Important blog post about the ICANN Accountability CCWG

[Sam Lanfranco]

On 27/12/2014 7:09 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> Talk about “the commons” is as confused as talk about “the market.” 
> Both constitute a form of fundamentalism, a religious belief that one 
> of them is good no matter what, a belief that is so abstract it is 
> virtually useless in policy discussions. 

RE: Commons: I am with Martin here, having worked through a course on 
the commons in my graduate studies. The existence of various commons has 
a long history but they only work when their ability provide for all 
exceeds the levels of collective demand. On the English common lands, 
the collective demands for grazing did not tax grazing capacity and 
forest products demand was modest and handled through community 
consensus. The Enclosure Movement, turning common land into private 
property, was driven by factors like technological change such as 
improved breeds of livestock and “I don’t want your B-List bull messing 
with my A-List cow.”. Here the DNS issue around the privatization of 
words in domain names is a technology driven threat to our very 
languages as a linguistic commons.

Our collective policy challenge here is to know when to situate, or not 
situate, the specific issue in the general context (for example: the DNS 
appropriation of words that belong in the commons) and when to situate, 
or not situate, the general issue in the specific context (for example: 
the application of public interest to a gTLD strings). In each case this 
dialogue and process exist in a sea of political and economic forces, 
with no guarantees with respect to outcomes. While a dictionary and a 
thesaurus are useful here, to reduce confusion with respect to terms, 
that is only a baby step toward policy development.

What is important, as Rafik has suggested, is that these discussions, 
which hopefully inform and educate us, are captured in ways (documents, 
etc.) that can serve as aides for future policy analysis and decision 
making, and not end up simply being polite and engaging intellectual 
sparing matches or reappearing over and over again with without the 
benefit of the tacit knowledge from previous discussions.

Sam
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