[governance] ITU vs. ICANN

[Avri Doria]

Hi,

As I have mentioned often, expecting governments to represent people's interests is yet another comforting fantasy.  In some countries at some times, they can represent some of a peoples' interests.  This leaves a lot of orphaned interests.  

But even if government were a perfect vehicle for people's interests as citizen's of a region in the world, they have never represented the full scope of people's interests, especially on something like the Internet, which is a cross border phenomenon with cross-border concerns. Governments represent your body count and your geography, but not necessarily your interests.

If we really believed that governments will take care of it all, we should just roll up the whole enterprise of having anyone other than the UN, the ITU and our respective government work on IG and go home and lobby our reps.  If governments are adequate for representing the people's interests, then why not support the ITU as the purveyor of all things Internet governance - all the countries participate equally in the ITU and UNESCO, so go home and lobby your government.

Obviously, I do not accept this prescription.

In terms of ICANN itself and the ALAC/At-Large

ICANN has a very interesting multistakeholder matrix design that has those who focus on the specific topics, the supporting organizations (SOs), operating horizontally across those specific topics.  And has other people focused on the principles that cut across all of the topics, the advisory committees (ACs), operating vertically across all topics.  Each of these dimensions has its multistakeholder composition.  In the horizontal dimension of the supporting organization dealing with names, the non commercial stakeholder group is the civil society vehicle dealing with the specific topics of names.  In the vertical direction, the ALAC and At-large are the group dealing with civil society concerns and matters of principle across all topics.

The ALAC/At-Large is not just 15 people, just as the IGC is not the 2 coordinators.  We can all have a rip roaring discussion about whether we like the structure of ALAC/At-Large and we can get into personalties if we really wanted.  But I strongly advise against selling the potential of the ALAC/At-Large structure short.  Like most things ICANN it is still formative and it struggles against the continued disrespect it gets from within ICANN and without, and yes many in the ALAC/At-Large seems as if they have given up.  Then again until a few years ago, the GAC was a joke that no one took seriously, and today it has become a threat in some people's minds.

I believe the IGC should be supportive of the ALAC/At-Large and that we should see more of us involved in it and working to make it a strong civil society oriented force inside of ICANN.  And I strongly believe they should be the ICANN by-law equals of GAC.

I support what McTim has often argued, in addition to participating in the IGC and the IGF and other UN oriented bodies, we should be involving ourselves, in an organized way, in the various IG groups that are making the decisions we care so much about.  Many of us are individually involved, but more would be helpful, especially if we were organized and made IGC comments on all (or at least many) of the policy issues they ask for commentary on.

But we could also just sit back, throw mud and when things fail say, "I told you so!."

a.




On 13 Oct 2010, at 06:57, Milton L Mueller wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> 
>> It seems to me that if one actually believes that governments are merely
>> expressions of human sovereignty, that authority derives from the
>> consent of the governed, then it would follow that in matters of
>> internet governance that corporate and governmental voices should fall
>> before the weight of the collective opinion of the community of people
>> affected by the internet.
> 
> Right, Karl
> This is why I am unenthusiastic about setting up ALAC as a "counterbalance" to GAC. First, because it is  unlikely that ALAC can carry that weight; second because we want authority to devolve to people, not a committee of 15 appointed people. Anyway, McTim, the real solution is for governments to become involved directly in bottom up policy formulation in an equal-status process, not to set up _another_ silo like the GAC that is empowered to second-guess, intervene externally or otherwise overrule the bottom up policy making process. 
> 
> --MM
> 
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