I take your point on the word "private" -- I would personally have used the
word "narrow" instead.  That's what I thought Joy was getting at.  I almost
made an edit to change the word when I referred to her statement, but
thought I would let it stand as such since I was quoting her.

You're correct that "broad" certainly encompasses a lot of "private" and
I'm more interested in the "broad" aspect, myself.

This is where specific wording can sometimes confuse us.  A whole lot of
the "public" interest is about "private" realities!  But that's really
about the difference between collective and individual lenses on the world.
These two lenses do in fact coexist.

I think of "public interest" as "collective interest" -- and I also
distinguish between interests and rights.  Not all interests constitute
rights per se.  Interests have to do with costs and benefits, effects and
influences.  Interests are a broader concept than rights.  (This is indeed
why they can be more slippery and we have to be careful when talking about
them.)

It is a collective interest to protect individual rights!  This is because
"society" is inherently collective, but how we structure our society
(collectively) has everything to do with our individual experiences, and
that collective structure is defined importantly by the individual rights
we establish.  That's precisely why the individual rights are important:
they create the kind of collective society we want to live in.

Dan


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At 3:49 PM +0000 12/27/14, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> That's what I liked about Joy's phrasing, I'll pull it verbatim here: "The
>> broader notion of public interest ... ensures that the mighty cannot
>> overpower the weak, just because they are more powerful"
>
>OK, so this will put to rest all those folks out there who are advocating
>overpowering the weak by the mighty. That will settle a lot of ICANN
>policy debates. Seriously, is this intended to provide a constraint on
>majoritarian rule? Or what?
>
>> ICANN context this notion of public interest needs to be protected to ensure
>> the DNS is not appropriated to suit purely private ends."  This seems to me
>> the core of what PI is all about, especially at ICANN.
>
>This is where we part company. What the heck does "purely private ends"
>means and why does this PI rhetoric always imply that the private is BAD?
>I am a registrant of a domain name and so is a small organization I am
>affiliated with. My main concern is to ensure that my right to use that
>domain and the speech associated with it - which is a purely private
>matter - is not interfered with or limited in certain ways. Yes, certain
>forms of private malfeasance, such as criminality or business fraud or
>monopolistic pricing, might be of concern to me here and there, but on the
>whole I think policy should be FACILITATING DNS  use for "purely private
>ends," and that privacy should be protected, and more often than not the
>imposition of so-called 'public interest' standards is all about one group
>exploiting its power to serves their collective ends at the expense of my
>private ends, or a weaker groups collective or private interests.
>
>And this is the trap that a PI standard always falls into.