[bestbits] Civil Society Letter on IANA Transition

[parminder]

On Wednesday 25 May 2016 06:33 PM, Deirdre Williams wrote:
> Dear Pranesh,
> I also have a concern - serious at least in my view. The third
> paragraph of the statement begins with this sentence "When the
> Internet community came together in Marrakech in March 2016 to endorse
> and forward the IANA transition package to NTIA, there was consensus
> that the product of two years of challenging hard work was robust and
> credible and met the key NTIA criteria."I have noticed, and questioned
> publicly, the spreading "loose" use of the word "community" which is
> leading, again in my view, to a rather dangerous conflation of
> concepts. To my mind it is incorrect to suggest that the ICANN
> community, which met in Marrakech in March, is the same thing as the
> internet community of which the ICANN community is a subset. This -
> deliberately? - confusing use of the word "community" has been going
> on for several years.
> I wonder does anyone else consider it to be a matter for concern?

The problem with the abuse of the term 'community' is not limited to a
particular para of this CS letter -- it is endemic to the ICANN
structure, including very prominently in the IANA transition process.
The US gov conditions for IANA transition spoke of transition of
oversight to global multi-stakeholder community .... It then somehow
become 'internet community' and then even narrower 'icann community'.
All these concepts get used inter-changeably, as per convenience of
making some point or the other.   I have often written to the CCWG list
(the WG looking at ICANN accountability) asking people to define what
exactly is considered 'community' here, especially when  'community' or
'empowered community' is actually entering the legal language around
ICANN. And this question was addressed to the group which otherwise, in
drafting transition documents , has been hair splitting over each word,
concept and term for precise meaning.... The group never ever replies to
this question.

So, Deirdre, you are referring to what is a very foundational problem --
is community everyone who is interested in Internet gov and policies
being impacted by it - but then why it is not 'public', the traditional
political/ policy/ gov term.... But if this community is a smaller
subset of the 'public', what boundaries or conditions define it? you
wont find any response answer, bec any response would open up the
question of political legitimacy of the ICANN structure... 'community'
is a multistakeholderist term of art that covers for 'public' because
they dont like the 'public' term... Why they dont like it is something
that I would leave it for you and others to guess :)

parminder



> Best wishes
> Deirdre
>
> On 25 May 2016 at 04:11, Pranesh Prakash <pranesh at cis-india.org
> <mailto:pranesh at cis-india.org>> wrote:
>
>     Dear all,
>     I recently came across this:
>     http://bestbits.net/iana-transition/
>
>     However, I never saw its contents being discussed on this list. 
>     Did I somehow fail to receive those messages?
>
>     I am quite concerned about the way the letter takes an uncritical
>     global North approach to the IANA transition, and refuses to
>     contend with the power dynamics at play.
>
>         The undersigned civil society and public interest groups
>         believe that the IANA transition is a positive development for
>         the Domain Name System and for the Internet at large, and that
>         the process to develop the transition proposal has been a
>         successful expression of multistakeholder approaches to
>         Internet decision-making.
>
>
>     I have pointed out in the past that this IANA transition process
>     fails the requirements of the NetMundial Statement, and was
>     primarily led by corporate interests in the US, and men:
>     http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/global-multistakeholder-community-neither-global-nor-multistakeholder
>
>     Regards,
>     Pranesh
>
>     -- 
>     Pranesh Prakash
>     Policy Director, Centre for Internet and Society
>     http://cis-india.org | tel:+91 80 40926283 <tel:%2B91%2080%2040926283>
>     sip:pranesh at ostel.co <mailto:sip%3Apranesh at ostel.co> |
>     xmpp:pranesh at cis-india.org <mailto:xmpp%3Apranesh at cis-india.org>
>     https://twitter.com/pranesh
>
>
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> -- 
> “The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge" Sir
> William Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize Economics, 1979
>
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