[governance] oversight

[Carlos Afonso]

Milton Mueller wrote:

>Avri:
>[...]
>But one can also think of "oversight" as a set of enforceable rules
>regulating ICANN. And for those rules to be truly enforceable, a
>significant number of the world's governments have to agree on them. How
>else will they come about and obtain any binding authority over ICANN?
>
>If properly defined, these rules can constrain governments just as much
>as they constrain ICANN. I.e., they might say that ICANN can be reversed
>or checked only according to certain procedures and only in the
>following areas: x,y,z.
>  
>
I understand this is generally the underlying vision of oversight the CS 
caucus works with.

>I think we would emphatically agree that the nature of these rules must
>be defined by civil society and private sector, not just governments. In
>other words, the concept of "oversight" has to be conceived in a way
>that makes its purpose _the protection of the rights of the general
>population of Internet users and suppliers_, not simply a matter of
>giving governments their pound of flesh qua governments.
>  
>
I agree that any definition of rules must result from a pluralist 
process, of course, but not just under the economists' vision of 
consumers and suppliers.

>While the immediate threat is national governments, veterans of ICANN
>can only repeat their warnings that ICANN itself can be captured, can be
>indifferent to users and individual rights, can ignore its own stated
>procedures, etc., etc. ICANN now seems nice only by comparison to
>traditional intergovernmental processes. And ICANN's "niceness" has been
>greatly enhanced by the threat of WSIS, who knows what will happen once
>that threat is gone and it is cut loose. So prima facie, there is a need
>for ICANN "oversight."
>  
>
On this, an interesting story: in the ITU Americas event in Salvador, 
ITU reps as usual tried to present the organization as an essential 
player in a new global governance mechanism. But the rep of one of the 
largest multinational telcos (Telefónica) proposed that nothing be 
changed in the current mechanisms of governance of the logical 
infrastructure (ie., the ICANN system). There are many examples like 
this in which global agencies' bureaucracies acquire a life of their 
own... There are already signals this is happening within ICANN as well 
-- we can see this in the ICANN meetings in which major business 
stakeholders (the TLD traders) raise their protests against the 
organization.

rgds

--c.a.


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