[governance] Statement made in Plenary

[Laina Raveendran Greene]

Good point. Even a UN body cld do the same.  I agree-let's understand the
facts of what needs to be fixed first....is it abusiness issue, a political
one or 'emotive' one.....are there clear issues being run as a 301c org
and/or lack of tranparent and accountability of ICANN versus US gov.....

Has this become more impt now as we move to IP NGN.....issues of equitable
allocation of resources and recourse issues...

Whether public or private national or international law are better options
to solve these issues,then can be answered properly.

Laina
>From Indonesia 

-----Original Message-----
From: governance-bounces at lists.cpsr.org
[mailto:governance-bounces at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Milton Mueller
Sent: Sunday, October 02, 2005 6:12 PM
To: vb at bertola.eu.org; avri at psg.com
Cc: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Statement made in Plenary

Vittorio:
I had the same conversations with the Iranians. Problem is, everything the
US is doing with sanctions against Iran could be done without ICANN and its
US-based governance arrangements. These are simply extensions of national
power - because so much of the Internet industry is in the US, if the USG
orders US companies to effect sanctions on Iranian Internet users, it gets a
lot of traction. And if it convinces European states and Japan to follow
suit, then 80% or so of the available internet services could be affected. 

This indicates that we need to be concerned about national power and
geopolitics per se, not just "US" power. 

It also is a clear indication of why I have so strongly advocated open,
nondiscriminatory methods of selecting new top level domain registries, such
as auctions and lotteries. If the structure of the industry becomes more
distributed, and award decisions less subject to discretion of a few
Internet hoi polloi in the US, then it will be harder to subject to national
political fights.

>>> Vittorio Bertola <vb at bertola.eu.org> 10/02/05 8:20 AM >>>
Avri Doria ha scritto:
>>>do you think it should not become an international body?
>>
>>I think it is.
> 
> as long as it is subject to all US and California law past and future, 
> i disagree.
> 
> the US government would be well within its national mandate to 
> prohibit companies from associating with certain foreign powers (the

> so called rogues and evil ones) and to prohibit contractual relations
 
> with entities in those countries.  It is this sort of potential 
> restriction that I believe is inappropriate for ICANN.

I remember one young Iranian guy coming to me at the Cape Town ICANN
meeting, and telling me the story of their .com domain names being suddenly
lost as their American registrar refused to make business with

them any more. Also, they tried to get a local ISP accredited by ICANN

as a registrar, but ICANN could not make a contract with an Iranian company,
and even if it did, Verisign, Thawte etc would refuse to sell

them an SSL certificate necessary for the communication.

I am not sure about to which extent this story is true, but as far as I

know it certainly could be.

I also remember the story of the biggest Macedonian ISP losing their
customers' domains as the American registrar who they were using started
refusing credit cards from Balkan countries to reduce fraud risks (in
practice, assuming that anyone attempting to pay with a credit card from
Balkans is likely to be a fraudster).

Now, one could say that this kind of things falls into the realm of private
law... but still, if we accept (as per the Tunis declaration) that "the
Internet is a global facility available to the public", I don't think that
this kind of things should be allowed to happen any more.
-- 
vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a]
bertola.eu.org]<-----
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Prima o poi...
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