[governance] Good faith at ISOC & comment on IGF

Mon Dec 2 05:00:28 EST 2019

Hi Parminder,

I believe Joly is sharing public information. I remember reading the same on one of ISOC's internal member mailing lists. I cannot remember if it was shared by Sullivan or Camarillo, but I believe it was one of them.

That said, I personally believe that the Board has made a short-sighted decision here and one which undermines ISOC's own mission. Perhaps the biggest contribution ISOC made to an open Internet governed for the benefit of all was maintaining a portion of the Domain Name System (DNS) that was not under commercial control. Without a public portion of the DNS, there will soon be no element of the DNS that is free of commercial pressures.

.CHARITY, .FOUNDATION, .ORG, .NGO, and .ONG - the only top level domains dedicated to non-commercial interests - will now all be owned by entities connected to the same venture capitalist.

Best wishes, Ayden Férdeline

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Monday, 2 December 2019 09:55, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:

> On 02/12/19 12:03 AM, Joly MacFie wrote:
>
>> Hi Mwenda,
>>
>> My guess is, if you were on the ISOC Board you would have done what they did. Take expert advice
>>
>> Apparently there were earlier offers - more than one at least - but nothing that the ISOC BoT considered remotely acceptable. Then this offer came in. So, they contemplated an auction. They took expert advice, The advice was
>
> Thanks Joly, you seem to know much more than was is publicly available... What are your sources, in case you can tell us that..
>
> As for expert advice, it is not difficult to get the expert advice one wants to get. That is why due processes of accountability beyond expert advice exists.
>
>> 1) they were unlikely to get a higher bid,
>
> You have no way to prove that I could not have pulled together a consortium in India that would have paid a higher price. Can you? This is especially my right as an ISOC member, when ISOC is supposed to be a global body. Why then do a sweetheart deal after some confabulations among US insiders?
>
>> 2) an auction could damage PIR both in morale and value. Plus Ethos had said they were not interested in participating in an auction, and it was thought they might just walk away. The decision was made to negotiate.
>
> Why does then ICANN auction gTLDs, and not take expert advice to make secret deals to maximise its reveues? Does its auction process reduce the morale and value of gTLDs or its buyers? I absolutely did not get your logic.
>
> ICANN has a rulebook whereby it has to auction gTLDs.... This rule exists as an obvious good practice, especially when dealing with a public or community asset.... ISOC did not have such a rule pre-established for it bec it is normally not in gTLDs selling business. But this does not mean that it can avoid observing the normal good practice, especially as involving a public or community asset, which most people take PIR to be, and is also indicated in its name. ISOC may not have broken any rule, but its secret sale of .org is absolutely against the spirit of community trusteeship that it is supposed to embody.
>
> It is for the civil society engaged with IG issues to seek accountability from ISOC in this regard. With non IG civil society organisations like Girl Scouts taking up the cudgels against ISOC it will  be greatly amiss if we do not take any stand in this matter.
>
> parminder
>
>> Joly
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 1:10 PM Mwendwa Kivuva <Kivuva at transworldafrica.com> wrote:
>>
>>> If I was on the ISOC board, I would probably suggest an auction as the best bet. Buying a $100m annual revenue company with few overheads at $1.3b is a steal anywhere. With the right strategy, the return on investment will be in less than 10 years. A simplistic reasonable RoI of 20years puts the value of .org way beyond the $2b mark
>>>
>>> On Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 23:58 Dave Burstein <daveb at dslprime.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Folks
>>>>
>>>> I know many of the board members at ISOC. I've been one of the most skeptical of the deal, which clearly causes some important harm. That said, I have written they are honorable and not corrupt.
>>>>
>>>> When the $1.135B figure was (finally) released, I write the below, including "If I were on the board, I might have voted for the deal." Reasonable people might decide that $1B+ for an organization committed to the Internet for everybody is enough to balance the harms we've discussed.
>>>>
>>>> I'm sending this here because I'm sure most of the people on this list are likewise honorable, even if I think their positions wrong. There are crooks in this world, including many US Congressmen, but very few of them bother with this list or the ISOC board.
>>>>
>>>> It's now important we work to bring ISOC back to its mission and open internal processes. ISOC is very far away from living up to our principles. If you're not an ISOC member, do join and choose a chapter. If there's no chapter where you are, the New York Chapter welcomes you. A third of our members are not local.
>>>>
>>>> My strength is tech, not policy. If you need to know whether Massive MIMO is the cost-effective way to a robust Internet, please ask. (It is, per Stanford Professor Paulraj.) Or what's really going on in 5G.
>>>>
>>>> I've also included an opinion piece on IGF. I listened to a session on IoT which was completely out of touch. To be widely adopted, IoT devices need to cost $2-$5. The suggestions on that panel would cost more than that.
>>>>
>>>> https://netpolicynews.com/index.php/89-r/1166-1-300-000-000-to-internet-society-if-org-deal-goes-down
>>>>
>>>> [Breaking: $1,135,000,000 to Internet Society if .org Deal Goes Down](https://netpolicynews.com/index.php/89-r/1166-1-300-000-000-to-internet-society-if-org-deal-goes-down)
>>>>
>>>> Tim Berners-Lee, over 10,000 at https://savedotorg.org/#add-org, slews of reporters, 3 ISOC Chapters and almost all well-informed independents are strongly opposed to the deal. The Internet Society just revealed it would get 1.13 Billion from very rich US investors for .org. That is enough money that honorable people have decided the damage to the Internet from the deal should be overridden. The deal will die if Pennsylvania or ICANN blocks or even delays.
>>>>
>>>> If I were on the board, I might have voted for the deal. I've been among the most skeptical, partly because the amount and many other key details were totally secret. I would have demanded much more information and public discussion.
>>>>
>>>> I'm strongly advocating ISOC now take extraordinary steps to heal the rift with the chapters and restore the public perception of ISOC.
>>>>
>>>> https://netpolicynews.com/index.php/89-r/1162-igf-talkfest-crisis-chaos-or-just-evolving
>>>>
>>>> [IGF Talkfest: Crisis, Chaos, or Just Evolving](https://netpolicynews.com/index.php/89-r/1162-igf-talkfest-crisis-chaos-or-just-evolving)
>>>>
>>>> "The Internet Governance Forum does need to evolve," ICANN & ISOC-NY board member Avri Doria emails. "Speaking personally, I do not believe the IGF would disappear. If something were to happen, or if in the future it was not renewed by the UN General Assembly, then it could be recreated in a bottom-up manner as an international place to bring the various groups together. I also said that I considered the National and Regional Initiative one of the greatest outcomes of the IGF because they brought "Internet Governance" to the national and regional level."
>>>>
>>>> The most common criticism of the IGF is that all it does is talk, talk, talk. That's valuable, but many hope for IGF to have direct results. [Monika Ermert, the best-informed commentator on "Internet Governance,"](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Die-Rettung-des-Internet-Governance-Forum-4594822.htm) writes, "In Berlin, the hosts want to work hard to lead the IGF out of the crisis, which has been around for a few years because it only debates and does not act. ... Die Machtlosigkeit ist dabei ein Geburtsfehler." Ermert describes a highly chaotic program.
>>>>
>>>> From the beginning, governments did not want to give away power. I've reported that the non-government participants have come overwhelmingly from the US and allies, as well as some others in general agreement. The non-government attendees rarely spoke from the point of view of the global south, which now represents the strong majority of Internet users. Two-thirds of the world want a more internationally representative group in charge, presumably the ITU.
>>>>
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>> --
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>> Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
>> --------------------------------------------------------------
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