[governance] "Oversight"

[John Curran]

On Jun 4, 2012, at 5:17 PM, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> And furthermore, among people outside the US there are strong reasons
> for not wanting to entrust a special role in CIR management to the US,
> reasons which are quite independent of any objective risks of the US
> government abusing such a special role: When your country has been at
> the receiving end of heavy handed US pressure to adopt and enforce US
> legal ideas according to US economic interests, quite naturally one
> of the side effects of that is that you simply don't want to entrust
> the US particularly with something that is of great value in your eyes.

That may be true, but that is a facile assessment of the situation as it 
considers the USG as one cohesive entity. I myself can find many troubling 
aspects to how parts of the US Government handle Internet-related matters 
(e.g. SOPA/ACTA, Domain name takedowns which appear to affect parties 
outside the US and are anchored in commercial disputes, et cetera...)
However, those are not the action of the US Dept of Commerce/NTIA, which
is the party which issues the IANA Function contract and is the oversight
agency with respect to ICANN.  US Dept of Commerce's track record in terms
of providing oversight in a fairly non-political manner is quite reasonable,
and there are no clear instances of abuse of the NTIA/IANA/ICANN relationship.

To reiterate a point from last year, the US Dept of Commerce has supported 
the transition from top-down contracting vehicles to more open bottom-up 
multi-stakeholder processes for management of critical Internet resources.
This has been shown with the formation of ICANN to provide a more open and
international process for DNS policy coordination as well as the expiration
and replacement of the JPA with the Affirmation of Commitments.  If someone 
can point out another organization (other than the US DoC) which has been 
more actively releasing its control over the Internet in preference to 
multi-stakeholder mechanisms, I'd love to hear about it.  I would also like 
to see an end to the unique relationship that the USG has in oversight of 
Internet infrastructure, but that should be because existing mechanisms have 
reached an appropriate level of maturity rather than imposition of a top-down,
government-led body under the very weak theory that such will provide a form 
of oversight which is nearly as free of political interests as the community 
has enjoyed to date.

/John

Disclaimers:  My views alone. Contents under pressure; failure to plan
appropriately before opening may result in permanent harm or injury.





-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t