Important blog post about the ICANN Accountability CCWG

[Nicolas Adam]

Funny because I thought before when I was a student interested in IG 
that ICANN *should* be the place where global public interest indeed 
resides for the Internet. Mostly I guess because I thought other venues 
were so clearly not tempting. Now the global public interest i wanted 
(and still do) and thought was self-evident isn't the same from Sam's 
apparently (although I am not sure and would not want to put words in 
his mouth) ....

A few months ago I even thought that we should readily declare domain 
names "public goods", to

i) *found* the global public interest claim for ICANN or WhateverCo

and

ii) direct towards the good (global public interest ) direction the 
subtstantive future policy development advances (for instance, founding 
an IG body on a public good claim for names would, I thought, 
dramatically reduce future possibilities of successful pressure from 
Intellectual Property Rights and censorship lobbies).

I would be more inclined today to suggest that we shouldn't empower 
AnyCo and that that is the best way to keep the global public interest 
at the substantive forefront of an "IG system". Most of the times our 
own (NCSG's) defense of the global public interest involves making sure 
that there are no new basis for enacting stuff on the basis of a global 
public interest we do not approve of.

What I wanted to say is that the contractual terms that the blogger 
talks about is a very good idea in my opinion.

Nicolas


On 2014-12-22 12:13 PM, Sam Lanfranco wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>

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