Posted on 7/30/2002


A California judge has ordered the Internet's governing body to open its books for inspection.
A state judge in Los Angeles on Monday lifted the veil of secrecy that has surrounded many of the group's internal deliberations for the last four years, dealing an embarrassing setback to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

During the 90-minute hearing, Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs said that ICANN board members could not be denied their right under California law to review financial records, travel logs, legal contracts and other internal documents. ICANN has a contract with the U.S. government to oversee key Internet functions, most notably approving new top-level domain names such as .info and .biz.

ICANN board member Karl Auerbach, a veteran Internet engineer now working at a start-up, sued the organization in March after being rebuffed in his request to review records, first made in November 2000.

Janavs pointed to California law, which says that board members at nonprofit groups such as ICANN have "the absolute right at any reasonable time to inspect and copy all books, records and documents of every kind."

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