[governance] "Oversight"

[Fouad Bajwa]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 3:37 AM, John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:

>  Yes, it does appear that the US government impacted domain names
>  based on certain law enforcement activities.  It appears also that
>  the action was effected by some form of legal orders to Verisign,
>  which is located within the US.

If ICANN is free after contracting a service to Verisign then does
that mean ICANN completely loses its control over a domain name? I
would doubt this because Verisign has to ask ICANN for implementing:
http://www.icann.org/en/registries/rsep/verisign-com-net-name-request-10oct11-en.pdf
and the take by TIME magazine on this:
http://techland.time.com/2011/10/12/verisign-seeks-authority-to-shut-down-websites-without-court-orders/


>  Such orders pose significant issues
>  when they amount to actions against infrastructure for purposes of
>  content control, and doubly so when they impact parties are outside
>  of the legal jurisdiction doing the ordering.

ICANN and Verisign are both corporations registered under US law
despite one being a non-profit corporation and the other a commercial
one. Since the addressing is being managed in the US, any compliance
to law enforcement will be done in the US and thus the unilateral
decision to take down exists and that is the argument.

>  However, none of this is related to ICANN, in that you could have
>  replaced ICANN with "World_DNS_NGO" and put it under a contract
>  issued by a hypothetical Internet Power Union (a new multilateral
>  treaty organization), and that would not have altered the outcome
>  in the slightest...  US law enforcement would still have issued an
>  order to a US company to perform takedowns of certain DNS names.
>  To suggest that ICANN has some fault here is to ascribe to ICANN
>  some very serious duties, i.e. that ICANN must somehow to be able
>  to prevent a government from engaging in its own perceived lawful
>  enforcement actions against organizations within its own borders.

Thats why US based non-profits or custodians of the Internet cannot
ensure freedom of expression when it itself is bound to restrictions
under a single country's law. Should the need arise, it has the
possibility to take action.

>
>  Again, your issue is that (in general) nation states feel that
>  it is acceptable for various reasons to directly impact Internet
>  infrastructure to protect certain policy objectives.

Unilateralism stands as a threat, will never be comfortable with ICANN
being under US law whatever the case and during the wcit's i expect
that issue is possibly going to be revisited.

>  Getting governments not to do this at all, or even not to do this for
>  specific reasons (freedom of speech, copyright enforcement, etc.)
>  is a very challenging task and I wish you enormous luck with it;
>  it is, however, a problem which lies far above ICANN's role today
>  of technical coordination and its particular USG relationship.

I sometimes refer to this as the scattered critical resource politics
of the Internet (just in case this is not confused with IGF's CIRs). I
don't have to be wished luck, things are directed in that way.

Once again, I resort back to what I usually recommend to people
raising their voice on WCIT's, talk to your government reps,
communications ministers, secretaries, regulators and missions to the
UN. Thats where the approval mechanisms originate from. Once those
countries meet at WCIT, I see more than 50+ countries going for
changes to WCITs in terms of Internet governance from one corner of
the world to the other. I see them not concerned about what we think,
I see them concerned about what has happened in the recent year.

Just a small example, this part of the world doesn't see what happened
in Libya and Egypt from the eyes of the west despite whatever lobbying
or awareness raising is done. For them, its a story the otherside will
never understand. Again local circumstances cause a difference of
opinion and a different angle to look towards the Internet and its
governance. We won't see much of the world playing along soon.

New oversight bodies are out of the question but there will be some
form of oversight and outside the IGF for sure. If we see anything
happening, it will happen within the existing multilateral space and
soon. IGF is slowly transitioning into a buffer zone as well between
IG and Oversight functions. Look where things are headed.

In the past, I've overheard other stakeholders/non-CS during IGFs that
let them (us CS people) empty their stomachs and talk their hearts
out, next time we can preoccupy them in something else or simply throw
topics out of the window.

Best

Foo

>
> FYI,
> /John
>
> Disclaimers:  My views alone. No subpoenas were issued in the preparation
> of this email. Special notice for attentive governments: the author of
> this email is unaware of any infringing content, but if found otherwise
> asks that his message be deleted in preference to domain name seizure of
> the archive web site...
>
>
>

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