[governance] Interesting story of the never ending ICANN Conflict of Interest. This time on .africa?

[Louis Pouzin (well)]

Hi,

ICANN is both a regulator and a vendor of services based on its
regulations. This is just the same as a private standard body taking
patents on its own standards and collecting license fees.

Rhetoric of equitable, neutral, accountable, transparent,
multi-stakeholder, public interest, bottom up (or down), belongs to
outreach (aka propaganda). We know the reality, and we know it cannot
change.

The reason it cannot change is that ICANN's structure is by design a locus
of permanent conflicts of interests. A self proclaimed world monopoly,
without voting members, nor international statute, collecting hundreds
millions $, without paying taxes anywhere, is already liable to suspicion.
Are the costs justified by provided services, or are services the
by-product of a racket ?

Humans not being angels, it would be very naive to believe that ICANN's
decision makers would stricly ignore their own personal and future
interests. And this is to last as long as regulation and services provision
keep hiding behind the smoke screen of a single organization.

Another flame (not from Kieren McCarthy).

http://www.circleid.com/posts/20121013_the_draw_icann_severe_case_of_virus_infection/

Louis
- - -

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 7:58 AM, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net>wrote:

>
>  On Friday 12 October 2012 10:32 AM, Martin McOsieno wrote:
>
>  Hi
>
>  Interesting story of the never ending ICANN Conflict of Interest. This
> time on .africa?
>
> But isnt the problem of conflict of interest structural to
> multistakeholder (MS) governance (not multistakeholder policy inputs, but
> actual governance) because MS governance is about those who have interest
> (or stake) being part of decision making processes. ICANN board and its
> various decision making committees, for instance, are full of people from
> the domain name industry, an industry that ICANN is supposed to regulate.
> Could one, coming from an old fashioned democratic tradition, even think of
> US's Federal Communications Commission or Telecom Regulatory Authority of
> India having a rep from Verizon or Airtel respectively! No, certainly not,
> it would be unthinkable. But not so in the ICANN's world of MSism.
>
> Consequently most conflict of interest talk at ICANN is window dressing,
> when the going, and the press, becomes too blatantly bad, as in the case of
> their former Chairman's misadventures. Otherwise, in the game as usual it
> is interested parties laying global CIR policies all the way, and the
> public or the supposed reps of the public sit in the gallery and clap
> enthusiastically about the untold wonders of MSism.
>
> This is what the outgoing CEO of ICANN had to say
>
> “Icann must place commercial and financial interests in their appropriate
> context,” said Mr. Beckstrom, who is scheduled to step down from his post
> in July. “How can it do this if all top leadership is from the very
> domain-name industry it is supposed to coordinate independently?
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/technology/private-fight-at-internet-naming-firm-goes-public.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1332165645-IV28j+gNERC8I8kD5rURmA
>
> See some examples of an endemic of conflicts of interest in ICANN at
> http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=1072&doc_id=240923.
>
> Many of you may not have great positive thoughts about the democratic
> system of governance in India, but I can assure you that if any
> governmental/policy organisation in India approached anywhere near the
> conflict of interest mess that ICANN is, it would take one public interest
> litigation to the high court or supreme court to get it folded up in a
> matter of days, even if the government itself does not fold it up (which
> too I am sure it would do on its own).
>
> parminder
>
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