[governance] NTIA announcement on JPA

[William Drake]

Hi Milton,

Agree with most of your post, but one comment.

On 4/3/08 5:25 AM, "Milton L Mueller" <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:

> The answer should be obvious: NTIA is not looking for information about what
> needs to be done, but seeking confirmation of its prior tendency to do
> nothing. Government agencies, in the absence of strong leadership from their
> political superiors, are lazy and prone to inertia. NTIA is not going to take
> any initiatives on its own and clearly the lame-duck Bush Presidency has no
> vision or plan in this area. The US is reasonably comfortable with the status
> quo and won't move until someone makes them very uncomfortable.

Saying the problem is laziness is equivalent to the standard practice of
attributing failed international negotiations to a lack of "political will."
There are of course structural forces at work that constrain the space for
movement.  The US has a strong society and an institutionally weak state
(save in the military sphere).  NTIA's Office of International Affairs is
just nine mostly mid-level people (all of them women, coincidentally), 3 of
whom have any involvement in ICANN matters.  They work for a Commerce Sec.
and administration committed to the Alfred E. Neuman school of economic
policymaking, and are down the street from a multiplicity of massive
companies, industry associations and government agencies, plus think tanks
and CSOs, all of whom oppose sharing sovereignty.  You know all this, so why
dump on "lazy bureaucrats"?  You can't really believe that if NTIA staffers
just pulled up their socks and sat up straighter they could tell all the
assembled forces for the status quo, sorry, suck it up, ICANN goes free into
the wild because we think it's a good idea that might make IGP and some
non-voters in distant lands happy?

> community and even ICANN itself is clearly unhappy with its role, and anyone
> with half a brain knows that it is not a austainable position in the long
> term. 

In the long run we're all dead, so that's not much comfort.  Prior to that,
I've got fifty bucks that says the next administration won't change
anything, at least not in its first term.  Who'd want to throw read meat to
right wing blogosphere etc before the 2012 election?

Cheers,

Bill 


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