[governance] so do i owe bill drake a pizza or not?

[Karl Auerbach]

On 09/30/2009 10:01 AM, William Drake wrote:
> Let's see.  On the one hand we have
>
> 1. IANA contract
> 2. VeriSign contract
> 3. California law
> 4. Entrenched org culture
> 5. Entrenched commercial interests
> 6. Whatever back channel political deals and assurances were needed in
> DC, etc (the administration will probably take heat for it anyway)
> 7. etc
>
> On the other hand, we have
>
> 1. NTIA's reviews replaced by non-binding panels.

I see serious problems with this "Affirmation".

First of all, NTIA cites as authority only the most vague and general of 
statutory authorizations.  If one accepts those as adequate it means, 
for example, that NTIA has the general authority to enter into 
agreements that require US corporations to include a committee of 
foreign governments in their highest decision making processes.

That might be a thought that gives comfort to some outside the US but it 
scares the beejeebers out of me as a whole new and previously unseen 
kind of expansion of US governmental power into the affairs of private 
activities.

There are several other aspects in which NTIA's citation of authority is 
not adequate for the impositions it places on ICANN.

Second, the agreement, as you mention, leaves open many other issues, 
such as who prepares the root zone, is NTIA still in the approval loop 
(I see no reason to believe that it is not).

Third, the "Affirmation" seems to be designed to buttress the 
intellectual property industry's drumbeat for an every more revealing 
and privacy-busting "whois"

Fourth, it leaves ICANN still in an unclear position with regard to 
anti-trust laws.

Fifth, given that the ICANN-Verisign contracts and legal agreements are 
based on certain assumptions about what NTIA delegated to ICANN, there 
is now a cloud on those contracts and agreements in that they now may be 
based on a vanished foundation.

The "Affirmation" is still based on the technically false belief that 
other DNS systems do exist and that some may come into larger use than 
they have.

And where are the root operators in all of this - they, at a flick of 
their text editors - can obviate this entire ICANN/NTIA structure.

This "Affirmation" is a collection of euphemisms wrapped in pretty ribbons.

By-the-way, did anyone else notice the list of "reactions" - all from 
people who must have been given an advance copy and none of whom are 
ICANN critics.

		--karl--

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