[Ccwg-auctionproceeds] Wrt (not) lobbying

[Mathieu Weill]

Daniel, All,

Reviewing the slides provided by ICANN Legal
(https://community.icann.org/display/CWGONGAP/Legal+and+Fiduciary+Constrai
nts+Related+Materials?preview=/64073737/64073741/DT%20for%20Auction%20Proc
eeds%20-%20CCWG%20Legal%20Presentation.pdf ) on slide 13, it seems that
the statement that "lobbying is a forbidden activity for ICANN" is not
entirely accurate.

The slide recognizes that ICANN engages in some lobbying activities (more
about it is disclosed here :
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/lobbying-disclosures-contributions-2
015-11-18-en) and mentions a requirement from our CCWG Charter against
providing funds in support of attemps to influence legislation.

The relevant section of our Charter is quoted below, from the "scope"
section (https://community.icann.org/display/CWGONGAP/CCWG+Charter) :

"To align with requirements imposed to maintain ICANN’s U.S. tax exempt
status, the CCWG must include a limitation that funds must not be used to
support political activity/intervening in a political campaing public
office[2] or attempts to influence legislation[3]. The definitions of the
limitations that are imposed to meet U.S. tax requirements must be applied
across all applicants, and not only those from or intending to use the
funds within the U.S. These requirements will apply to comparable
activities across any location where applicants are located or intend to
use the funds."

So my interpretation would be that organizations who engage in lobbying
activities (such as the examples given by Daniel) would not be ruled out
as a matter of principle, but should commit and ensure that any funds they
would receive from the ICANN Auction Proceeds would not be used in
lobbying or political funding activities.

Would that be correct ?

Best,
Mathieu

-----Message d'origine-----
De : ccwg-auctionproceeds-bounces at icann.org
[mailto:ccwg-auctionproceeds-bounces at icann.org] De la part de Daniel
Dardailler
Envoyé : jeudi 23 mars 2017 18:54
À : ccwg-auctionproceeds at icann.org
Objet : [Ccwg-auctionproceeds] Wrt (not) lobbying

Hello all

In the legal slides, lobbying is pointed out as a forbidden activity for
ICANN and is loosely defined as "attempts to influence legislation".

I'd like to understand exactly what that means.

For instance, both IETF and W3C have been active in various European
official fora (parliament, commission, national governments) to change the
old EU legislation wrt public procurement so that procurers be allowed to
reference our standards directly (e.g. IPV6 or HTML).
This is clearly about legislation, and it's more than an attempt, since we
eventually succeeded (look for the EU Multistakeholder Platform for
details).

Is this sort of policy oriented work to make the Internet and the Web
technologies more "official", and therefore better deployed, without
fragmentation, considered lobbying ?

Let's take another example. Suppose that some governments want to pass a
brain-damaged legislation related to IP routing. Shouldn't ICANN be
allowed to inform the public authority about the risks of doing just that
? If ICANN doesn't do it, who will ?

This is not a rhetorical case, every year or so, I get alerted by some
advocacy groups that "deep linking" is about to become illegal somewhere
on the planet (a deep link is just a link to a page "inside" another site,
bypassing their "home" page) in order to protect some publisher business.
Such an approach would undermine a fundamental piece of the Web
architecture: freedom to link anywhere, and if we, the technical
community, don't explain that point to policy makers, who will ?

There are dozens of public policy topics that are directly related to the
Internet and the Web. They are all technical in nature of course and they
only exist because of the net, because of us. As it happens, these topics
are not very "hot" in the technical community, mostly because of their
"policy/legal" flavor (not geek enough), so it's already difficult to find
resources to represent our point-of-view.

My point is: at this point in time in Internet history, with lots of
legislators trying to control the net without much of a clue of how things
work, I think it would be a strategic mistake from the Internet technical
community to self-censored itself in these debates.























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