[governance] Comments related to the WGIG report

[Vittorio Bertola]

Izumi AIZU ha scritto:
> If GAC is given the final decision making, could they make
> any decision at all? Similarly, on other highly politically
> controversial issues, can they decide by majority? or by
> consensus?
> 
> Even a "small committee" will face this challenge depending on
> the composition and decision making procedure.

I think this could be a key point - I would have no problem in giving the 
GAC or other gov-only entity a right of veto on the authorization of 
policy changes in the root zone (ie, not on technical stuff like changing 
the NS list, but only on the addition/deletion/redelegation of TLDs) if 
they were required to reach, say, a 2/3 majority of all countries. That 
way, this veto right would be almost unexercisable, unless ICANN really 
decides something that upsets the entire world (and in this case, it will 
be good to have an independent evaluation of ICANN's decision).

Procedural oversight - as hinted at by Milton - is IMHO a different 
question. You could also imagine this kind of body acting as a sort of 
"appeal jury" over ICANN decisions in procedural terms, but ICANN already 
has its own reconsideration procedures etc.

Of course, it would be better if this oversight/"check and balance" role 
was given to a multistakeholder body, rather than to governments only, and 
this is possibly what we should say in our text, but I'm not sure about 
the political feasibility of this.

Finally, I think that the .xxx example is telling, in the sense that the 
approval of .xxx was a world-level piece of news - it made the first page 
even on Italian newspapers, who had no clue about what ICANN was and in 
most cases misspellt its name... - but still, there was almost no 
discussion on it inside the ICANN community, let alone in the rest of the 
world. (Of course the Board replied something like "if you had clicked on 
the fifth item on ICANN's home page, in the fourth para you could have 
found an email address that would have allowed you to submit a comment six 
months ago", but I think that you judge the inclusiveness of a process by 
the actual number of participants, not by the theoretical possibilities of 
participation.)

I think that the real problem is how to devise a mechanism to ensure that 
many more groups participate in discussing this kind of decisions before 
they are taken, and in this regard, I don't see why governments shouldn't 
be part of the story. After all, as I was told by a gov rep, "when a 
mother finds her kid clicking random links over the Internet and ending up 
in pornography, she complains with us, not with ICANN".
-- 
vb.               [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<------
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Vecchio sito, nuovo toblòg...
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