[CCWG-ACCT] Reflections on human rights protection and promotion by ICANN

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

Sorry for the top post and long response time.  

As I hope everyone knows, the normal effect of a secondary expiry timer being reached is that the server in question stops answering and starts returning servfail. Clearly ICANN knew perfectly well that its proposal was outside the norm, or it would not have announced the plan.  I think it unreasonable to call the decision more than administrative-technical (or techno-administrative, if we want to split hairs) because of the unusual situation.  Connectivity had gone down, the situation was unclear, and this plan would have at least kept the zone active until the situation could be sorted out.  

I'm prepared to accept an argument that this was a bad or a good decision, but I fail completely to see how adding human rights to the discussion helps us know.  You could make a rights argument in either direction. You could make parallel arguments from the responsibility for stable resolution of delegations from the root zone.  Administrative decisions are not necessarily ones that do not ramify for rights people have. But it seems to me that, if we can get the results we need by properly constraining ICANN to freedoms it needs for technical administrative decisions, then the rights flow from the technology itself and not from ICANN decisions or actions. 

That narrower conception also neatly cuts off other uncomfortable issues. For instance, if the failure were in twitter.com, would ICANN properly intervene?  I say no, but both the recently-debated chapeau of the mission (which we appear to have resolved) and the human rights references proposed might well be used to argue ICANN ought to act in such cases.  That seems risky to me. 

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan 
Please excuse my clumbsy thums. 

> On Nov 5, 2015, at 11:43, Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net> wrote:
> 
> Andrew,
> 
> As you are available, would you care to explain to the common reader what expiry of a zone means in a secondary authoritative name server? Either ICANN was proposing to violate the documented mechanism for ensuring zone data is expired, and refreshed, and so engaging in something other than a narrow, administrative-technical function, or ICANN was not proposing to violate that rather well understood process.
> 
> But I take your point that in your opinion, there is no "right" to continuous correct resolution which government, or any other actor, may not arbitrarily alter.
> 
> You might also want to argue that the former CEO and Chair were in error when asserting that the one remaining instance of the .eg zone would be preserved, or as an alternative, that since the withdrawn prefixes were re-announced before expiry occurred, that this was a non-event, regardless of the utterances of the CEO and Chair at the time.
> 
> You may want to re-evaluate whether your personal experience is sufficient to offer a cogent response to every question.
> 
> Eric
> 
>> On 11/5/15 9:17 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> Hi Eric,
>> 
>>> On Thu, Nov 05, 2015 at 08:53:37AM -0800, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
>>> In effect, the Corporation guaranteed the continuous existence of zone data
>>> and correctness of resolution, independent of the express intent of the
>>> (then) Government of Egypt, because ...
>>> 
>>> And there is where we have the possibility of writing in the human rights
>>> rational for keeping the .eg data from expiry.
>> But there is a simpler rationale that can be easily founded in the
>> practical responsibility of ICANN, which is to make the root zone work
>> and keep the resolution of names on the Internet continuous as far as
>> practically possible.  This is a narrow, administrative-technical
>> function that I think keeps ICANN away from political activities that
>> are perhaps better resolved by politicians.
>> 
>> In my experience, it is easier to make an argument from practical
>> grounds -- especially when talking about an operational problem --
>> than from principles.
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> 
>> A
> 
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