[CCWG-Accountability] Related work on ICANN's Public Interest

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Greg,

Comments somewhat inline and below.

On 12/18/14 2:56 PM, Greg Shatan wrote:
> Eric,
>
> Thanks for your reply and confirmation.  I think that if one pauses at 
> your statement "what we mean by "public interest" is determined by our 
> social expectations -- as residents of France (and Europe) and as 
> residents of the United States (and North America)" (or Namibia or 
> Argentina, etc. etc.)" the great difficulty in defining an overarching 
> definition of "public interest" for ICANN becomes clear.  And I think 
> it goes beyond geographically-driven social differences -- to 
> political, cultural, economic and other differences, etc.

As you note, the reasons for differences in framing "public interest" is 
larger than mere location.

> For instance, someone who felt that bridging the digital divide was a 
> paramount "public interest" concern would emphatically say yes in 
> answer to your questions.  Someone whose public interest concerns lay 
> elsewhere might say that those are nice, but should not be a priority 
> over [xyz].  And there could be more extreme reactions than that to 
> those with different priorities or different perspectives on how 
> important the "public interest" is versus other interests.

In my response to Malcolm Hutty, to which you originally responded, I 
offered "mere stewardship of unique endpoint identifiers and protocol 
parameters" and "informed only by the commentary of the IAB, e.g., RFC 
2826" as sufficient to create "significant public interest capability, 
and responsibility". RFC 2826 is the " IAB Technical Comment on the 
Unique DNS Root" [1].

My choice of examples of public interest policy development in my 
response to Mr. Hutty -- IDNs, address allocation during exhaustion, and 
zone signing algorithms, have a non-trivial relation to 2826. One or 
more, if not addressed, presented the possibility of preempting the 
rational central to RFC 2826. In my response to your note I simply 
extended the use case for IDNs from where we were in the 2003 and 2010 
IDN and IDNA exercises to where we are today with Script Generation 
Panels, and of course, the ICANN Board of Directors Nairobi direction to 
the Community to study supporting applicants from underdeveloped 
economies. I didn't mention "bridging the digital divide", which, as you 
observed, is not universally compelling.

Again, if we are to detour to define or clarify "public interest", the 
details will be important, as is the case for the central point of the 
CCWG-Accountability exercise.

I hope this finally clarifies my prior comments to you and Mr. Hutty.

Regards,
Eric Brunner-Williams
Eugene, Oregon

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc2826/
>
> Greg
>
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>
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 5:45 PM, Eric Brunner-Williams 
> <ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net <mailto:ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net>> wrote:
>
>     On 12/18/14 2:09 PM, Greg Shatan wrote:
>
>         Eric,
>
>         I'm not sure why you appear to be limiting your inquiry to the
>         "technical coordination of unique endpoint identifiers" and
>         the IANA Function, narrowly construed. Or is your point that
>         from that fairly narrow set of tasks, a broad variety of
>         developments, innovations and other consequences have flowed,
>         hopefully in the public interest (but certainly affecting the
>         public interest.)?
>
>
>     Starting at "Or is your point ..." Yes.
>
>         On a separate note, the way I look at the whole "applicable
>         law" point is that ICANN (like any person or entity) should be
>         expected to act within the laws applicable to it.  To put it
>         another way, they shouldn't break the law.  There is some
>         validity to Dr. Lisse's point that this is both vague and
>         self-evident, but it gives folks some comfort to say it in
>         things like Articles of Incorporation (indeed, there's a
>         certain level of requirement for statements like that in
>         documents like that).  The linkage between acting in the
>         "public interest" and not breaking the law is somewhat cloudy.
>         Many corporations (and people) do the latter without doing the
>         former.  And sometimes (e.g., the Pentagon Papers or
>         (arguably, to some) Edward Snowden) do the former while
>         failing to do the latter.
>
>         In any event, I do think there is some value in clarifying the
>         concept of "public interest" in the context of ICANN, but I am
>         not seeing the value in trying to create a linkage between
>         that concept and the concept of "applicable law."
>
>
>     I don't know if you recall the discussion between Jeff Neuman and
>     Bertrand de la Chapelle -- if I recall correctly -- at the Paris
>     meeting -- it was the first of those awkard "facilitated
>     conversations" with colored bits of paper for the rest of us to
>     indicate our responses to the theses of Jeff and Bertrand. They
>     talked to, and past, each other, attempting to make cases for what
>     "the public interest" might be. To my mind the enduring value of
>     that moment (and others later in policy development contexts) was
>     the demonstration that what we mean by "public interest" is
>     determined by our social expectations -- as residents of France
>     (and Europe) and as residents of the United States (and North
>     America).
>
>     If we are to "clarify the concept" I suspect that starting with
>     explicit questions like "should we extend IDN to meet the
>     requirements for lesser known languages?" or "should we promote
>     registrar and registry formations in developing economies?" will
>     be useful -- questions rather remote from "applicable law".
>
>     These two example questions, to be sure, are outside of the remit
>     of the CCWG, but if we are to detour to define or clarify "public
>     interest", the details will be important.
>
>
>     Regards,
>     Eric Brunner-Williams
>     Eugene, Oregon
>

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