[governance] today's Wash Post editorial

[David Conrad]

Parminder,

On Jan 25, 2013, at 3:52 PM, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:
> My general proposal assumes widespread agreement among an overwhelming majority of actors in the global IG space that the US oversight of ICANN is essentially illegitimate and must be replaced. (This is what I have been led to believe from discussions on this list.)

I have not seen any surveys of the 'global IG space' to inform me as to whether the "overwhelming majority of actors" views US oversight of ICANN as illegitimate (can you provide a pointer?), however for sake of argument...

> If this assumption holds, I would presume that at least 10 of the 13 root servers operators (non US gov), whom I consider trustees for global Internet public,would be among such actors who ultimately seek global legitimacy for a global infrastructures.

The folks who run root servers do so for their own reasons. It is possible that some might "seek global legitimacy" beyond just doing their job competently, but to be honest, I'd be surprised. My guess is that most (all?) of the root server operators feel that running a mirrored secondary for the root is a good thing to do as long as the benefits outweigh the costs. When you require the root server operators to take an active role in the maintenance of the root zone, I suspect the costs (at least in the view of their legal staff) will vastly outweigh the benefit.

> Indeed, I think even you (David) have argued that these non US gov root server operators are expected to take decisions in conformity with global public interest, and are not tied to the apron strings of the US gov, and its narrow interests.

Not exactly. I stated that the root servers operator are independent actors and if they (individually) feel a violation of process has occurred sufficient to justify a significant disruption to Internet governance, they have the ability to refuse that inappropriate change.  Note that this is a very different scenario than being directly involved in day-to-day changes of the root zone.

> Perhaps, we should start with a meeting between ICANN and the root operators, convened by public interest actors, like maybe the IGC, to kickstart the process that my proposal seeks to establish.

I think you vastly overestimate the unhappiness of (at least) the technical community in general and the root server operators in particular with the status quo. What incentive does the root server operators have to change the way things are being done?

To try to bring this back to reality, if the issue is unhappiness with the NTIA role in root changes (which is, AFAIK, primarily oversight to ensure ICANN hasn't violated its own processes), then I'd think a better approach than re-architecting the entire root zone management (and security) structure would be to replace the NTIA role.

Regards,
-drc


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