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

Mark Carvell mark.carvell at culture.gov.uk
Tue Dec 29 18:21:29 UTC 2015


Dear Kavouss

Forgive me if I'm not grasping fully the point behind your rhetorical
question but it seems to me that a key global public interest goal for an
organisation like ICANN that has a global managerial and coordinating role,
is ensuring equal access and fair opportunity. ICANN would achieve this
through correcting any distortion or imbalance in access to resources, if
necessary through direct intervention ssupported by all stakeholders, for
example to provide assistance to those with limited resources so that they
can exercise their right to access and opportunity in the domain name
system.

We have seen that kind of intervention in the current new gTLD round: ICANN
committing to take full account of the concerns and specific needs of
individual stakeholders and communities in developing countries. That it
did not always succeed in this is a major concern that needs to be
addressed if the next open gTLD round is to be more successful in realising
the potential contribution of the expansion of the domain name system to
the growth of the digital economy worldwide and to sustainable
development. That
would be one example of ICANN acting in order to advance the global public
interest.

Kind regards

Mark

Mark Carvell
Global Internet Governance Policy
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
mark.carvell at culture.gov.uk
tel +44 (0) 20 7211 6062

On 28 December 2015 at 21:43, Kavouss Arasteh <kavouss.arasteh at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear All,
> The argument given through an example of distribution of the addresses is
> totally irelevant .
> Does the public interests meant that one country has many times addresses
> as a continent?
> Let us be logical
> Regards
> Kavouss
>
> 2015-12-28 21:31 GMT+01:00 Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net
> >:
>
>> Well, lets start with the allocation of a scarce resource -- ipv4
>> addresses. Does the Corporation have an interest in the allocation being
>> (a) congenial with routing, and possibly conservative as well (a subject of
>> serious discussion on an RIR's policy mailing list), and (b) not captured
>> by a single, or several, allocatee(s)?
>>
>> Clearly there is a broadly held interest that routing work, and address
>> exhaustion delayed as long as possible, and the distribution of allocations
>> be somewhat uniform, reflecting shared goals of DARPA, the conversion from
>> classful to classless allocation, and of course, Jon's farming out
>> regionally the addressing component of his work at ISI, and a wicked large
>> number of beneficiaries of these efforts to ensure routing, conservation,
>> and at regional distribution.
>>
>> We have come some way from the point in time when MIT campus held more
>> allocated v4 addresses than all of the access providers in the PRC
>> combined. The design of v6 allows at least one address per human being, a
>> property absent in the v4 design.
>>
>> Incorporating my note of the 25th, the Corporation Board has, over its
>> 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, and to some degree, only
>> slightly restricted by access to capital, where packetized data
>> communication is supported by communications infrastructure. This
>> Corporation observation of public interests in access to endpoint
>> identifiers is indistinguishable from the allocation behavior of the prior
>> parties exercising "technical coordination", and so continuous, and likely
>> to remain so in the foreseeable future.
>>
>> The suggestion that finding a public interest is an exercise in sophistry
>> would of necessity apply to the current, and prior, Corporation Boards, and
>> those responsible for technical coordination of endpoint identifiers prior
>> to November, 1998, specifically any representations that their acts to make
>> numbers or names accessible to later adopters were in a public interest.
>>
>> Eric Brunner-Williams
>> Eugene, Oregon
>>
>>
>> On 12/27/15 10:58 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm sort of loathe to dive into this discussion, but I think there's a
>>> useful thread in here that is worth tugging on so that we can see the
>>> quality of the weave.
>>>
>>> My biggest worry about the phrase "the global public interest" is not
>>> the meaning of "global", "public", or "interest", but "the".  By
>>> claiming that something is or is not in _the_ global public interest,
>>> the definite article implies that there is such an interest (or maybe,
>>> such a public); that there is exactly one; and, perhaps most
>>> interesting, that one knows what that is.  Even if I were to grant (I
>>> do not, but let's say for the sake of argument) that there is a fact
>>> of the matter about the the interest of the global public, I cannot
>>> imagine how one would test a claim that something is or is not in said
>>> interest.
>>>
>>> The quest to come up with a definition of "the global public
>>> interest", therefore, is an attempt to create such a test; but it's
>>> really a dodge in a Wittgenstinean language-game.  Were we to unpack
>>> any such definition that was even widely acceptable, we'd discover
>>> either that some interest (or public) would be left out, or else that
>>> some conflict inherent in the definition would be obscured.  For the
>>> basic problem is that you cannot define "the global public interest"
>>> in a way that is all of universally acceptable, useful for the
>>> purposes of making tough decisions, and true.  Even apparently simple
>>> and obvious cases -- "It is in the global public interest for war to
>>> end" -- turn out to be troublesome.  For example, people fighting a
>>> current war are presumably doing it for some other end, so they'd only
>>> agree to that example statement with the implicit premise, "as long as
>>> my desired outcome is assured."
>>>
>>> A definition of "the global public interest" will be ever more
>>> troublesome the clearer it tries to be, because the list of specifics
>>> will start to be long.  I think our experience in working on the
>>> mission statement is mighty instructive, and it is at least scoped
>>> merely to the parts of the Internet ICANN directly touches -- whatever
>>> we think those are.
>>>
>>> As a consequence, I think a claim that _x_ is [not] in "the global
>>> public interest" is really just a way of saying, "I [don't] think _x_
>>> should happen."  Such a claim is part of a tussle, like the "Tussle in
>>> Cyberspace" described by Clark, Wroclawski, Sollins, and Braden (see
>>> http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1074049).  It's a nice rhetorical
>>> move to claim that you can define the tussle away, but you can't (at
>>> least, not legitimately).  I think we should be honest with ourselves
>>> that such definitional efforts will create wheels that do no work.
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> A
>>>
>>>
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