Here is another issue:

My understanding from the NTIA announcement in March 2014 was that the transition covers just the IANA contract, nothing else. One should not forget that ICANN got its basic independence from the USG via the Affirmation of Commitment (AoC) in 2009. The IANA contract is just the remaining rest of a promise given by the USG in 1998 in the first MoU, reaffirmed in paragraph 68 of the Tunis Agenda in 2005 (which led as an interim step in 2006 to the Joint Project Agreement/JPA). 

In Istanbul during the IGF (September 2014) Strickling introduced the (reasonable) argument that to finalize the IANA transition one has to be on the safe side and ICANN has to demonstrate that it is ripe for the transition, that means that the multistakeholder approach works and the ICANN Board is accountable to the broader community. As a result we did see two distinct but interrelated processes: CWG and CCWG-A. In the last months the "interrelation" of the two processes was of special importance. My impression is that here and now we have to change priorities now and to look more into the distinction between the two processes. A lot of issues raised by the accountability CCWG has nothing or only little to do with the IANA function. The transition of the stewardship for the IANA function is - as we all know - a very limited technical issue. At the end of the day it is nothing else than that the authorization of the publication of TLD zone files in the root is done under the new regime in one step instead of two under the old regime. The previous second step - the special authorization of the publication by the NTIA - is not needed anymore. Thats it.

Certainly the NTIA has to look into the broader environment and has to check whether the question, raised by Strickling in Istanbul, can be answered with "Yes". But at the end of the day it is a rather simple question: Do we trust that the renewed ICANN with its PTI will function as the old IANA did?

Thomas Rickert told me in Oslo last week that all the changes in the bylaws which are recommended by the CCWG-A will become effective with or without the transition. So what is the problem? 

And we should not forget that the "Marrakesh Consensus" was a unique moment in history. If you re-open the package, parts of the community would think twice whether they would join again such a consensus in two years from now. I talked to a substantial number of governments (including GAC members) who already the next morning lamented that they join the agreement they do not like. Each government could have vetoed the consensus in the dramatic nighjt of Marrakesh nobody wanted to be the "bad guy". To get them back in 2018 is just an illusion.

And BTW, Internet censorship in Turkey (a NATO Country), China or Russia has nothing to to with the IANA function. It is a slippery slope if Senators in the US would start to argue that a delay of the IANA transition could reduce Internet censorship in undemocratic countries.  

Wolfgang


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: NCSG-Discuss im Auftrag von Mueller, Milton L
Gesendet: Do 26.05.2016 18:26
An: [log in to unmask]
Betreff: Re: [NCSG-Discuss] great opening statement by Brett
 


From: David Post [mailto:[log in to unmask]]

But that's not the goal, in my eyes. The goal is to create an institution that can manage these resources in a reasonable way, for the next [many] years.

MM: As Avri noted, the goal of the stewardship transition was to...transition, i.e. get the US govt out of its current role. I am flabbergasted by the fact that you do not see the US oversight role as a broken part of the institution.

MM: As someone who has written about early post-revolutionary America, I wonder how you would respond to my argument "all these new democratic government models are new and untested. We don't really know how well they will work. Why doesn't the United States retain its status as a British colony under the King for a few years, and let him decide if the experiment has worked?"

All I'm suggesting is that it would hardly seem unreasonable, to me, if the USG took the position that while it is signing off on the transition, it is doing so subject to a kind of probationary period that will enable us all to understand better whether and how it actually works. Perhaps other countries will view that as a terribly untrustworthy move, perhaps they won't - I do think it helps that it is, fundamentally, quite a reasonable position to take.

MM: So you assume that the USG is NOT part of the machine, it is a deus ex machina that we can invoke at any time to insert an entirely rational, undistorted corrective action on whatever happens?