Amr,
Jon Zittrain made a post today that in refuting the right wings attack on
the Obama administration "giving away the internet to the UN " I
think encapsulates the gist of what is going on:
"US gov't cedes control of Internet" announcement is 99%
symbolic - and not bizarre UN giveaway. It empowers ICANN, not UN/ITU.
A cynic would say that the Americans have decided that de jure control is
no longer tenable and by dumping the IANA functions to ICANN would empower
an organisation in which it has substantial leverage and control. As NTIA
has largely been hands off the practical consequences of the occurrence are
perhaps not as revolutionary as one might first think.
What we need to be careful about is the organisational structure and legal
position of ICANN coming out of these changes. This Board has shown a
propensity for empowering itself and it's friends at the expense of the
bottom up nature of MS most of us subscribe to. Since we filed our initial
Reconsideration petition eleven months ago there have been twenty nine new
reconsideration petitions filed, as opposed to three in 2011 and 2012
combined. Universally these petitions have been unsuccessful. This Board has
ignored it's own Bylaws, flaunted it's accountability processes,
denied our efforts to obtain documentation as we seek explanation for
decisions made and, as above, largely shown an unwillingness to reflexively
and honestly examine it's own decisions despite repeated requests by
Community members.
NCSG member Rolf Weber co-wrote an
interesting piece a few years ago illustrating the "who controls
the board" problem at ICANN, with a suggested solution, a problem
that may be exacerbated by this weeks US government announcement:
http://www.stlr.org/html/volume14/WeberGunnarson.pdf . Milton has also written in the past about the
concept of Members, ICANN's lack thereof, and consequences under the
current legal accord.
I have deep concerns
about the maturity of ICANN and the commitment of many in the
organisation, particularly in legal, to an open, transparent and accountable
governance structure. In fact, the cynic in me conceives of new oversight by
Jones Day (ICANN's outside law firm) replacing that of the NTIA. I
don't think that would be progress.
There will be opportunity here, of course, to make positive change but let
us not be so overjoyed by the proposed internationalisation of IANA to
ignore the fact that ICANN itself has deep and abiding problems. There may
be possibilities in the current chaos to correct some of these problems,
foremost of which is sorting a way in which staff and Board are held
accountable to someone or something other than themselves or the nebulous
and poorly defined "community".
-----Original Message-----
From: Amr Elsadr <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:02:37 +0100
Subject: Re: US Government Announcement about transfer IANA functions
stewardship
I hope you’re right, Sam. However, this paragraph of the NTIA press
release is what prompted my question:
From the inception of ICANN, the U.S. Government and Internet stakeholders
envisioned that the U.S. role in the IANA functions would be
temporary. The Commerce Department’s June 10, 1998
Statement of Policy
stated that the U.S. Government “is committed to a transition
that will allow the private sector to take leadership for DNS
management.” ICANN as an organization has matured and taken
steps in recent years to improve its accountability and transparency and its
technical competence. At the same time, international support
continues to grow for the multistakeholder model of Internet governance as
evidenced by the continued success of the Internet Governance Forum and the
resilient stewardship of the various Internet institutions.
The paragraph somehow indicates (as I read it at
least) that the “How to do this” is associated
with the “Why the
changes”. So to rephrase my question; I wonder wether after some 17
years, does the NTIA’s belief in ICANN’s maturity and competence
reflect its confidence in ICANN to simply be the convener of a
dialogue amongst the different stakeholders to collectively reach some
form of consensus on how to transition NTIA’s role to a yet
undetermined institution, or does it reflect confidence in ICANN to
coordinate this discussion in order to see how best ICANN can assume this
role without NTIA involvement?
Frankly, ICANN's “…, steps in recent years to improve
its accountability and transparency…,” still leave much to be desired.
Yeah…, steps were taken, but ICANN’s not quite there yet. In
fact, several actors across different stakeholder groups have recently been
voicing discontent claiming the exact opposite of this. One of the
earlier examples is
NCSG’s reconsideration request
of ICANN’s decision to expand the scope of the Trademark
Clearinghouse to include up to 50 confusingly similar variants of brand
names.
I still don’t know if my concerns
are unfounded or not, but I do find it difficult to simply dismiss them, but
we will all see how things’ll unfold over the next few months.
Thanks.
Amr
Amr Elsadr poses the questions:
On the other hand, have any proposals
suggesting that institutional separation of the IANA function from ICANN
been preemptively squashed??
Or is the principle still a viable option that can be promoted??
What this announcement does is set a deadline on what has to be done, in
the absence of delays by unforeseen forces at play. The key implication is
to shift the discussions from "What changes" and "Why the
changes" to the "How to do this" while honoring the four
stated principles and producing a set of viable and sustainable structures
and processes. That will have ripple effects in structures and
processes across the Internet ecosystem. This is more than just replacing
one structure by another, and probably nothing has been preempted. A
successful outcome will call for heightened stakeholder awareness and
engagement, within ICANN, within constituencies, and beyond ICANN.
Sam Lanfranco