[governance] RE: who does "public policy" then?

[McTim]

On 4/15/07, Dan Krimm <dan at musicunbound.com> wrote:

>
> So, to answer McTim:  I don't know exactly how "it" will work.  How does it
> work today?

In many cases, it couldn't.

It's called filtering, and can only be done by coercion or by
draconian legislation.  In a few cases, there is one ASN per country,
in which case it is easy to set up filters to drop packets from .xyz.

If China wants to deny a TLD from visibility inside its
> national networks, does it not have a way to do that?

It does, few others do though.

>
> And if there is no easy solution to the problem today, why should anyone
> think that ICANN can by itself hack together something that has all the
> checks and balances of democratic national constitutions, etc.?

A) It's only a problem if you live in one of the countries that filter
(Iran, China, Saudi, etc)

B) It's not ICANN's "problem" to solve.

>
> It would be bad public policy to set up ICANN as a global monarchy with
> feudal relationships governing its constituencies.  But as far as I can
> see, this is essentially what ICANN is, at the moment, in terms of
> structure, within the domain of Internet Assigned Names and Numbers.

If you had experience in the numbering/port assignment world, you
would not have this opinion.  It's all the naming biz which gives
ICANN it's black eye, and names aren't critical resources IMO.


> Perhaps an extreme description, but it seems closer to the authoritarian
> model than the democratic model, to me.  Remember that authoritarian
> governments can include many of the "trappings" of democratic governments,
> such as "elections" and so forth.  But if such trappings are constrained in
> ways that make "choice" an illusion, then that is no more than a big
> finesse to hoodwink the public so that the power players can run things
> without interference from mere citizens.

Well that's how it currently works in the banana republic where I
live, but that's not how ICANN processes work in my experience.  I, as
a clueful individual end-user CAN and DO have a significant effect on
policy development.  In fact, I did just that a few minutes ago on
another list!

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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