On 2015-03-30 10:49, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> ...Thus, the “corporate responsibility” model is off target. If people 
> outside the “walled city” of ICANN are asking how it is performing in 
> terms of corporate social responsibility they are asking the wrong 
> question. But frankly, I don’t think many people are asking that. I 
> deal with lots of people, including hundreds of students, who are not 
> involved with ICANN and I have never heard that question asked.
You are lucky that I am not your student!  I am actually busy grappling 
with that question re ICANN....how do you define corporate social 
responsibility, for an org like ICANN, without getting into content.  I 
believe that they cannot start refereeing content fights and decisions, 
but I expect them to uphold human rights ...as Monika has pointed out, 
the Ruggies would apply to them, the question is what does it mean when 
you get specific?  I think the policy on WHOIS conflicts of law, just 
for starters, shows disrespect for national law at a minimum, and I am 
wondering if I should describe setting policy that forces registrars to 
question the application of law as bad policy, illegal, or showing no 
corporate social responsibility?  Advice welcome...

Anyway, I think this is an essential question that we need to figure out 
before we get further down the path towards determining a framework for 
"the public interest".  I would agree with the guy who said that dot 
sucks is a shakedown, but there are plenty of examples of that in the 
new gTLDs, so what.

Getting back to corporate social responsibility.....still drafting a 
privacy policy for ICANN, which I justify by saying it is a basic 
corporate social responsibility, regardless of the spurious arguments 
about jurisdiction and choice of law which they always raise in defence 
of doing nothing.   As far as I can see, there are a number of things 
that fall clearly on the "do it" side of that not-so-bright line....and 
I argue that diving into which domains (or should I say, choice of 
names) are nice and which are not nice, is out of bounds.  Enforcement 
of libel is also definitely not within ICANN's job description.   Where 
things get tough is some of those recent initiatives where ICANN staff 
were busy helping track down kiddie porn, without a Court order to do 
so.  Some might call that "corporate social responsibility", and however 
we may beat up Fadi when he strays into areas outside of ICANN's 
jurisdiction, this one is tough to turn away.
Berard is a slick proponent for this thing, but he is wrong about 
"sucks" not being a pejorative.  Try walking into a bar late at night 
and tell some drunk he sucks, see what happens.  (Or check the recent 
edition of OED 2010, which says:

An expression of derision, used esp. by children; often in phrs. /sucks 
to you; yah, boo, sucks/. 1913–.

    /*Listener*/ The council treated the urbane Mr Cook to the
    politician's equivalent of ‘Yah, boo, sucks’ (1983).

What he ought to be saying is that the word is creeping into polite 
discourse.  Different.

Thanks for the interesting debate on this
Stephanie Perrin