[governance] ICANN and the IGF

[Vittorio Bertola]

Pardon me if I enter the discussion at this stage - I just got back from 
two days of flights and I haven't read all the rest.

Meryem Marzouki ha scritto:
>> The trouble with an "elephant in the room" as several people have 
>> described
>> ICANN is that it leads to a total loss of perspective, at the expense of
>> other issues, of equal or even greater concern and relevance.
> 
> Loss of which perpective?
> ICANN is not the elephant in the room, it's the gatekeeper of a room 
> that should be everyone's room, deciding:
> - who can enter and who is denied any right to be in the room
> - how much one should pay to enter
> - how one should behave in the room
> - who has more rights than others in the room
> - in case of dispute, how they should be resolved in order to enforce 
> such unbalance of rights
> - which language should be spoken in the room
> - etc. the list is long

Sure, ICANN is a regulator and does what regulators do. Now my questions 
are:

1) is there the need of a regulator? Sure there is. Without regulation, 
Verisign would be running the entire DNS alone, maybe taking direct 
orders by the Bush administration. I do not buy the argument that the 
Internet does not need regulation, that equates to leaving it in the 
free hands of the strongest economical and political powers.

2) couldn't we have a system where regulation is more distributed? e.g. 
with multiple roots living under some coordination? Yes we could - 
actually I wrote a short article exactly on that point in the WGIG book, 
more than two years ago - however, in the end, you do need some 
coordination, and thus some form of central coordinating entity, even if 
one could imagine a coordinating entity more lightweight than ICANN.

3) is ICANN a good regulator? Yes, no? Well, that's a discussion worth 
having, wherever people want to have it, but I suspect that ICANN itself 
might be the more logical venue, especially if you want to advance 
practical points such as multilingualism etc.; and incidentally, several 
of us have been rolling their sleeves up to that purpose for years.

> On this list (not to mention other far more important fora), we're 
> constantly witnessing this attitude: don't even talk about ICANN, "there 
> are other issues of equal or even greater concern and relevance". What 
> prevents from also discussing other issues?

I just found a 300-message thread on ICANN issues, after getting back 
from an IGF where one main session and at least 1/4 of the workshops 
regarded DNS issues, so I don't see how anyone can claim that it's 
impossible to discuss ICANN.

But this is not your fault, it's the fault of the stupid approach that 
was devised by the ICANN leadership in the last years, when they were 
scared by the prospect of a discussion, and thus did whatever they could 
to prevent it. They behaved defensively as if they had anything to hide 
or to be ashamed for, which in a mediatic world, as everyone knows, 
implies an admission to have something to hide or to be ashamed for, 
even when that is not true in reality. So even people like you, who were 
never involved in ICANN, saw this behaviour and thought: if they behave 
like this, there must be something really bad going on. Nice strategy!

The last pearl of the collection was the attempt to convince the people 
who were calling for a discussion on "critical Internet resources" that 
they didn't really want to discuss ICANN, they wanted to discuss on how 
scarce electricity is in the third world. It was pathetic to watch - 
more, it bordered on insulting the intelligence of everyone else.

I have been involved in ICANN for the last seven years. I have seen 
plenty of shortcomings, failures, political tricks. Yet I think that, if 
examined objectively, ICANN scores much better than most other global 
institutions, and that the remaining issues (such as the relationship 
with the USG) can be overcome with due patience and effort; *that* is 
where our efforts, as users and as civil society, should go.

If only ICANN wasn't so committed to shooting themselves in the foot...

But:

> Actually, during WSIS and now it's going on at IGF, this is exactly 
> what's happening: constantly beating around the bush, when the real 
> point is to ensure noone directly addresses the main issue for which 
> WSIS as well as IGF have been set up.

No, sorry, this is factually wrong.

When the WSIS started, no one even knew what Internet governance was. 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it started because of a synergy between 
Tunisia's self-promotional efforts and the desire of the United Nations 
to show activity in the shaping of the Information Society, especially 
for developmental purposes - the fundamental purpose, in fact, was ICT 
for development.

When the IGF was created, its most important purpose was to address all 
the other issues, those that did not have a regulator or a venue for 
discussion yet. The nature of ICANN was to be addressed by a separate 
program called "enhanced cooperation".

I would be desperate if the IGF stopped discussing "all the rest" and 
became a shadow meeting of ICANN. It is the ICANN controversy and the 
related political maneuvering - see the few things we know about 
internal feuds in the AG - that has actually been preventing a fuller 
success of the IGF in other fields.

I think that we should tell to all the people who are only interested in 
ICANN to bring their arguing somewhere else (at ICANN meetings, 
possibly), because this controversy is poisoning the entire IGF; and I 
want to use the IGF to discuss human rights, access, privacy, 
intellectual property, and a lot of other stuff which is much much more 
fundamental to our future society than a three-character string at the 
end of a URL. And that *is* being impeded by our lists and meetings 
being flooded by ICANN-related arguing, often on arguments going on 
since 10 years ago; and by the AG being unable to agree on panelists 
until the day before the IGF, because everyone is unwilling to 
compromise about those for the CIR session; and so on.

But I also see that a precondition for this is that the controversy on 
ICANN has to be addressed somewhere, with full satisfaction of all 
participants. In the past two years, too often ICANN looked like those 
young adult students who face their graduation exam at the university, 
and approach it as a 5-year-old bully who is afraid of a grammar test at 
the elementary school. They whine, pretend they're ill, find petty 
excuses not to show up, punch the teacher in the face, claim their 
classmates should go first, and eventually try to move the conversation 
towards the weather and the latest football matches. If only they could 
be self-confident enough to realize that they are adults and have been 
doing a reasonably good job, they would show up and discover that they 
already passed the exam.

But of course, if after a lot of time they still don't show up, the 
university will get fed up, and that's the only case when they will 
actually graduate someone else.
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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