[governance] First Draft of Statement on US Commerce Department/GACchair intervention

Thu Aug 18 16:50:18 EDT 2005

Milton, from the comments I have been reading here, I do not believe this
reflects the views of civil society. It's a perfectly valid viewpoint to put
forward if you wish as an individual or a group of signatories, but I do not
believe it is or ever will be a draft civil society statement. So I believe
you should remove that heading and make it a statement from individuals who
support it.

That does not include me. Nor do I think you would be able to amend this
documents to reflect the views I hold on this subject, along with many
others on this list. Please respect this difference as being a valid and
different interpretation of what is going on and what we should do about it.
I agree with a lot of what you are trying to achieve but find myself a long
way distanced from the positions you want to take and your interpretation of
events and appropriate actions.

Ian Peter
Senior Partner
Ian Peter and Associates Pty Ltd
P.O Box 10670  Adelaide St
Brisbane 4000
Australia
Tel +614 1966 7772
Email ian.peter at ianpeter.com
www.ianpeter.com
www.internetmark2.org
www.nethistory.info (Winner, Top100 Sites Award, PCMagazine Spring 2005)

-----Original Message-----
From: governance-bounces at lists.cpsr.org
[mailto:governance-bounces at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Milton Mueller
Sent: Friday, 19 August 2005 6:16 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Cc: NCUC-DISCUSS at listserv.syr.edu
Subject: [governance] First Draft of Statement on US Commerce
Department/GACchair intervention

Attached as a Word doc, but also inserted below as ascii. 

Thanks to Bill Drake, Lisa McLaughlin and Lee McKnight for their input so
far; others welcome.

---------

DRAFT CIVIL SOCIETY STATEMENT v 1.1 
8/18/05

The following signatories, all participants in ICANN and WSIS civil society,
wish to express our concern over the recent request by the Government
Advisory Committee's chairman and the U.S. Department of Commerce to delay,
and possibly reverse, a gTLD delegation decision by ICANN's Board. 

The intervention by the U.S. Commerce Department and the GAC Chair raises
three issues:

1. The role of governments in ICANN

ICANN was intended to be a multistakeholder governance authority. Under
ICANN's bylaws, the private sector, civil society, the technical community
and governmental representatives have roughly equal status. The GAC
chair/Commerce Department intervention, however, seems to be based on the
theory that governments have a superior authority to review or reverse
decisions emerging from ICANN's processes. This view of the role of
governments, if accepted or encouraged by the Board, would lead to a radical
change in ICANN's mode of operation, one which we strongly oppose. We
acknowledge the existence of legitimate demands for revising the oversight
relationship between governments and ICANN. If change is to take place
fairly and legitimately, however, it must occur through careful, deliberate
negotiations and formal agreements among governments and all other involved
constituencies * e.g., through the WSIS process * rather than through sudden
actions by a few governmental representatives reacting to lobbying efforts
by a handful of interest groups. 

2. The importance of stable rules and procedures

We believe that Board's willingness to entertain this last-minute
intervention, while no doubt intended to be an act of accommodation and
flexibility, could damage the fairness, credibility and stability of ICANN's
processes if it is taken to be a precedent for the future. We believe that
it is unjust to tell TLD applicants * or anyone else seeking a decision or
policy from ICANN * to follow a prolonged and elaborate set of rules and
procedures, and then at the 11th hour cast all those requirements aside and
impose new procedures that put at risk everything they have invested. But
the harm potentially goes beyond those directly affected by ICANN awards.
The delay sends a message to everyone who devotes time and energy to
participating in ICANN processes that their work can be rendered irrelevant
at any time if politics intervene.  GAC members, including the US
government, had ample opportunity to express their views on the .xxx
proposal during the transparent 18-month evaluation process. At the very
least, the GAC should be required to agree on a formal resolution before
offering policy advice to the Board, as ICANN's bylaws stipulate. As we show
in the annex to this letter, GAC members had many opportunities to learn
about and express their views on the .xxx application, but passed them up.
It is unclear to us why a stakeholder group unwilling to fulfill the role
assigned to them by the TLD evaluation process should be granted special
powers to affect the outcome. 

3. Censorship

Last but not least, we object to the decision as fostering and encouraging
censorship.  Censorship is fundamentally contrary to the principles of
freedom of expression and access to information enshrined in both the UN's
International Bill of Human Rights and the WSIS' 2003 Declaration of
Prinicples. Signatories to this letter recognize the existence of
wide-ranging views on appropriate policies toward sexually explicit material
across nations and cultures. It is an undeniable fact, however, that
eliminating .xxx as a top-level domain will not eliminate pornography from
the Internet. In fact, by openly identifying sexually explicit web sites and
messages, the .xxx domain might help parents and governments to adopt
appropriate policies on their own, e.g. by employing filtering tools that
block access to the .xxx TLD.  Suppressing this TLD could create a precedent
for political suppression of free expression on the Internet using the
leverage of the technical system. We believe that administration of Internet
identifiers should be content-neutral; censorship and content regulation are
appropriately the province of national-level policies and should not be
extended into the global management of the domain name system. 

To conclude, we urge the ICANN Board to abide by its prior decision to
delegate the .xxx domain to ICM Registry. We hope they will use the delay to
explain to those who have raised the objections how and why the delegation
decision was made and why ICANN's governance model, which centers on
technical coordination and involves private sector, civil society and
technical stakeholders as well as governments, is the most appropriate for
management of the domain name system. 

We encourage the GAC to develop a dialogue with ICANN management and various
ICANN constituencies on the improvement of TLD addition procedures to make
them more objective, impartial and inclusive, but we ask GAC to accept the
fact that in the interest of fairness and stability change must be
forward-looking and not retroactive. 

Chronology

1.	October 2000 .xxx domain first proposed; rejected in November 2000
2.	December 2002 discussion begins on a new round of sponsored TLDs
(sTLDs)
3.	Public comment on sponsored TLD round opened on March 21, 2003. Main
topic of discussion was whether to restrict applications to those made in
the first round, which included the .xxx proposal. 
4.	Draft RFP for new sTLDs posted 24 June, 2003, during the Montreal
ICANN meeting. ICM registry has a prominent booth at the Montreal meeting.
5.	Board Resolution authorizing new round at Tunisia meeting Oct 31,
2003, opening up the sTLD process to new applications as well as the
existing ones.
6.	RFP finalized and published on December 2003
7.	19 March 2004 ICM Registry submitted an application under the new
RFP, which was posted on the ICANN website and announced to GAC. Public
comment forum opened.
8.	March * August, 2004. Proposal debated in mainstream media,
including The New Republic and the Today Show. 
9.	October 2004, ICANN announced approvals of two other sTLDs (.post
and .travel), mentioned .xxx as still in evaluation
10.	Dec. 2004, ICM Registry asks to make a presentation to the GAC
meeting at the Capetown, South Africa ICANN meeting. Their request was
declined.
11.	April 2005, ICM Registry again directly approaches the GAC asking to
make a presentation at the GAC meeting during the Mar del Plata, Argentina
ICANN meeting. Again their request was declined.
12.	June 17, 2005 ICANN Board approves .xxx TLD and the decision is
widely announced.

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