[governance] "Oversight"

[Milton L Mueller]

The law under which ICANN is incorporated can determine and limit what ICANN can do or not do.  BTW, if it indeed does not so  determine, and I have asked this question a thousand times, why then not let ICANN be incorporated under international law. Why do all the arguments change when we transit from US law to international law.

Because, as I explained before, international law is mostly designed to insulate organizations from legal accountability, it is more about immunities than accountabilities, and offers ordinary individuals challenging it fewer rights.

And if you want to know of a practical instance; I was reading about the ICANN's decision last year to do away with registry-registrar cross ownership restriction (BTW a most retrogressive decision!),

Wrong. But tangential to this discussion.

and I found frequent mentions of things like ' as we discussed with competition authorities'. First of all I would like to know from the people more closely involved, which competition authorities did ICANN talk to. I take it to be US government's because I know of no international level competition authority.  Apparently, the inputs from US's competition authorities helped ICANN take this most retrograde decision.

Actually the USG ginned up an FTC statement that criticized and opposed the decision. And so did the EC. So get your facts right, then comment.

I think that competition authorities of many other countries - perhaps even of India- would not have advised in favour of such a bad decision, which as I would separately discuss, would now lead to privatisation of important bits digital lingua and work against competitive practices in the domain name industry.

If you start by assuming it is a bad decision and then ask me to explain why it happened, we are not having a discussion about political oversight or policy, we are having a discussion about your own prejudices.


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