[Ccwg-auctionproceeds] Wrt (not) lobbying

Daniel Dardailler danield at w3.org
Mon Mar 27 14:28:41 UTC 2017


Hello Mathieu, all

Thanks for the pointers, especially the ICANN Lobbying Disclosures & 
Contribution Reports. If my understanding is right, they show that some 
lobbying areas are already OK, and that the set of areas can evolve over 
time.

Looking at the various documents, it's clear that the qualifier "attempt 
to modify legislation" can be subject to interpretation.

Our charter even says "Lobbying does not include public education about 
issues", which to me, clearly includes public policy makers as a 
potential audience (it includes everybody when it's online public/free 
and transparent education and outreach). This would also cover 
grass-root lobbying, aka indirect lobbying, i.e. when you don't talk to 
policy makers directly but you hope that your public audience will learn 
from you and influence the policy work in the end.

The important bit is all that IMO is not so much if you talk directly to 
policy makers or not, but if when doing so, you represent a political 
party, or a corporate interest, vs. you represent a public interest 
position, especially one that involves Internet technicalities.

Maybe we should look at some recent listing  of core Internet values 
(e.g. done at IGF) to identify which "lobbying" areas are potentially 
aligned with the ICANN core value of "preserving and enhancing the 
operational stability, reliability, security, and global 
interoperability of the Internet.".



On 2017-03-24 11:42, Mathieu Weill wrote:
> 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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