[governance] JPA

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeanette Hofmann [mailto:jeanette at wzb.eu] 
> 1. ICANN needs to be accountable to an external entity independent of 
> ICANN itself. This is very hard to design for at least 2 
> reasons. First, civil society folks disagree on how much authority 
> such a body should have (Avri used the nice metaphors of "teeth" 
> and "gum" to illustrate the 2 options under discussion). 
> Second, there is no good model around 
> on the international level that we could copy or learn from. 
> It is not clear, how a multi-stakeholder supervisory body that would 
> keep ICANN in check could be designed and on what sources of authority such a body 
> would rely.

Jeanette, it may just be your phrasing, but I fear that you make the same mistake that WSIS and so many others dealing with the accountability problem have made. You think of accountability as residing in an external "body" i.e. an organization, rather than in rules or laws. This approach has two inherent problems:
  1) once it is put in place, everyone ignores ICANN and reaches directly for influence within that "body" (further undermining ICANN's already tenuous bottom up)
  2) the creation of the body just reproduces all the existing politics within ICANN, with no guarantees that the result will be any better. (infinite recursion)

What ICANN needs is a "body" of _applicable law_ or rules that are global in scope and that give any seriously wronged party - not just states - the ability to invoke an action. The action invoked should not be: "I dont like the decision ICANN made" or "let's exploit ICANN's power to enrich this group at the expense of that group." IT should be focused on very narrowly defined and clear substantive and due process rights. So an "appeals mechanism" or "external check" has validity only insofar as it can be trusted to neutrally and impartially apply these rights. In other words, without rules to apply, these "supervisory bodies" are meaningless at best, and dangerous at worst. 

What ICANN also needs is a clearly defined membership to which it is accountable. We have all bought into this blather about "getting more people involved" and "increasing participation" and fail to see how participation without any clear, meaningful status of the participants actually backfires. It gives those in power the discretion to listen to whoever they want to, and to pick and choose among which arguments and interests and movements it will respond to in a self-interested, self-perpetuating way. I have noted that the RIR process is a lot more rational and accountable than ICANN precisely because they know exactly to whom, in the end, they are accountable (their dues-paying members without which they would not exist). 

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