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

Sat Aug 4 13:34:31 EDT 2012

Riaz,

it is interesting that in the same breath in which you call a number of people a "coarse and vulgar bunch", in ways that make it difficult to separate those you mean to debase from those you don't, you choose to characterize some subset of people as "more Catholic than the Pope", "coarse and vulgar", and other terms which you may guess some might find between inadequate and offensive.

Where there may be a flaw in your argumentation is, interestingly, where opportunity for real dialog lies.

You may imagine that positions like the ones you often present, and their delivery, are equally alienating to others.

One of them - and this one may cut both ways - is the creation of a Feindbild, in which A assumes that B is X just because a part of his/her positions are like some of X, sound like part of X, or are conflated in the reader's minds to be like X.

When that happens each of us may be "seeing red" and not noticing important parts of the conversation, such as people being equally committed to build a system and to fix its faults. One instance would be people trying to carry on the task of building ICANN, yet keeping it within size and mission, and trying their best to solve the flaws of asymmetric USG power.

Tell me what I may be seeing wrong, in a similar way, in your position, that can open up a dialogue and throw down or at least soften the walls of the tunnel situation in which we land again and again.

Yours,

Alejandro Pisanty

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________________________________
Desde: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] en nombre de Riaz K Tayob [riaz.tayob at gmail.com]
Enviado el: sábado, 04 de agosto de 2012 02:25
Hasta: governance at lists.igcaucus.org; John Curran
Asunto: [governance] Re: IANA and what is to come 10 years hence?

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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