[CCWG-ACCT] Personal thoughts on membership

Sat Oct 3 09:18:10 UTC 2015

Bruce,

You below statement casts the Board's resistance to the CCWG in a
completely new light and which, at least for the present discussion, I
will judge as being a rather more favourable light.

What I understand you to be basically saying - and please correct me if
I am wrong - is that you can agree that the Board should be under the
oversight of the global public, or the global Internet community, and
that, if the right structure can be provided for it, it is obviously the
global Internet community which should hold the final and unassailable
legitimacy and power, and not the Board. Whereby a membership
organisation is fine with you. However, the real problem here is that
the so called group(s) or the community which are/is represented in the
current CCWG's oversight or accountability model are simply not
representative enough of the global Internet community. You are so very
right. But the problem I see here is that this is just not the right
moment to raise this most important of issues in the oversight
transition process. This should have been more or less the first issue
that should have been dealt with by this process.

Seethe contribution of the Just Net Coalition
<https://comments.ianacg.org/pdf/submission/submission19.pdf> where our
primary contention is that the process is flawed precisely because it
seems to lunge towards sorting out the details to the most meticulous
levels before addressing the issues that are rather higher in logical
and political hierarchy, as the issue of representativity of the
Internet community, or as the NTIA announcement called it, the global
multistakeholder community, obviously is.

Even now, instead of employing this rather well-founded argument, that
the current community structure is simply not representative enough, to
propose that therefore we should keep the Board un- supervised or
inadequately supervised, which almost everyone has recognised as 'the'
central problem in the transition, we should be looking in full earnest
into the issue of/*what kind of membership structure will be
representative enough to have a legitimate claim to the kind of
oversight over the Board that the CCWG proposal presents. */

Should we not first be addressing this key question, rather than any
other? This indeed was among the two key questions that were the ones
that should have been sorted out at the very start (other being
jurisdiction), before getting quickly into details of specific models.
Even at this stage, the current exercise of arriving at the best model
for public ('internet community' if you like) oversight over one of the
most important global technical infrastructures being of such
outstanding and sustained global importance, we still must do what we
must do... Rather than submit to the circular logic of since we do not
have a community structure that is representative enough, we cannot have
any effective oversight over the Board, which now becomes more or less a
sovereign power in this area, .....

Indeed, Just Net Coalition had recommended a membership based model
<http://forum.icann.org/lists/icg-forum/msg00009.html> which will
include all registrants from across the world... If that makes for too
unwieldy a number, we can have some means of regional elections, with
one person or legal entity given just one vote however many domains it
may have registered, to have a viable number of representatives of the
Internet community to exercise oversight over the board (although I
still find this model defective bec it doesnt include those who use the
Internet but havent registered a domain name).

But of course this is just one possibility and there could be numerous
others that can tend towards better addressing the problem of lack of
representativity of the current structures. We also know that whatever
we get finally may still not be perfect but the test here would be how
well we try, within the limits of practicality.

So that it may not be alleged that in taking on from Bruce's emails I
have moved to entirely different territories of some kind of personal
political priorities, I must repeat that all that I am doing here is to
address the issue posited by Bruce as follows, which I really find genuine.

    "For ICANN to move to a membership model I think it needs a
    membership structure that more broadly reflects the size and
    diversity of that "Internet community".

I just dont see how it can be just left as an excuse, however
reasonable, for Board to not to accept community oversight... The
problem has to be approached from the opposite direction... By actually
coming up with a "membership structure that more broadly reflects the
size and diversity of that "Internet community".

Not to do so would be a complete dereliction of the duty of the CCWG,
and is likely to attract the allegation that the group being constituted
largely by the 'defectively' representative current community structure,
and therefore having a vest interest in it, for this reason chose not to
look beyond towards a really representative structure .

The CCWG group should remember that it was constituted to represent and
serve the interests of the global Internet community and not that of the
currently, and defectively, constituted ICANN plus community structure.

The real thing to do in devising the right oversight over ICANN always
was to find or devise that structure which can be considered
sufficiently representative of the Internet community and therefore
legitimate, and inter alia therefore avoid responses like this from the
Board that sorry you yourself are not legitimate enough to be trusted
with the kind of power you seek.

This was/ is the time and opportunity to devise some kind of really
globally representative structure outside the states based structures,
and thus meet the requirements of participatory democracy, and
alternative models of global governance that are still democratic, and
interact with the current states based ones.

Regards, parminder

On Saturday 03 October 2015 12:39 PM, Bruce Tonkin wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I have given the topic of membership some thought over the last 6 months.
>
> As has already been noted, the Articles of Incorporation does contemplate that one day ICANN may have members.
>
> Member organisations are quite common structures for ccTLD managers (e.g the manager of .au - auDA has about 150 members) , RIR structures  (APNIC has 4,500 members) , and other I* bodies like the Internet Society (65,000 members)  and World Wide Web Consortium (404 members).
>
> ICANN owes a fiduciary duty to the Internet community as a whole.
>
> For ICANN to move to a membership model I think it needs a membership structure that more broadly reflects the size and diversity of that "Internet community".
>
> The Structure of the SOs and ACs is an attempt to at least have a structure that "could" involve a large proportion of the Internet community.
>
> Using the GNSO as an example, it has as part of its structure:
> - gTLD registries, gTLD registrars, business users, intellectual property interests, internet service and connectivity providers, non-commercial users, and not-for-profit operational concerns interests.
>
> >From my perspective ICANN would be ready to move to a membership model when each of the parts of the Internet community has a statistically relevant participation in ICANN.    The gTLD registrars stakeholder group for example have 89 members of about 1000 registrars, and those registrars represent a majority of the domain name registrations.     I am less clear on whether the representation is appropriately in proportion across the 5 geographic regions.   When I look at other areas though - I see limited participation from different parts of the world, and a limited proportion of the business, non-commercial entities and individuals involved in any way.
>
> The current ICANN model was established to reduce capture from any particular segment - e.g. just commercial gTLD registry or registrar interests, or predominately US based intellectual property interests etc.
>
> Each SO appoints two directors, ALAC appoints one director, the technical community has three liaisons (IETF, SSAC, RSSAC) and the public sector has one liaison (GAC).   Other than that we formed a nominating committee comprising all of the above to find 8 directors that provide some cultural and geographic diversity to the Board.   The nominating committee operates using consensus amongst all the representations from the SOs and ACs.   This model attempts to balance people on the Board with specific technical names and numbers expertise, with people that bring a broad range of experience from different cultural and geographic backgrounds.   This voting model was established over 16 years with a few changes along the way  to substitute for the broader membership based body that many would like to see.   I interpreted the NTIA announcement that it was ready to transition its stewardship as support for this governance model.
>
> So I don't think ICANN has sufficient participation to move to a full membership mode such that  each of the parts of the Internet community has a statistically relevant participation in ICANN.    
>
> Regards,
> Bruce Tonkin
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  
> _______________________________________________
> Accountability-Cross-Community mailing list
> Accountability-Cross-Community at icann.org
> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/accountability-cross-community
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/accountability-cross-community/attachments/20151003/fb3fd9b6/attachment.html>