[CCWG-ACCT] Definitions and the tussle (was Re: Fwd: [CCWG-Advisors] question regarding Global Public Interest)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi Eric,

On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 12:31:58PM -0800, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:

> nearly two decades of existence, observed that a public interest exists in
> access to numeric endpoint identifiers, and in access to mnemonic endpoint
> identifiers, unrestricted by region or language

I think you may be making my point for me.  We can explain this
behaviour without appeal to an ill-defined and practically untestable
assertion of "the global public interest", and instead refer to more
concrete problems that are squarely within the problem ICANN is
designed to solve.  For instance, access to the kinds of identifiers
you mention increases the utility of the global Internet for more
possibly-connected internets.  We therefore don't need an appeal to
difficult geopolitical categories when we can just say that, whatever
the other interests are, unbiased access to these identifiers are good
for interoperation on the Internet.  This changes the matter from
answering a question that is completely intractable into one that is
at least constrained to a particular domain of discourse.

Such a limit doesn't, of course, make all disputes go away.  Does a
larger number of delegations from the root zone improve interoperation
on the Internet?  Well, in one way yes and in another way no.  But at
least we can have a discussion that doesn't have to range across every
possible dimension of (human?) experience.  Not every problem is made
easier by resort to levels of abstraction so large as to make
astrophysics blush.

I think there are legitimate policy questions to answer even in the
restricted domain of discourse, and the answers to such questions may
even change over time.  Those are real questions for the entire ICANN
community (or maybe community of communities) to answer.  There is no
reason to make the problems harder that that.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com