[CCWG-ACCT] what ICANN can't regulate (was Re: Board comments on the Mission statement)

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 07:58:02PM +0000, Mueller, Milton L wrote:

>  If you understand this then you understand the purpose of this
> prohibition.

I certainly understand the purpose of the prohibition, but I claim the
prohibition is already there.  I further claim that this additional
sentence is going to be too hard to write without either accidentally
forbidding things that oughtn't to be forbidden or failing to cover
actions that should be covered.  I appreciate, however, that there are
people who insist this needs to be there.

> I do not understand why you think this language is "dangerous."

Because it doesn't appear to be possible to write it without it
covering some things that it should not cover.  If we could, we
wouldn't be having this very long discussion about it.

> But if you've studied information theory you k now that
> redundancy can overcome uncertainty.

And if you've doe any coding work, you know that implementing the same
thing in two slightly different ways is an opportunity for bugs.
Redundancy is only useful when it's genuinely redundant; but that does
not seem to be the case here, since we all seem to agree that the
prohibitive sentence is a special case of the general rule against
ICANN venturing outside its mandate; yet we don't seem to be able to
write down the prohibitive language in such a way that it covers the
whole Internet except for the parts that ICANN really should have
something to say about. 

> confusion. Taking down a name based on a legal order from some
> external legitimate authority is something that can and does happen
> without ICANN itself having broader regulatory authority to do
> it.

Sure, but that's not the case I'm thinking of (in the case of a legal
order, I don't think it'd be ICANN taking the name down, unless it was
a TLD).  We know that ICANN operations staff sometimes collaborate in
information-gathering before such orders, and I'm wondering whether
the targets in such cases are merely "using" the DNS.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com