[CCWG-ACCT] A modest attempt to advance the "Mission scoping" discussion

[Eric (Maule) Brunner-Williams]

Mathieu,

Thank you for the suggestion, however ... The authors and the various
eventual applicants to ICANN in 2000 and 2004 and 2010 for delegations
for linguistic and/or cultural and/or municipal and/or regional service
registries, as I recall them did not, in general, frame the agreements
they proposed within their eventual applications as being made for the
purpose of competitive advantage in a contention process.

The authors of the applications in 2010 for delegations other than those
for linguistic and/or cultural and/or municipal and/or regional service
registries, again, as I recall them, rationally evaluated whether their
business models could be achieved under the (presumed enforced) restrictions
of the "community-type" (which bobbled through each of the revisions of the
draft AGB, in form, and in dispositive function).

My point being that there are "voluntary commitments" such as services to
users who prefer a Catalan namespace, or a cooperative-operated registry,
absent any application impediment such as string similarity. Dissimilarly,
there are "voluntary commitments" which appear to have no meaning outside
of the application type restriction of 2004, and more recently, the similar
string contention resolution mechanism of 2010.

We can distinguish between these, and should, as the exercise of "voluntary
commitments" for the purposes of gaming type restrictions (2004) and/or
gaming contention (2010), substitutes (gamed) implementation for the policy
of record.

> And most importantly, regarding the discussion about "voluntary
> commitments", as Avri points out, we might have a way forward if we were
> to agree that *the scope of acceptable commitments in any agreement should
> be defined by policy* (with all the related process safeguards, including
> bottom up nature as well as advisory inputs), instead of implementation.
> Then it would be up to the policy makers to define whether eligibility
> conditions are appropriate or not and should be enforced, whether a
> specific form of stakeholder consultation or governance is acceptable,
> etc.

As a process coda, prior to the June 2010 meeting in Bruxelles, there was
no "single user" application type in any draft of the AGB. Our current
problem contains the implementation-trumps-policy warts of the 2010 round,
and we cannot pretend that policy has been made transparently, accountably,
and from the bottom-up, though we can hope that it is in the present, and
will be in the future.

Eric Brunner-Williams
Eugene, Oregon