A group of registrars filed a new Request for Reconsideration this week (PDF here). It addresses ICANN's many failures in openness, transparency, legitimacy, and sound decision-making. It's well worth reading. Registrars, it's also probably time you all got out of your work rooms during the ICANN meetings and met some important people in the community.

Allow me to make a few introductions.

Registrars, I'd first like to introduce you to the editors of ICANNWatch.... Michael Froomkin, Jonathan Weinberg, Dave Farber, Ted Byfield, and Milton Mueller. They started writing about the very issues raised in your Reconsideration Request way back in 1999. Imagine that.

You also should take a few minutes and get to know Karl Auerbach and Andy Müller-Maguhn. They used to be on the Board. They were even elected.

Take some time to talk about ICANN accountability with the many members of the NAIS Project and the At Large Study Committee: Clement Dzidonu, Alan Levin, Izumi Aizu, Adam Peake, Myungkoo Kang, Christian Ahlert, Stefaan Verhulst, Jeanette Hofmann, Jerry Berman, Alan Davidson, Rob Courtney, Scott Harshbarger, Don Simon, Raúl Echeberria, Carlos Afonso, Carl Bildt, Charles Costello, Pierre Dandjinou, Esther Dyson, Olivier Iteanu, Ching-Yi Liu, Oscar Robles, and Pindar Wong. Do you remember this statement in Ghana? Some of us will never forget it. We knew then what it would mean for this ICANN.

Take a virtual walk through the former DNSO's General Assembly, where disenfranchised individual domain name registrants still worry about an unaccountable, opaque ICANN.

Spend some time in Wellington getting to know the At Large Advisory Committee. They're the last vestiges of a once robust At Large Membership.

And last but not least, let me introduce you to Ed Hasbrouck. In spite of being bullied by ICANN's counsel and ignored by ICANN's Board, Mr. Hasbrouck has filed timely and important requests for reconsideration and independent review. In them, he makes allegations about ICANN's closed, non-transparent processes that are strikingly similar to the ones you made. You two have a lot of common interests.

You need to know all of these people, Registrars.

See, here's how this works: we're all connected.

You can draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign a perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.

After you meet all these people, Registrars, you'll find that you like their company a great deal. It's these people -- the users -- who share your interests in an open, competitive marketplace. They too believe in a transparent, accountable ICANN. It's time you got to know these people, maybe even helped them organize into voting GNSO constituencies or funded their travel to ICANN's farflung meetings. And when you meet them in some hotel bar in Wellington or Marrakech or Sao Paulo, buy them a drink and raise a toast to the crazy ones.

As you've now discovered, they weren't so crazy after all.