[governance] ICANN ads for "general public" (new subject header)

[Kieren McCarthy]

Sitting in on the seven-year Whois process as a first ICANN experience is
not an enviable position, but even so, this response is so extraordinary it
is verging on satire.

Three short paras suggesting taking a more gentle approach in dealing with
ICANN matters is met with 13 paragraphs that get increasingly angry and then
start veering wildly between finger-pointing, conspiracy and wide-eyed
denunciation. 

I honestly have no idea what I am supposed to do with this. Answers on a
postcard please.



Kieren




-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Krimm [mailto:dan at musicunbound.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 10:55 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: RE: [governance] ICANN ads for "general public" (new subject
header)

At 9:55 AM +0100 9/10/07, Kieren McCarthy wrote:
>> The ad that he provided as an example appears to be
>> incoherent when one evaluates...
>
>
>Dan,
>
>Since you have been so generous with your advice, would you accept some?
>
>If you wish to have your views properly considered, then reaching for the
>strongest negative word each time while also making it clear your mind is
>made up, is the least effective way of doing it.
>
>We are not negotiating a treaty here. ICANN is in a complex, challenging
and
>changing world and its systems have evolved to favour those that are
willing
>to work with others to reach a consensus view.
>
>If you relax the rhetoric and talk to people you will find a significant
>number of them are working hard at fixing the issues you have identified.


Fair enough, Kieren.  My experience in the "consensus" process in the
recent Whois WG probably primed me for extreme frustration, as meaningful
consensus was ultimately systematically thwarted in that venue in my
first-hand experience.  And a big part of the problem there was that there
were many at the table for whom consensus would be a uniformly losing
proposition (at least so they thought), and because they (thought they) had
nothing to gain they did not participate in good faith.  In my experience,
the ICANN process in this instance systematically favored those who did
*not* wish to reach consensus.

So rhetoric that suggests that ICANN's (policy making) systems in fact
favor those who are willing to work for consensus seems to me either
unforgivably naive, deliberately misleading, or abjectly clueless.  Sorry
to ruffle your feathers once more, but your statement above just seems like
rhetorical spin-doctoring in the context of the pungent experience I had
this spring and summer.  If you really believe it, then I think you need to
find yourself some way of getting information about ICANN's activities
through some alternative channels that can complement whatever official
channels you are using right now to find out what is going on in ICANN's
policy processes.  For sure, no one has time to directly monitor all of the
PDPs et cetera first-hand, so I don't expect you to do it all yourself.
Thus you must rely on others.  Whom you choose to rely on will make a
difference in the quality of your information.

To be blunt, when it comes to sticky matters of contentious general public
policy, ICANN seems to have been entirely unsuccessful in discovering real
consensus, partly because the issues themselves do not allow it regardless
of what ICANN tries to do.  Some circles cannot be "squared", and as long
as ICANN keeps trying to do the impossible, it will and must fail.


What initially set me off, though, was the claim that "ICANN is indeed
open" when in fact the best one can possibly say is that "some people at
ICANN indeed endeavor for it to be open" (sorry to ruffle your feathers
*yet again*, but either you are seeing it through rose glasses or you have
relatively low standards of genuinely effective openness).  The way you
worded it seemed to imply that the intent was enough to suffice, even when
there remain serious systematic obstacles to effective implementation of
open participation policies at ICANN.  Again, it struck me as spin, not a
meaningful evaluation of the full reality.


I don't know who exactly at ICANN is establishing the ideology and official
rhetoric about ICANN's mission.  I would have to assume that Paul Twomey is
a big part of it, and that the Board has a good deal to do with it as well,
because those are putatively the people who *should* have this
responsibility, given the non-profit corporate organizational structure.
And of course, the JPA and NTIA must impose a huge constraining influence
as well.

In any case, I see a substantial disconnect between rhetoric and reality
here, and that is at the core of the most important ICANN disputes, as I
noted previously.

I honestly don't know all of the ins and outs of ICANN's institutional
hierarchy, both among paid staff and among the pro bono policy-making
participants.  Perhaps there is no one who really does.  But it is clear to
me that there is serious chronic dysfunction in this institution, and it
may reflect significant external forces that cannot entirely be controlled
from within.

But whatever the problems are, it appears that they are deep and
structural, so tactical fixes are not likely to solve the profound
conflicts that lie at the heart of the institution.  The problems likely
originate in the bylaws and the process that creates the bylaws, and fixing
them will be extremely challenging at the very least.

Don't just go around rearranging the deck chairs...

Dan

PS -- I made a comment in the new gTLD forum about ICANN's policy-making
structure, and I still think this is a huge problem: policy is made
directly by what amount to special-interest lobbyists, without the presence
of legislators who are accountable to a full constituency that directly
elects them.  As long as this remains the core dynamic of policy making at
ICANN, and public input will continue to be limited in terms of "veto
power" over bad policy along the way, as was demonstrated in the recent
GNSO Council vote on the new gTLD report, there will remain a profound
structural distortion in policy making at ICANN, plain and simple.  All of
the rhetoric about "multi-stakeholder" forms of policy making simply run
cold for me.  It flat-out doesn't work, and I don't see how it ever
possibly could, no matter how it is tweaked and expanded and modified.

It feels to me as if ICANN has decided that it has to find a way to
geometrically "trisect the angle" and will not stop trying even when it has
been demonstrated that it is theoretically impossible, because it saw that
it could *bisect the angle* and sees no obvious reason that could not be
extended to a 3-way split generally, especially because there is an
existing precedent with a special case, namely a 270-degree angle split
into 90-degree pieces.

This idea of "consensus-based policy making" (as applied to matters of
*general* public policy, above and beyond the narrow technical
considerations of network stability/reliability) is a conceptual trap that
seems to inform the most basic ideology of the organization, and it is
ultimately kind of frightening to see otherwise intelligent and rational
people sucked into this vortex of inevitable doom.

As long as you accept this cognitive frame without question, I believe
there is nothing you can do to solve the problems, no matter how many
people are working in good faith at ICANN to try to do so.
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