We just finished the ICANN meeting in Wellington, New Zealand.
For one of the last resolutions of the ICANN board meeting, Vint asked the board to show their support by swaying back and forth in their seat. He promised to explain it later, but wasn’t able to. Some people already noticed the way the Board voted, but without fully understanding why.
Therefore, Joichi Ito decided it is his role in the interest of transparency, to explain the reference.
From Joichi’s web site:
Last night Veni told us a joke.
Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev are on a train heading towards communism.
Suddenly the conductor says, “Oh noes! There are no rails left. We can not move on.”
Lenin says, “no problem, Saturday is Lenin day and we will all work for free and cut down trees and build the rails.”
Then Stalin says, “no, we must find out whose fault this is and kill them.”
Khrushchev disagrees and says, “no, we can plant corn in the fields, sell the corn to the American and we can buy the railroad.”
Brezhnev says, “no, we must all sit in the train and sway back and forward so we have the appearance of forward motion towards communism.”
Finally Gorbachev stands up and says, “Comrandes, you don’t understand the modern times. There is a new spirit of glasnost and perestroika. We need more transparency. We need more openness.” At this point, he opened the windows and started shouting, “there are no rails! There are no rails!”
After the joke, we tried replacing communism with new gTLD’s and discussed which board members were like which Russian leaders…