[governance] JPA - final draft for comments

[Milton L Mueller]

Bill
JPA does not provide accountability. So ending it does not lose us any accountability. 
JPA is significant only insofar as ICANN wants out of it enough to institute reforms demanded by the community. 
There is a significant class of stakeholder (mostly US intellectual property and domain name industry) who wants to extended forever. 

________________________________________
From: William Drake [william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch]
Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 8:56 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Carlos Afonso
Cc: Ian Peter; Parminder
Subject: Re: [governance] JPA - final draft for comments

Hi Carlos,

On Jun 3, 2009, at 1:50 PM, Carlos Afonso wrote:

> Not the JPA, Jeanette, but we did discuss (and keep discussing) the
> set of chains which bind ICANN to the USA government, of which the
> JPA is an obvious one. So we of course discussed the JPA as part of
> that "barrier".

Chains which some in the USG would be happy to be free of, but I guess
let's not confuse the narrative...
>
> My view continues the same -- the IGC should call for an immediate
> end to the JPA and gthe establishment of a transition agreement to
> formulate the termination as soon as possible of the other bindings
> (in particular the IANA function which holds the root zone file
> hostage to the USDoC) and the process to actual internationalization
> -- this agreement would constitute a multistakeholder group
> (including UN agencies, of course) to prepare this formulation -- no
> particular stakeholder would have any golden rule or special
> privileges on it.

So immediate end coupled with an immediate process that would yield
immediate results?  Or do you mean that ICANN should just be free in
the wild for however many months or years it takes to figure out an
accountability system, and then be forced to give up that independence
and brought under 'oversight'?  Unless the framework is pretty anodyne
and results from a truly magical moment of harmonic convergence in
which all divided interests are simply put aside, this sounds like a
recipe for some very serious conflict.

The point of people who are skeptical of immediate cessation is, let's
phase things, end it if/when we have something better in place rather
than a void, and start dialogue on that ASAP. The prospects for
success would be very long either way, but they are probably much
longer for post hoc rather than ex ante agreement.

That said, barring a major push back in Congress, probably what we'll
get is no JPA and ICANN with no strings attached.  Just remember if it
happens, you effectively asked for it :-)

Will be interesting to see what happens in the House hearings
tomorrow....

>
> We did not build anything to offer in terms of what this pluralist
> group should be or how it could work, with which capacity etc, but
> we could try. In my view, this would be a working group with five
> govs, five private sector, five non-profits, some UN agencies (ITU,
> WIPO comes to mind immediately), and a suitable set of specialists
> (legal, technical) who would act as resource persons, plus reps from
> the current ICANN Board -- striving for balanced representation in
> regional and interest group terms.
>
> If we have to include in our statement that the JPA should be
> extended or continued in any form, I insist after September we risk
> even be regarded as that civil society group which is to the right
> of the Obama administration... So we better then strike the whole
> thing out as Ian suggests.

So now it is "left" to want immediate termination and hence an ICANN
run by business without constraint for however long, and "right" to
live with the least bad of currently available options until there's
something better?  We are really through the lexical looking glass
here...

Cheers,

Bill
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