[governance] ICANN taxes/fees

[Carlos Afonso]

Dear people,

I have been just a lurker in the list lately, given my workload. Well, 
the IGF stock-taking meeting is near (starts Monday), and I tried to 
follow the list in the hope of catching up regarding all the procedural 
and strategic matters we need to handle towards IGF 2007, since I will 
be in Geneva for the stock-taking (learned I should go just last 
Friday). I find the dozens of messages regarding ICANN fees and how hard 
or how easy is to run a DNS server service, way off-focus in my opinion 
at least right now.

In the meantime, a group of countries tries to get organized to insist 
that the IGF should be mainly a space for ICANN bashing and/or 
replacement, while other groups are preparing to propose that the main 
topics in Rio should be exactly the same as in Athens. A majority 
(Brazil not included) of GRULAC (the Latin American and Caribbean 
government group at the UN) members, for example, insist the agenda for 
Rio should be exactly as it was for Athens -- that generic, almost 
useless group of four topics: open standards, access, security, 
diversity... the weather, soccer, who won the lotto... If we continue 
this trend, we better turn IGF into an international old-timers' chat 
space (sponsored by the UN!) like the Brazilian Academy of Letters or 
some other sleepy, tea-soaked thing -- this way we would not need to 
worry about it anymore.

Several post-Athens contributions are worried about format as well as 
content. My view is that we need a process in each meeting in which we 
arrive at thematic and procedural resolutions. Plenaries "moderated" (I 
prefer to say "manipulated") by professional TV hosts do not work well, 
and even scare some of the panelists (specially some of those whose 
native idiom is not English). We need thematic specialists as 
moderators, not "crowd handling" specialists or showmen -- it seemed the 
purpose here was to keep true debate dissolved into generalities.

In my view, we main focus should be on thematic workshops with the goal 
of presenting a resolution proposal in the final plenary -- the main 
meetings would be shorter and would work just as "seeds" for the 
workshops. These would constitute the official set of recommendations 
from IGF.

fraternal regards

--c.a.

Veni Markovski wrote:
> At 06:01 PM 2/6/2007  -0500, Milton Mueller wrote:
>> Registries are not difficult to run,
> 
> Could you continue talking on this subject? Is it based on commercial 
> practices, or on existing registries, or on academic research?
> 
> 
> Sincerely,
> Veni Markovski
> http://www.veni.com
> 
> check also my blog:
> http://blog.veni.com
> 
> The opinions expressed above are those of the author,
> not of any organizations, associated with or related to
> the author in any given way.


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