Important blog post about the ICANN Accountability CCWG

[Sam Lanfranco]

David Johnson’s blog argues that the democratic potential for ICANN 
membership is in danger of being co-opted by groups that want a very 
narrow and limited conception of who the members should be and a very 
expansive conception of what their powers should be. see: 
http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/12/19/icann-accountability-a-coup-or-a-contract/ 


It is important to go beyond the nature of this risk and look at the 
source of this risk, those pushing ICANN to be a public interest 
regulator. Johnson argues that “If ICANN took the “public interest 
regulator” option off the table, the “accountability” discussion could 
be greatly simplified.” This touches on a deeper question of whether or 
not ICANN is even the appropriate venue for protecting the “public 
interest” here.

Using the discussions around regulated professions gTLD (e.g. .health, 
.doc, etc.) it becomes clear pretty quickly that there is little ICANN 
can do to address the “public interest” concerns there, even if it had 
some regulatory power. See my blog “/Rethinking, and Redirecting the 
Global Health Strategy on the Proposed .health gTLD/” at 
samlanfranco.blogspot.ca .

Most public interest concerns will have to be addresses bottom up in 
struggles around policy at various levels within countries, within 
professions, and using appropriate regulatory tools and laws at those 
levels. ICANN cannot be all things to all concerns, and attempting to do 
so will compromise ICANN, while public interest concerns will still have 
to be addressed elsewhere.


Sam L.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/ncsg-discuss/attachments/20141222/79a89a40/attachment.htm>