Kieren, Thanks for your response; downloads of the paper have increased quite a bit thanks to your attack. That being said, I am confident that anyone who actually reads our rather long, academic paper and then reads your attempted critique of it will have no doubt about who has the better of the argument. I will address one disappointing aspect of your review. Like so many in ICANN, you characterize structural critiques as "conspiracy theories." For both you and Veni Markovski, any suggestion that things are going a bit wrong means that bad people are conspiring behind the scenes to deliberately make bad things happen. But that is just a projection of your own superficiality onto others. That aspect of your argument is just wrong, and it is easy to prove: Here is how you characterize the paper's argument: "All decisions are made by a secretive staff. Efforts are constantly made to mislead people into believing their input has an impact." Here is a direct quote from the paper: "I do not suggest that this strategy of substitution [of participation for accountability] is a conscious one intended to deceive or mislead the community of actors around ICANN. Rather, I see it as a logical response to the political and organizational tensions inherent in ICANN’s DNA. ICANN consists of an all-powerful Board with the legal and organizational authority to rule from the top down, yet this Board co-exists with norms and expectations derived from a bottom-up standards organization and a government agency. Given this Board’s utter independence from the normal forms of accountability associated with the corporate model and its obvious self-interest in remaining free of the other forms of accountability, ICANN has learned to develop ever-more elaborate and extensive forms of participation as a response to the absence of accountability." I know that as former manager of "public participation" you are personally invested in that project, and the argument made in our paper - that participation detached from accountability can be and often is meaningless - must come as a blow to you. But bear in mind that we are not criticizing you personally, we are addressing basic flaws in ICANN's structure, and in particular the bizarre combination of bottom up, consensus-based standards organization, top-down private corporate board governance model, and democratic representational /legislative body. I agree with you that it is the community around ICANN that often calls for "more participation" - we are criticizing that meme, not ICANN per se, too.