he has no interest in the sport. He flirted with another girl and I, in revenge, went after the helicopter pilot he’d invited as wingman. Him falling drunkenly asleep in an exhibit in the Spy Museum. Definitely not a spook, then. The evening ending in separate taxis and disarray. Mutual apologies the following morning and the scheduling of a proper date. Me encouraging my toddler nephew to call him from my mobile, accidentally on purpose. Him just dropping by on a seven mile run in one hundred degrees. Me inviting myself on his Californian holiday. Him accepting.

And in longer order; a cross country move for work, the sudden loss of my job, home and visa, family bereavements on both sides, unemployment in Dublin, me getting a new job in DC just weeks before he left for his next posting, and months and months of uncertainty at long distance. Then I did something uncharacteristic. I stood my ground and waited.

Because about half way through an adult life where I’d followed one opportunity to the next, moved house every nine months, lived in no country longer than three years, and always thought the point of it all would be revealed in the next job, the next city; I had stumbled into something stronger than my own will, something whose logic and grammar I intuitively accepted with questioning but not doubt. And waiting for the person chosen for me to feel that too, for the next job and the next home and the next ones after that to be willed by someone else, and for all other possibilities to be forever foreclosed, I was calm and perfectly still.

This day last year, in a sunny cottage garden in the Luberon, he crouched down beside my chair and gave me a handful of wild lavendar and thyme he’d picked as he walked and struggled to decide. He began a speech so pained and passionate that I could not tell if it meant the beginning or the end for us. I retained none of it as I concentrated on keeping my face neutral and my breathing steady, ready to bear the worst with dignity, until the very end when the tumble of words paused and he said “… and that’s why I want to marry you.”

We went walking down a country lane to gather ourselves, pulling flowers from hedges as the sun set and pausing to listen to children divebombing into a swimming pool, marveling that the exchange of a few words had changed everything for us.

We married four months later in freezing Dublin. Meg, the author of our happiness, and Mary, the book club queen, were guests of honour and read out an epic poem of our romance. It’s now hanging in the downstairs loo.

Ten days later, Ed left on exercise in east Africa and was out of contact for much of three months. The day we re-united and got the keys of our married quarter in Scotland, he charged out the door for Libya (only to spend a week cooling his heels in Brize Norton before returning home horribly behind on his email). Every time the headlines say ‘the army may be called in’, his phone starts buzzing. It’s like being married to an anti-Superman; when trouble calls, he’s ready. Oh, and that’s it. Phew.

Now, in the present, I see hideous army curtains and a professional life shoe-horned into a new home every year or two, with an unlikely infantry officer who reads me poetry in the bath and whose steady gaze brought me to tears when I ardently vowed to cherish him. And in the future; deployment and more absence, love letters on thin blue sheets, perhaps a welcome redundancy and many more fresh starts, this time together.

‘Reader, I married him’ is just the beginning of the story.

ICANN’s Board has now decided not to renew Rod Beckstrom’s contract as CEO when the deal expires in 2012.* There had been calls for Beckstrom to resign or be fired before the end of his contract, but I’m glad the Board is ensuring that the search for a new CEO is not rushed unnecessarily. Hasten slowly, as my grandmother used to say.

As many know, the Board’s new Chair, Dr. Steve Crocker, has spent considerable time over the past year or so on regular phone calls to Rod Beckstrom, not so much in coaching mode as providing a sounding board and voice of experience. That solid working relationship is a credit to both and will help to ease the transition to new leadership.

The Board has given itself time to think hard about a new CEO and make sure the decision is the right one. Presumably they will set up a search committee. I hope that committee can include or consult members of the Internet community. Here are some points the search committee might consider.

‘Multi-stakeholder’ is not a slogan. It’s ICANN’s DNA.

Rod’s most obvious legacy is a largely new, mostly American executive team with shallow ties to the global Internet naming and numbering community. They will need to work hard with the community to show they understand that ‘multi-stakeholder’ is more than a slogan, and that transparency and accountability are not optional.

The next CEO needs to understand that ICANN is not a California nonprofit that happens to have a lot of volunteers. It’s a unique, multi-stakeholder organisation with a global responsibility to Internet users everywhere.

Avri Doria, who has long experience as a volunteer in ICANN and the IETF puts it well:

“There is a mismatch in the self-identity of ICANN. To some of us, both among the volunteers and among the professional staff, ICANN is a multi-stakeholder driven organization that has hired a professional staff that implements the decisions of the volunteers and assists those volunteers with their work.

I believe more has to be done to make sure that the distinctive character of ICANN as a multi-stakeholder driven organization is preserved and furthered.”

ICANN’s community members aren’t a nuisance to be managed, nor simply a rod to beat the ITU’s back with. They are why the organization exists at all. The Board could do worse than pull a CEO from this pool.

Follow the money, and the politics, and the technology

The CEO needs to master the detail. Unless she or he understands the business models, geo-politics, technology and market trends, and all the gory technical details about how the Internet works, the CEO will not understand what motivates the scores of interested parties clamouring at the table.

There are no shortcuts to mastery, and no room for a figure-head. With a minimum two-year learning curve for a rookie CEO to be fully effective in this role, we need someone who can hit the ground running.

Put it another way, globally, there are probably about 500 key people involved in running the DNS and numbering systems. If the CEO doesn’t know these people already, and know where the bodies are buried – i.e. is not already one of the 500 – then she or he will be a liability for at least the first year.

Also, recognize that this job demands a successful track record in international policy and political circles, as well as good, old-fashioned operational experience. There is a real temptation to hire plausible-sounding management types who have led tech organisations undergoing rapid growth.

But folks, setting up a sales office in Asia is not in the same league as dealing effectively and diplomatically with ministers around the world. Pure private sector leaders simply don’t understand the complexity of operating in a political environment, and we don’t have time to teach them.

(This is not a shot at Rod, who worked as a senior appointee in the USG before he joined ICANN.)

Our people are our greatest asset. No, really.
To lose one or two VPs/Chiefs may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three or four looks like carelessness. To lose seven is vandalism.

The remaining long-term ICANN staff are demoralized and eyeing the exits, especially as the new top level domain program creates opportunities for them to take their insider knowledge and relationships elsewhere. A new CEO needs to value quality of work and integrity, not simply reward yes men and women. To retain good staff, she or he needs to rein in the prevailing mediocrity and caution that destroy motivation and ingenuity on sight. Encouraging staff to develop themselves and take risks – and backing them up when they fail – is the best way to encourage a confident, open culture of cooperation with the community.

Running ICANN is always going to be terrifying. It faces down a political or legal existential threat that is truly FUBAR about every two years. (Of course some of these, it makes for itself.) Hats off to anyone with the courage to take it on.

So credit where it’s due; I don’t agree with much of how Rod runs the organization, but his instinct to publicly call a spade a spade is admirable, albeit wielded inopportunely. A CEO needs to override sensible advice once in a while, and set out a vision just an inch or two beyond everyone else’s grasp.

Good luck to Rod who still has miles to go with ICANN, and to the Board that must now decide how to replace him.—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

• For a more pungent analysis of Rod’s legacy, read Kieren McCarthy or Kevin Murphy at The Register.

When I was a teenager, I met Mats Wilander and had the bright idea of giving him my autograph, instead of the other way around. That way he’d remember me. Cringe. Another time, in college, I met Umberto Eco and blurbled away to him about smoking for several minutes until the postgrads he was there to speak to managed to get a word in. Why, only last month, I was introduced to Alastair Darling and asked him if he’d ever been to DC.

Maybe that’s what happened to the girl from Reason.tv. In this video clip (spotted on BoingBoing a couple of days ago) Matt Damon responds to her assertion that he works hard because acting is insecure, therefore teachers would be better if their ‘incentives’ were similar. Coz it’s in their interest to, see?

Asking a man who financially never needs to work again to agree that the fear of not having a job is what motivates him/teachers is head-scratchingly silly.

By the by, in the BoingBoing comments, Cory Doctorow also makes a beautiful case for education as a public good:

“Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision collectively.

… But functional democracies require that all people—not just those who are already wealthy—are given the foundational knowledge that allows them to prosper and participate in the full range of social activities that make nations great.”

Words to ponder.

The increasing Americanisation of the FT now has writers review books by their brothers and sisters in arms. The British tradition of publishing book reviews by people who are real-life critics and not part-time cheer leaders and quarterbacks may be nasty, discomfiting and sometimes unfair to writers – and for this I blame editors – but it gives a reader a much clearer view of the essential question; ‘Is it any good?’. I imagine it’s also costing unsung book reviewers their living as money is thrown at superstar writers at the top of the pile.

Case in point: this week’s review by Annie Proulx of a novel, ‘Irma Voth’, by Miriam Toews. Without the name recognition of Proulx, it’s hard to imagine the review being published anywhere except, perhaps, a town newspaper wishing to fill up space and appear cultural by inviting the doyenne of the local book club to write a little something. Proulx dedicates 800 of her 1000 words to describing the plot of the novel from beginning to end; 800 tedious words of ‘this happens and then that happens’, and then a final 50 to more helpfully add that Irma Voth is a parable of redemption with a decent pay-off. It’s just not a very good piece, and yet it is given star treatment.

Proulx’ review occupies the most prominent real estate in the sadly pared back FT book review section, and has an apparently custom-ordered illustration to go with it. The picture alone takes up the same amount of space on the page as 6 of the mini-reviews that comprise the meat of the section. What a waste of space! The books editor may have imagined a gloriously co-branded vista, with the joint intellectual capital of Proulx and the FT expanding geometrically as far as the eye can see. What’s ended up on the page is a colossally wasteful exercise in winner-takes-all back-scratching that is unworthy of either party.

Which is not to say writers don’t have anything interesting to say about books. (And Lionel Shriver’s reviews for the FT are much better than those of Proulx.) Where would the LRB be without writers talking to and about other writers? However, a weekend book review section is for readers, and editors booking puff pieces from rock stars to add to squeezed book sections the illusion of mass would do well to remember this.