[governance] Irony

[William Drake]

Hi Alex,

A few points of friendly (seriously) disagreement over my morning coffee...

On 11/30/07 1:10 AM, "Alejandro Pisanty" <apisan at servidor.unam.mx> wrote:

> OK,
> 
> so, no trust for Kieren or anyone who speaks for ICANN or in favor of
> ICANN. Dan's minutious dissection proves that and everybody should take
> that as dogma from now on. This may cut two ways but never mind for now.

This seems an unfair misconstruction of what others have said.  I will never
understand the persistent tendency of ICANN partisans to respond to any and
all criticism by going nuclear and personal, but Rovian rhetorical
strategies are not the best way to draw in and engage people.  It is all the
more odd when read against the equally persistent (and utterly
anti-democratic) claim from some that only people who are contributing to
the work have the right and street cred to raise concerns.
 
> Is there still a chance for anything productive to be done in this list
> with the participation of people who think that ICANN is more half-full
> than half-empty? There are at least three outstanding strands that I can
> recognize from recent days:

I've been on the list since it was created 4 1/2 years ago, and to my
recollection the only folks who've consistently intoned darkly that the
dialogue is unproductive, uncollegial crap are the same partisans.  The list
was originally set up to facilitate work in the IGC, and while you may
disagree with some or all what's come out of that process, it's not been a
waste of time for those involved, or they wouldn't have stayed here.  As the
list grew into an all-purpose multistakeholder debate space the complexion
has changed, but 98% of the negative exchanges have been between ICANN
defenders and critics.  There've been very few flame wars and much useful
discussion about other aspects of IG.
 
> 1. my question to Meryem whether there is any positive he recognizes in
> ICANN;

She
 
> 2. my question to Milton whether there is really interest in any Internet
> Governance question that is not ICANN;

As you well know, there's been four years of discussion and a great deal
written on other aspects of IG.  That these issues keep getting pushed aside
is a pity, and if there's now interest in revisiting them seriously, great,
but it'd take a lot of juice to go back and restate everything that's been
said already.  Poking through the list archive and relevant literature might
be a time saver so we don't have to restart from scratch.
 
> 3. the thread started by Adam about the IGF 2008 session;
> 
> 4. Bill Drake's question to me, whether we should go through the exercise
> of measuring ICANN against the WSIS criteria. He recalls correctly that I
> thought that would be a useful exercise to perform with respect to the
> ITU, and in fact that did not happen in the WGIG or any time later. It was
> done for ICANN in the WGIG in 2004, and it was done again for ICANN ("to
> use WSIS criteria as a kind of report card") in Sao Paulo in December
> 2006, I think. Once again? Bill, yes, let's do it. I call it the
> WSIS-o-meter, it's a nice, compact spreadsheet, let's, by all means, and
> be able to move beyond.

We have very different recollections here.  You seem to remember only the
bits where some people in WGIG said things about ICANN you didn't like.  I
remember us looking at ICANN and ITU side by side in terms of the principles
and quickly concluding that the ITU fares poorly in comparison, particularly
as it's not multistakeholder and transparent only to Members and members.
In consequence, ITU fell out of the discussion, was mentioned only in one
footnote of the WGIG report, and the developing country proponents of
"oversight" turned instead to promoting new bodies outside the ITU, which
clearly wasn't going to happen.  The exercise effectively ended the "ITU vs
ICANN" debate, a good result, but of course also directed closer attention
then to making ICANN work better.  That demonstrates the potential utility
of " promoting and assessing, on an ongoing basis, the embodiment of WSIS
principles in [all] Internet Governance processes.²

I'd have to go back and dig through the archive to find it, but I distinctly
remember asking you on the list several years ago whether you'd support
taking forward such an effort and not getting a response.  If you're now on
board with the idea, great.  Would you participate in a DC on this?
 
All the best,

Bill



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