[governance] "Oversight"

[William Drake]

Hi Parminder

On Jun 8, 2012, at 6:40 PM, parminder wrote:

> We should give a clear call for internationalising oversight of CIR management, whereby the oversight function is shifted from US gov to an international body constituted under an international treaty limited to addressing the question of CIR oversight.

I don't think it'd be possible to get consensus in the caucus on that, as evidenced by the fact that you've been saying this for years without getting a bite.  But that's not the end of the story.

To the best of my recollection, the caucus has on a number of occasions going back to WSIS called for internationalizing oversight, so that's nothing new.  We also encouraged, in PrepCom 3 September 2005, the USG to make a unilateral declaration that it would not attempt to monkey with the root zone file, e.g. in cases where the US is in conflict with some country.  As you might imagine, that would have been a difficult stance for the representatives to run up the food chain in the Bush administration.  It would be interesting to explore whether such a declaration could be feasible if there's a second Obama administration, e.g. in the context of an expanded Affirmation of Commitments with buy in beyond the governments and other actors actively participating in ICANN.

A problem arose back in WSIS as to the meaning of internationalization (or as many said, globalization, as the former can be read as between governments).  And it's still here today.  There's a chunk of the caucus that sees the preferred globalization as a truly independent ICANN, perhaps vested with IANA function, perhaps with a host country agreement---if I'm not mistaken one ICANN strategy review on this highlighted Switzerland and Belgium as the most viable locations.  Personally, I think this would be politically easier to push through the rest if the atoms stayed in the US, but whatever.

I also think, as per points Milton and David have made, that any transition would have to evolutionary, with a campaign of effective persuasion yielding serious buy in from a US administration that'd have to be willing to go to the Congress and all the heavy duty government agencies, private sector groups, and noncommercial actors who'd be skittish about change and make the case for why this should be done.  It would be a battle, and political capital would have to be expended.  The administration would be vilified on the political right and have to tough it out.  And of course, if Obama loses, this becomes an even more distant possibility. 

The model you propose is obviously starkly different.  Rather than making ICANN fully independent and responsible to the global community through a revamped and expanded AoC, you want a UN negotiation that would yield an oversight treaty (among governments, presumably with full SG input but not equality) in which ICANN accountability would not be via an AoC but rather to some new body that in all likelihood would be populated by government reps not actively involved in ICANN affairs, and with SGs in some sort of undefined role (I remain unconvinced any treaty-based system is going to treat SGs as peers with equal input, which is problematic to many).  And this implies not an evolutionary process where actors in the US come to a new understanding that the USG link can be severed without risking anything to security stability etc, but rather a sort of confrontational NEIO-style negotiation in which the international community rises up en masse and tells the US it must let go, now.  I don't see that working a) within the US, where everyone's back would get up a la WCIT, or b) in the international coalitions that would have to shape said treaty, because there's no evidence that the international community is en masse as unhappy as you are.  David gave away the dirty little secret the other day,

On Jun 8, 2012, at 2:51 AM, David Conrad wrote:

> I have to admit seeing a bit of irony here: in the past (both while I was at APNIC and as IANA general manager), I was in numerous private meetings with government officials in which they told me that while publicly, they will continue to rail against the USG's "control" of the Internet, privately, they welcome it since the know how to work with the USG, don't trust (or perhaps more accurately, have less ability to influence) the alternatives, and it's the devil they know.  However, that was some time ago, so perhaps the positions of those individuals have changed.

I suspect many of us have had such conversations.  So I'm very hard pressed to see OECD governments backing such a move, and the same may true for many developing and transitional countries who either are reasonably satisfied that stuff works, are tied into complex supportive relations with the US, or just don't care all the much either way, etc.  I just don't see the scenario in which you get a clear and remotely consensual mandate though a cosmic UN battle in which governments' preferences follow a highly variable geometry and most well organized SGs would be opposed.

But the two paths need not be mutually exclusive.  It's not inconceivable that over some years we move on the first approach and see if it works.  It it manifestly fails to meet global public interest criteria and satisfy enough governments and SGs, the question of establishing a separate UN thing to fix something that is indeed broken could then get a much more serious hearing.

So my suggestion is to recognize that big changes in the architecture of global governance cannot be arrived at quickly and through confrontation, and that we should be in it for the long haul.  It's be a lot easier to push for revolution once reform has not worked, if indeed it does not.

And we should keep things in proportion and bear in mind that 99% of the actors relying on the Internet and caring how these things are done are probably unaware of the IGC.  Even if we could reach consensus on that there should be rapid movement toward a new grand design, the response elsewhere could be, "IGC who?"  I don't think we're in a position to unilaterally change the world along lines that lines that would be contentious, but we could weigh in and add weight to calls elsewhere to get started on a more evolutionary path.

I'm sure we don't agree, but that's how I see it anyway…

Best,

Bill
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