Dan:
Of course there are collective goods, and a need to organize politically to achieve them. 
And I agree that freedoms themselves have many positive externalities; and that a legal system that protects rights could itself be considered a collective good; and that protecting rights (as I said in my last message) is in the interest of the general public. 

I think the only significant disagreement is here: 

> So it seems there may be two broad strategies to choose from here: (1) re-
> appropriating the term P.I., or (2) attempting to remove the term P.I.
> outright from systematic discourse among policy makers at ICANN.  And it
> seems you are arguing for the latter.

Neither. I don't think the term P.I. can be "appropriated." That's what I have been trying to say. I guess the opposing vision here is that through persistent organizing and agitating we can condition (in the Pavlovian sense) the ICANN polity to think of _our_ specific values and policy agenda every time they hear the term P.I. But it's hard to see how or why that would ever work. Dozens of other political actors are busy appropriating the term, including GACers (who think they represent the public interest simply by virtue of the fact that they are governments), intellectual property interests and business interests. And I am enough of a rational actor theorist to think that when GAC or the government of China or Steve DelBianco and other business interests actively push the term they know what they are doing, that kind of framing must contribute to their own policy agenda in an important way. So in the end, you just end up having an argument about what the public interest really is and whose conception is right. 

Or at worst, you create a bias in the discourse against individual freedom and principled recognition of rights, because in a mature institutionalized system most committed and well-resourced actors are trying to control things collectively rather than un-control things or free them up. 

More below...

> I'm not sure if these need to be perfectly mutually exclusive, and I can see
> there may be certain situations where the latter strategy might be the most
> effective one for our immediate (collective NCSG) purposes.  But I expect
> there will probably be other specific circumstances where the former
> strategy might hold the most promise.
> 
> Maybe we can agree to try to be aware of the two options, try to determine
> which option is the best for a specific circumstance, and then use that
> strategy where it seems to be the best choice to accomplish our goals.
> 
> Does that make sense to you?

Yes, it does. I am not trying to banish the term PI from the lexicon entirely. It can be useful when narrowly focused economic (or political) interest groups grab control of a policy process and milk it for private gain. The obvious line of attack in those situations is to say, yes, we see how this benefits X interest group (French vintners, or registrars, or incumbent registries or something) but doesn't it do so at the expense of the public? But I just don't think the overarching principle of our policy agenda is the public interest per se, a term taken from late 19th century utility regulation. I would rather think of it as advancing and protecting individual rights, especially rights to free expression and to an open and innovative internet. 

--MM