[governance] oversight

[Bertrand de La Chapelle]

Dear all,
 Just a few quick toughts following Avri's e-mail.
 1) on ccTLDs, Avri is right : the question is not to establish an absolute
sovereign RIGHT over a man-made ressource that they did not care about a few
years ago. The challenge is to establish that governments have a major
RESPONSIBILITY in ensuring that the ccTLD corresponding to their country is
used and developed to the greatest benefit of their citizens AND the rest of
the international community.
 2) From rights to responsibilities. The whole WSIS process has been
ill-focused around governments' desire to affirm their rights in the
Internet space. The real issue at stake should be their responsibility in
ensuring that this global facility :
- is acceessible to all (not their right to prevent their own citizens from
accessing it)
- enables freedom of expression and access to information (not their right
to control and censor)
- remains stable and secure and unified (not their right to fragment it at
will)
- can develop all its potential in an appropriate enabling environment (not
to limit usage by inappropriate national legislations)
 3) It follows that governments should be given in the future a legitimate
place in the existing architecture of Internet Governance in due proportion
of :
- their willingness and capacity to contribute to the above objectives (and
a few others of course)
- their willingness to engage in a truly multi-stakeholder process
 So far, because of the attitude of some of them, the community of
governments has failed on both counts :
- the whole WSIS debate seems to focus on the single issue of the role of
the US DoC (an important and symbolic one, I agree but certainly not the
only and most pressing one)
- civil society and business actors who actually run the whole thing are
simply kicked out of the rooms where multi-stakeholder processes are
supposed to be established....
 In any case, there is no reason, within the ICANN framework to do more than
involve governments as peers : no legitimacy for an oversight role. If there
is a need for an oversight, it should be multi-stakeholder.
 4) The best lesson form the last four years is simple : had the Internet
been launched and developped thirty years ago with the kind of governmental
process that the WSIS exemplified, we probably would have something like
3000 working groups on various issues and ....maybe 100.000 users worldwide.

 This is today, IMHO, the strongest argument against putting the wholde
thing within a UN-type framework. We do not need UN-type absolute consesus
procedures that only mean the ability for anyone to say no and block
processes, but rough consensus-type of mechanisms among actors that are
pursuing a common goal.
 Just my two cents.
 Bertrand

 On 10/24/05, Avri Doria <avri at acm.org> wrote:
>
>
> On 20 okt 2005, at 16.40, Danny Butt wrote:
>
> >
> > I also agree with Milton's reservations about the "independent
> > appeals process" - and this could be an area that intergovernmental
> > oversight is important -
>
> i don't understand this.
>
> i think the appeals process needs to be external and multistakeholder.
> why should it involve inter-governemental oversight? though it could
> contain inter-governemental participation.
>
>
> > I don't have the expertise to draft anything
> > about that though. I'm not sure if this is exactly what Milton is
> > saying, but my POV is that the GAC is basically attempting to be an
> > intergovernmental mechanism without the representativeness or
> > resource support that proper intergovernmental organisations have to
> > ensure e.g. developing country participation. So it's really a worst
> > of both worlds.
>
> I believe that while it is appropriate for GAC to move from an
> advisory role to a participatory role as one of the ICANN
> constituencies (which need badly need review and possibly
> reorganization). Is that enough representativeness or do people
> within CS think they should somehow be more equal then the others in
> ICANN. Ie. do people want to give GAC oversight within ICANN? and
> if so, why?
>
> Additionally, there has been an implicit acceptance of the notion
> that ccTLDs are a national and sovereign issue. I for one have not
> accepted this. That is like saying that any product that one invents
> that uses the national name, or its abbreviation is, by virtue of its
> name, now a sovereign resource. I personally wonder why so many in
> CS accept this without any argument. It is one of the premises that
> once accepted make calls for government oversight, of at least their
> countries cccTLD, plausible if still not acceptable. I just don't
> see any reason why it should be accepted. ccTLDs were not created
> for that purpose and the fact that it took decades for nations to
> begin making a grab at this common's resource does not lend
> credibility to their claim.
>
>
> a.
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> governance at lists.cpsr.org
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