[governance] oversight

Sun Oct 16 16:13:09 EDT 2005

Firstly agree with your comments that it may not be necessary to have it
stateled or to rush into things. 

Having said that, state-led does help make it more enforceable or enforced.
Anyway, it may be useful to see precedents and see how we can learn from
this. I believe private sector has had more experience with working with
governments e.f MOU on MNCs (can't recall the name used for this), GMPCS
MOU, Law of the Sea negotiations, Outer Space negotiations,  etc than civil
society. 

Would be good to see if any civil society precedents exist or is this
completely new territory? If it is new territory, we should not rush
otherwise, like the gTLD MOU it will not be enforced or enforceable.

Perhaps in the interim, there could be some agreement on the principles
"e.g."shared responsibility" "transparency" "universal participation or
inclusiveness" etc and then agree to form an interim committee to work how
to get this to work (kind of what the Law of the Sea did although their
effectiveness has yet to be seen) OR agree to continue working on making
ICANN include these principles and manifest a more international inclusive
structure.

Laina

-----Original Message-----
From: governance-bounces at lists.cpsr.org
[mailto:governance-bounces at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Lee McKnight
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2005 10:58 PM
To: wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de; Milton Mueller
Cc: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] oversight

Wolfgang,

You seem to assume Milton and the rest of us expect a framework convention
for the Internet would work the same as prior framework conventions, ie be
state-led.

I agree that would be dangerous and unacceptable.  A multistakeholder-led
and balanced framework convention on the other hand, would be a whole new
beast.

Probably, it would have to be at least partially outside the state-centric
UN system.

Even conceding that point will of course be difficult, but if that is not
conceded then I for one definitely don;t want to go to that party (again and
again and again - there are no easy fixes here). 

There will be interim patches and fixes and upgrades along the way, but
definitely it would be dangerous to rush into a new international regime for
the Internet. 

Lee

Prof. Lee W. McKnight
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
+1-315-443-6891office
+1-315-278-4392 mobile

>>> Wolfgang Kleinwächter 
>>> <wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de> 10/15/2005 6:34 AM 
>>> >>>
Milton:
>>Is not a governmental council more dangerous within ICANN than outside it?

Wolfgang:
>The GAC reform would include that the GAC constitutes an own legal 
>basis, outside of the ICANN bylaws but linked to ICANN via a MoU, which 
>could be part of the ICANN bylaws.

Mitlton:
So even if this happens, we are talking about re-negotiating the role(s) of
governments in ICANN. And does this not raise all the same issues as the
EU-proposed Council?

Wolfgang:
My problem with the EU proposal is that the borderline between "the level of
principle" and the " day to day operation" is unclear. If the "level of
principle" means, dealing with the TOP 16 list and creating general
frameworks "on the level of principle",  this would be not only okay for me,
I think this is needed, in particular if it comes to non-ICANN issues. But
if I take the story of .eu anf the "heavy legislation" (and the debate
before the Directive was adopted) I feel rather uncomfortable with such a
procedure. In this case, the "level of principle" does interfere rather deep
into the day to day operations. Ask EURID people about their
experiences.That all stakeholder - including governments - have to have a
channel, is without any doubt. Nobody challenges this. The question is the
detail: the procedure, the basic structure (network vs. hierarchiy) etc. 

My criticism with your framework convention is driven by the same argument:
A heavy inter-governmental cloud over the Internet is a. difficult to
achieve (it has to be negotiated and if 15 western European countries need
five years to agree on a legislation for one single and simple issue like
.eu, you can speculate how long this will lastif 190+ UN member states are
involved)  and b. risky because too much rain can come from the sky which
will set the Internet on the gorund under water.

To have an intergovernmental council (for the TOP 16 list, including ICANN
issues) with a "Private Sector Advisory Committee" (PSAC) and an "Civil
Society Advisory Committee" (CSAC), both with qualified voting rights for
issues which have relevance for the private sector and civil society (users)
would be much better. To internationalize the authorization function of the
publication of zone files in the root is a bad idea. Here I agree with Carl
Bildt. USG should push ICANN to crate the condition that this can be fully
privatized. Anycast, DNSSec etc are steps in the right direction.  More is
needed. 
Best

wolfgang

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