[governance] Statement made in Plenary

[Ronda Hauben]

The issue of what law governs ICANN is an important question.

At one of the early meetings about the problems with ICANN that
was set up at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School I raised
some of the problems with having a private company in charge of
the Internet's infrastructure. Elaine Kamarck was at the meeting
and during lunch she came over to me and asked me to keep raising
the issues I was raising. She said that she didn't know anything
about the Internet, but she did know about government. (I am
paraphrasing the conversation, but here is the geist of it.)

That the laws governing a corporation (in the US) were laws that
had did not provide protection for people whose economic lives
were dependent on the Internet. That if a corporation does something
that is a problem, one can vote someone off the board of directors.
But basically there is not the kind of ability to prevent corruption
and abuse that there is when a government entity is involved.

That setting up a private corporation to oversee what is happening with
the infrastructure of the Internet is not an appropriate structure.

If you think about what happened with Enron or WorldCom or other corporate 
corruption in the US, it gives you some idea of what she was referring to.

She later gave a talk at the meeting where she said some of this.

So the legal nature of ICANN is a serious issue. Currently as I have
been told it is under the laws that govern charity's in California.
(I had the impression this meant laws governing nonprofits or something
like the Red Cross etc.) But untold numbers of people, and governments,
etc are dependent on the Internet, and so ICANN has control over
immense power.

How this is deal with is a serious issue and needs to be raised and
considered.

Ronda

On Sun, 2 Oct 2005, Vittorio Bertola wrote:

> McTim ha scritto:
(...)
>> I would prefer none at all.  Would all the contracts ICANN has have to
>> be renegotiated under a new host country thingy?  Who is going to pay
>> for that?
>
> This is an interesting question, and maybe some legal expert (Jovan?)
> can be more precise. However, as far as I understand, it's up to the
> agreement itself to define which laws of the host country apply, and
> which ones don't. So I think that there could be a host country
> agreement that prevents ICANN from having to be subject to, say, US
> international trade restrictions, or US visa requirements for people
> willing to attend the meetings, but still lets US law be applied to
> private contracts when no exception is specifically defined. But I'm
> really not sure whether I got this right.
> -- 
> vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<-----
> http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Prima o poi...
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