Certainly no one here is suggesting that ICANN hold "the public interest"
as the definition of its jurisdiction.  ICANN's jurisdiction is to make
sure the DNS system works.

*Within* that jurisdiction, one would hope that ICANN takes into account
various aspects of the public interest, especially as we prefer to define
it within NCSG.  Given that it is inevitable that the PI term will be used
in the course of policy making at ICANN, rather than always reject it out
of hand (we may not have the power to remove the term from ICANN policy
discourse outright), there may be occasions when redefining it according to
our policy mission is useful.

Especially, pointing out when the public interest is best served by ICANN
not getting involved with one or another specific issues.  Like, for
example, trying to apply "moral values" to the approval of domain strings,
a task for which ICANN is, and will likely always be, utterly lacking in
capacity for proper due process, partly because there is no universal
global consensus on such values to support a coherent global due process.
So the public interest is in preventing "moral values" from being defined
by some powerful minority and imposed universally on a weak majority,
especially through whatever legitimate narrow technical jurisdictions ICANN
does have.

Contending with the details of such policy gets into the weeds, but the
overarching principle seems clear enough.

Dan


--
Any opinions expressed in this message are those of the author alone and do
not necessarily reflect any position of the author's employer.




At 2:12 PM +0000 12/26/14, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>If ICANN regulates "in the public interest" it has an open-ended mandate
>to do anything, there are no limits on its scope of authority.
>
>World you please explain or expand your last sentence, for the benefit of
>English as a second language readers?
>
>
>That is why we should not conceive of ICANN's authority as containing a
>mandate to pursue "the general welfare" or "the public interest."
>