Important blog post about the ICANN Accountability CCWG

[Sam Lanfranco]

I might sound like a kid beating on a one-note drum here, but it is 
useful to remind us that ICANN is not the first or only organization to 
have to deal with this issue. History gives us excellent models of how 
this can be approached with or without organizational structures. 
Consider human rights and decent work, two areas that comfortably fall 
under the heading of "public interest" and both integral to humanity's 
"core values" Our "empirical eye" tells us that across the globe human 
society falls more than a bit short in achieving acceptable levels of 
performance in these two areas. We have responded using the same idea to 
approach to both, but doing so in different ways. We created the 
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as a navigational aid 
(fixed star) for the pursuit of human rights everywhere. We created UDHR 
without an organization, and in our wisdom UDHR was vested with neither 
judicial, legislative nor regulatory authority, which as it should be. 
It is surrounded by a whole constellation of human rights entities 
engaged in the pursuit of human rights in ways that feed into 
appropriate regulatory, legislative and judicial venues elsewhere.

In the area of decent work, we humans created the International Labour 
Organization (ILO) with a mandate to promote and pursue "decent work". 
As an organization the ILO was vested with neither judicial, legislative 
nor regulator authority. With its own multistakeholder model the ILO has 
worked for a century using something like a blend of ICANN's DG, WG, and 
PDP processes, with results at all levels available for use by 
stakeholders in their own regulatory, legislative and judicial venues 
elsewhere. That is as it should be.

What does this tell tell us about ICANN? It suggests several things. 
First, ICANN as ICANN is but one stakeholder in the process of defining 
rights and obligations within the Internet ecosystem. It is neither the 
torch bearer, nor the keeper of the flame. It is a stakeholder. Second, 
the embodiment of rights and obligations, as a declaration (e.g. UDHR) 
or as the mandate of an entity (e.g. WHO), has to be in universal terms, 
to be used as a "fixed star" navigational beacon for all stakeholders, 
including for ICANN as a stakeholder.  Third, ICANN cannot wait for the 
global stakeholder community to arrive at a declaration on rights and 
obligations within the Internet ecosystem but it can within its own 
business develop case-by-case best practice approaches to dealing with 
the issues. The end result within  ICANN will be a case-based process, 
but it will be case-based wisdom, not case-based law. This will also be 
useful for ICANN's position around these issues in the wider Internet 
ecosystem DG, WG, PDP processes, as well as useful for ICANN's 
stakeholder constituencies as they address the same issues "at home" and 
elsewhere. Lastly, in addition to raising awareness and engagement, such 
a strategy will reduce the risk that forces will coalesce around vesting 
global regulatory authority in multilateral entities, in the UN, or in 
sister agencies such as the ITU. They too are stakeholders in the 
process, and also not "the" torch bearer, nor "the" keeper of the flame.

Sam

On 27/12/2014 10:53 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>
> I totally reject that presumption.
>
> All behavior is private. Only individuals or small coordinated groups 
> act and behave. The public interest cannot be much different from an 
> aggregation of a lot of people’s private interests. The idea that we 
> are all devils individually but collectively become angels is a 
> nonsense that I thought had died with various forms of totalitarianism.
>
> Again I think it is much better to talk about these problems in the 
> context of rights. If a specific private actor does something that 
> violates one or more peoples rights then there is a regulatory problem.
>
>

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