[governance] Towards Singapore

[William Drake]

Hi Wolfgang

On May 22, 2011, at 10:26 AM, Kleinwächter, Wolfgang wrote:

> FYI
> 
> http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/05/18/high-noon-in-singapore

Thanks for the pointer, a nice read.  And I enjoyed the blissful pic of you, looks like an ad for some good earphones :-)

I was going to ask something on his site, but since Kieren requires everything but a blood sample to register and respond to blog posts, I'll do it here.  Re: your suggestion,

<If consensus cannot be reached quickly on the scorecard issues, one approach could be to cut the package into two parts and move forward at different speeds on two levels.  The final version of the “Draft Applicant Guidebook” (DAG) could be adopted “in principle” while at the same time the five to seven remaining paragraphs, where the devil feeds the fire, could be put temporarily into so-called “brackets”.  ICANN would not move from, DAG 5.0 to DAG 6.0 but to DAG 5.1. Based on such a basic agreement one could do two things at once: start the process with all those strings which are not touched by the devil’s paragraphs and do not have the potential to create any type of controversy (this could be a group of about 50+ new gTLDs) and move forward with this 1st basket of uncontroversial applications in Singapore and, at the same time, continue negotiations among the involved parties to remove the brackets from the devils paragraphs as quick as possible, hopefully until the 42nd meeting in Dakar, October 2011 which would than open the door for applications which would go into a 2nd basket.>

I have to wonder whether this is necessarily a good idea from a negotiation standpoint.  Separating out the "devil’s paragraphs" would alter the incentives structures and could complicate the search for compromises on those issues.  Inter alia, there'd be no scope for leveraging tactical issue-linkages or using the prospect of being responsible for sinking the whole deal to incent reluctant parties to gulp hard and say ok.  This is part of why the WTO always does its huge multi-issue trade rounds as "single undertakings" in which all regime elements and national schedules must be finalized by the same deadline (although there are some specific factors making that increasingly problematic in trade).  One also wonders about the consequences, including from FoE and competitive standpoints, of categorizing some gTLDs as noncontroversial and therefore privileged to go first while others that offend some government's or trademark holder's tender sensibilities languish waiting for a successful resolution that very might not happen by Dakar, or beyond.

Bottom line, there can be pluses and minuses to decomposing a complex deal in order to urgently reach agreement on a subset of issues.  These might merit some assessment and weighing...

Best,

Bill







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