A look at the state of telecommuting as ICANN holds its four-day Public Meeting, with ~3,000 people from 150 countries, remotely for the first time
and the American workplace — ready to go fully remote? https://www.latimes.com/... Dani Mlt / @war_kittens : Motherfucker, I can't telecommute lab work. https://twitter.com/... Jeff Bercovici / @jeffbercovici : With COVID-19 spreading, millions of people are about to get their first taste of full-time virtual office life. It's gonna get weird, @SamAugustDean reports. https://www.latimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
ICANN convening ~3,000 people from 150 countries for a fully remote Public Meeting lands in the same week millions of American workers get their first forced taste of virtual office life, and the piece treats both as a live stress test of telecommuting — including the workers who cannot opt in, like lab scientists. The timing makes ICANN's meeting an early institutional proof point: a multi-stakeholder body that normally depends on physical venues just ran its core governance process distributed across the globe.
The experiment also extends a pattern ICANN had already started when it moved public forums online and drew 1,752 participants from 130 countries once travel barriers came down — and it does so while the same body weighs consequential calls like rejecting the .org registry sale and proposing the .INTERNAL top-level domain, decisions made by an organization that just demonstrated it can convene without one.
First-order effects
- ICANN's attendees participate without travel, scaling up the access gains from its earlier online forums and removing the cost and visa barriers that shaped who could attend in person.
- Millions of US workers begin full-time remote work at once, while site-bound jobs — the lab work the piece cites — cannot follow, sharpening the divide between those who can and can't work remotely.
Second-order effects
- Tooling demand surges to match: coverage of work-from-home trends tracks rising adoption of desktop-as-a-service, purpose-built remote-communication hardware, and home-office equipment investment as employers equip dispersed staff.
- Policy copycats emerge quickly — Twitter's two-years-in-the-making work-from-home plan spawns a wave of imitators, and Zuckerberg commits Facebook to roughly half its staff working remotely permanently within 5-10 years.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, remote-first becomes default policy at major tech employers — though Zoom's 2023 order that office-proximate employees return two days a week shows the equilibrium settling at hybrid rather than fully remote.
- For convening bodies like ICANN, remote meetings remove travel as a gatekeeper to participation, structurally widening who takes part in internet governance — a shift with no clear path back even after the health rationale fades.
The trend: The COVID-19 shock converts remote work from a per-company perk into default infrastructure, with each forced experiment — ICANN's meeting among the first — resetting what counts as a normal way to convene and work.