[governance] DMP} Statement on Process and Objectives for the Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance

[Milton L Mueller]

David

> Personally speaking (as always), I believe that oversight is important. While I have no
> fears of the current IANA staff running off the rails, it is important to remember that in
> the past when there was less focus on what IANA did, it did run off the rails.

Are you referring here to the Jan 1998 Jon Postel "experiment" redirecting the root servers, or something else? If something else, please let me know; it is useful to have specific cases of what can go wrong.

Btw if you do mean the Postel redirection, am I correct that this is _not_ what NTIA currently audits (which master root server is used)?

When it comes to deciding what can go in the root, that is clearly now the role of the GAC (see GAC Communnique's from Beijing, Durban).

> Oversimplification.

Not an oversimplification: completely wrong.

The GAC provides _advice_ to the Board on "public policy issues" that are supposed to emerge from ICANN's policy development process. GAC has no role in auditing or monitoring the actual changes that go into the root after they have been decided. Indeed, that is a pretty good example of something you do _not_ want a collection of mid-level bureaucrats with no technical expertise to do.

There seems to be a deeper error embedded in both David's comments and the person he was responding to.

It is important not to confuse the audit function of root zone changes performed by NTIA with a policy making function performed by ICANN's allegedly bottom up process. It is extremely dangerous to combine or confuse the two. In other words, we don't want some oversight/auditor refusing to approve a change in the zone file not because it is an error or a deviation from accepted process, but because she doesn't like the policy outcome of the ICANN process.

To make this problem concrete, suppose (using an extreme & deliberately inflammatory example) that the .arab TLD meets all the criteria in ICANN's new gTLD program and is approved by the Board, but when it comes time to add .arab to the root, someone who doesn't like Arabs is providing "oversight/audit" function and refuses to approve the change.

I think we can all agree that that is NOT something that should ever happen. The "oversight" provided by NTIA is not supposed to be a policy override function; it is simply meant to ensure that when policies that involve changes to the root zone are implemented that the changes conform to what was actually agreed by the community. The risk that it might become a policy override function is one of the main reasons why we want to get this function out of the hands of the USG (remember .xxx?). This should also makeit clear why we should not want this "oversight" function to be turned into a politicized multilateral organization in which governments play a big role. If the USG could not resist tampering with that power, adding 5, 12 or 100 other governments to the mix is only going to multiply the risk.

--MM
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