NCSG's Gift of the Seasons: The Gift of its Wisdom to Itself

[Sam Lanfranco]

Hallelujah! Attribute it to the holiday season, the religious season, or 
the winter solstice. NCSG dialogue may have produced a gift for all. It 
is the gift of focus and clarity. It is the possibility that ICANN (all 
of it including us) reaffirms ICANN’s core values, re-acquaints ICANN 
with its rights and obligations, and helps ICANN become capable, strong 
and secure within its remit.Trying to be more, everything to everybody, 
means, in the end and despite sometimes heroic effort, being little to 
anybody and being eaten as somebody’s dinner. ICANN deserves a better fate.

ICANN is not the only Internet issues game in town. The NCSG community 
is present in many of those other games. As stakeholders in ICANN we, or 
other forces within ICANN, push ICANN to join more games that it should, 
or push it to draw their issues into ICANN’s game. That is not good. It 
compromises ICANN’s focus on covering its own obligations within its 
remit. It also nurtures a false belief around many Internet issues, the 
belief that they can be dealt with within ICANN, when they cannot. The 
risk is under engagement in the other Internet issues games in town, and 
the result that issues, policies and regulations are handled badly. A 
healthy Internet ecosystem carries the obligation to engage the right 
issues in the right venues. All policy roads to not run to ICANN, and 
ICANN is not the Internet’s emergency first responder, although it may 
be an important early issues detector and alerts site. When I am the 
first to see a house fire I alert the fire department, I don't first try 
to extinguish it, although there may be things I can do to help.

In our discussions the words used frequently elude operational meaning. 
For example, Public Interest and public good [used apart from its 
technical economic definition], have no intrinsic meaning. They are 
short hand for things linked to one’s (or a community’s) core values in 
areas were issues get resolved in political, legal, regulatory or other 
social process. It has been noted that Public Interest is largely a term 
in U.S. policy dialogue. Even there it is just a starting point in a 
social/political/legal process where conflicting interests are resolve. 
Such terms should not be used to allow ICANN remit creep.

There are similar concerns around human and individual rights, within 
and beyond the context of the Internet. The Universal Declaration of 
Human Rights (UDHR) is a statement of core values around the rights of 
humans, but it is left to distributed process to codify that into 
individual rights in particular settings. The US considers the right to 
possess major personal firearms an individual right, and other countries 
do not. The UDHR does not rule here, but it does ask for reflection on 
the consequences of such positions through the lens of the core values 
of the UDHR. There is an important lesson there for dealing with both 
human rights and public interest perspectives.

What is the lesson for the ICANN community here? An ICANN role in the 
management of the Internet ecosystem does not mean that it should be 
involved in all of the issues that arise within the ecosystem. Outside 
ICANN’s remit it could still do as many of its stakeholders do and take 
Internet policy positions through comment windows, or by submitting 
/amicus curiae/(friend of the court) briefs to the deliberative 
processes. ICANN’s weight in such deliberations would depend on the 
quality of its submissions and the general respect for ICANN, both of 
which would be greater if ICANN did not try to be, and was not pressured 
to be, all things to everybody, and everywhere at once.

Let us not squander the gift NCSG has given itself here. Yes there is 
the work on tasks within ICANN’s remit, with the ongoing ICANN agenda of 
policy and operational issues, and with the opportunities of (and 
threats in) the IANA transition. However, the central task should be 
ICANN (all of it including us) reaffirming what are ICANN’s core values, 
re-acquainting ICANN with its rights and obligations within its own 
remit, helping ICANN become capable, strong and secure within that 
remit, and establishing ICANN as a wise and competent partner in the 
health of the Internet ecosystem. No more, no less.

Sam L.
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