[governance] Ideas that this mailing list has agreed to

Milton Mueller mueller at syr.edu
Sat Nov 12 19:09:43 EST 2005


Just had time to catch up with this. 

>>> "Parminder" <parminder at itforchange.net> 11/9/2005 11:01:09 AM >>>
>The new paper by Milton and others concludes that a 
>reformed ICANN be left without political oversight - which is 
>unacceptable -  and also quite at variance with earlier outputs 
>form the IG project. 

Not inconsistent at all. The point of separating "narrow" and "broad"
oversight is precisely to solve this problem. Governments can pursue a
framework convention and establish principles and norms for broader
internet gov, which would by definition include ICANN at a very high
level. But there is no reason to inject governmental political oversight
directly into the process of Internet identifier resource allocation and
assignment. That is too close to the "day to day operation" that
governments themselves agree they shouldn't be involved in. 

>The recent paper by Milton speaks of narrower oversight and 
>broader oversight - and promises to deal with the broader 
>oversight issue later. There is a big problem here. The narrow and 
>broader oversight areas are horizontal divisions, and not vertical 
>components, and therefore can not be considered separately 
>form one another.

Here is where we disagree. Narrow and broad oversight MUST be separated
and dealt with separately, otherwise you mess up both terribly.
Injecting highly political concerns into the techno-economic processes
of root server management, number allocation, TLD creation, etc. would
be a disaster. Likewise, the process of formulating broad policy
principles for the Internet - thebroad oversight - would be crippled if
it gets bogged down in the details of technical coordination. 

> The interface between the two is the whole issue - 
>and if the narrow oversight is not defined in a manner that it
>has a workable interface with the broader oversight - than there 
>is no point in determining the mechanisms of broader oversight 
>later. How will the broader oversight then be enforced on the 
>realm of the narrow oversight.

Governments as a collectivity have to define what principles and norms
they want to enforce on the Internet, in general terms, before they can
be allowed to get anywhere near the detailed mechanisms of identifier
governance. They have not yet done so. They may not ever be able to do
so. But if you tell them, hey you can veto TLD selections, grab address
resources, fiddle with language standards, etc., etc., they will do so
opportunistically and in the short term, playing out little political
games. So I think it is quite consistent and reasonable to say to the
world's nation-states: you don't get any more power over ICANN and its
activities until you figure out what you really want for the Internert
as a whole. And yes, that applies to the USG, more than any other. 



 I
have found the attempt to separate the two - in this manner - always
problematic. An analytical separation soon becomes a political
separation. 

Can we instead try to build a consensus around IG project's response to
WGIG
report. (Internet Governance Quo Vadis? A Response to the WGIG
Report)(http://www.internetgovernance.org/) 

Parminder

-----Original Message-----
From: governance-bounces at lists.cpsr.org 
[mailto:governance-bounces at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Adam Peake
Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2005 8:41 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org 
Subject: Re: [governance] Ideas that this mailing list has agreed to

We seem to be struggling with "oversight" at the moment.

I suggest that the caucus endorses the paper by the Internet 
Governance Project and use that as basis for our discussion about 
ICANN.  Personally, I think it's an excellent paper.

This is *not* about Internet Governance broadly (i.e. the working 
definition provided by WGIG and adopted during prepcom 3). Only about 
ICANN, what the paper calls "Narrow oversight refers to the policy 
supervision of ICANN and its administration of Internet identifiers."

I would be interested to hear opinions on this.

Can you support this paper?

Thanks,

Adam



At 11:47 AM -0500 11/1/05, Milton Mueller wrote:
>=================
>Political Oversight of ICANN
>=================
>
>The Internet Governance Project releases a new paper clarifying the
>controversies around "oversight" of ICANN.
>
>  http://dcc.syr.edu/miscarticles/Political-Oversight.pdf 
>
>We explain why WSIS must separate discussion of governments' role in
>setting policy for all Internet issues from discussion of the
narrower
>problem of ICANN's oversight.
>
>An analysis of the contractual instruments used by the U.S. to
>supervise ICANN shows how the problem of U.S. unilateral oversight
can
>be addressed in a way that is both politically feasible and avoids
>threatening the stability or freedom of the Internet.
>
>The paper can be downloaded here:
>http://dcc.syr.edu/miscarticles/Political-Oversight.pdf 
>
>www.internetgovernance.org 
>

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