[governance] Re: IANA and what is to come 10 years hence?

[Riaz K Tayob]

On 2012/08/03 03:30 PM, John Curran wrote:
> On Aug 2, 2012, at 10:28 PM, Sivasubramanian M <isolatedn at gmail.com 
> <mailto:isolatedn at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 3, 2012 6:29 AM, "John Curran" <jcurran at istaff.org 
>> <mailto:jcurran at istaff.org>> wrote:
>>
>> > After all, the USG has seen the transition from top-down formal 
>> contracting for these
>> > functions to a more open bottom-up multi-stakeholder management of 
>> critical Internet
>> > resources, including the decentralization of IP address management 
>> to the RIRs, the
>> > formation of ICANN, and replacement of the JPA with the Affirmation 
>> of Commitments.
>>
>> Who knows this?  Who understands this?  How many people know that it 
>> takes no more than $3k to mirror the ICANN root server? A few among 
>> the few thousand ICANN / IG / RIR / ISOC participants. In a world of 
>> sensational headlines on unilateral control of the root, all these 
>> positive goodness is buried in fine print.  The gestures I have 
>> talked about would be a visible, graphic answer to the bad headlines.
>>
> If you are suggesting the USG needs some help in doing PR with regards 
> to its positive
> steps in Internet Governance over the last two decades, I would not 
> argue with that...

PR is one thing. Disinterested discourse in civil society is quite 
another. There are many who take an ICANN line, defending the "faith" - 
and are try to be more Catholic than the pope. Effectiveness arguments 
are INSUFFICIENT regarding claims of legitimacy. And of course in civil 
society ICANN "loyalists" (paid hacks or genuine believers) are overal 
IMHO rather coarse and vulgar bunch (needs be said). So there PR is one 
thing, and civil society engagement (based on reason - which is not too 
high a standard to cope with diversity) another.



>> > None of the above would have been possible coming from "a posture 
>> of total unwillingness"...
>>
>> So it appears to the common man, or made to appear to the common man 
>> in a carefully archestrated propaganda of misleading 'headlines'  
>> that appears to me to be a psychological campaign with carefully 
>> calculated omissions.
>>
> Indeed.  I believe that some actively obscure or misrepresent the USG 
> track record in
> facilitating decentralization of Internet Governance since inception 
> of the Internet.  Like
> many things in this world, it is not perfect, but I do believe that 
> has been an enabler of
> discussion of open and transparent multi-stakeholder governance which 
> might easily not
> have otherwise occurred.

Ah but one cannot just take a single type of approach to this. 
Dialectically (in the Hegelian sense) MSG has been seen by some as a 
good alternative to actually doing something about the legitimacy issue. 
Name calling (anti-Internet propaganda sounds so similar to "there can 
be only one root") has been the forte of the coarse and vulgar, and ab 
initio takes the wind out of the sails of any genuine engagement/arguments.

>> >> As an answer to all these undesirable distractions, why not offer 
>> a glimpse of what is to come 10 years or less or more later ?
>> >
>> >
>> > Why should we presume that such a roadmap should come from the USG, 
>> as opposed
>> > the Internet community itself?
>>
>> :-)
>>
> Thanks for raising this important topic!

The issue is that the combined might (i.e. power) of USG, ICANN 
(employees, hacks & believers & wannabe's) in an MSG institutional 
setting (where scant regard is given for corporate domination - perhaps 
because of the "quaint" definition of "private sector" in the US that 
includes both non-profit and for-profit) kinda makes it hard to have a 
civilised reasonable discussion about these topics.

Yeah, people engage up to a point... so this needs to be said - just so 
that there is no doubt: if one does not conflate technical 
(effectiveness) with social then the legitimacy argument has and 
continues to have merit. And issues of where is your evidence or 
technical precision, are often (not always) raised, but NOT as a means 
to deal with the issue - but to fob it off. Now some on this list may 
present themselves as playing the game (because that is how the game is 
played)... not all are convinced by that wonderful alleged Bushism 
(elected 2x btw;), you can fool some of the people some of the time and 
those are the ones you should concentrate on.

While some/few (in case there are others of my persuasion - but speaking 
for myself only) of us know  our relative powerless, and very aware of 
the sophisticated hounding of our views, _we do believe in the reality 
of choice_, and engagement to bring about changes in an evolutionary 
way... so the real test will be weather these communication of technical 
details can actually stand up to being "neutral" in terms of 
legitimacy... after all Cassandra did warn about the Trojan Horse...

> /John
>
> Disclaimers:  My views alone.  Email written at higher altitudes may 
> lack coherence;
> use at your own risk.
>

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