[CWG-Stewardship] Narrow focus (was: CWG-Stewardship Chairs' Statement - Summary of ICANN 52 Meeting)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 05:06:25AM -0800, Kieren McCarthy wrote:
> 
> There are a few signs that ICANN corporate is being a little more open minded and helpful than in most of the previous SEVEN accountability reviews (but not all).
> 
> But when it comes to non-cosmetic changes, particularly over ICANN corporate's unquestionable final authority, I have seen only critical and defensive responses, as well as accusations of bad faith and various efforts to undermine the commenter - the same pattern that has played out for over a decade.
> 

This is not to pick on Kieren McCarthy, but those paragraphs where
helpful to hang my remarks on.  I've been thinking about something
along these lines since Singapore and thought I'd take this occasion
to send.

It seems to me that we heard in Singapore some pretty strong
suggestions from parts of the community that we ought to concentrate
on the narrow question of the IANA transition and how to make those
arrangements at least as reliable and safe as the current arrangements
are.  In my opinion, Larry Strickling also asked some pretty pointed
questions about this group's focus on that narrow issue.

It seems to me that the IETF and RIRs have come up with fairly narrow
discussions of their issues, and have focussed on the specific issues
for their communities.  I do not pretend that things are just the same
in the names community, because of the way the IANA names functions
and the policy functions are located in the same organization.  But
perhaps we could focus on the exact places where the existing
organizational boundaries inside ICANN (for the IANA function) are,
and see whether there is a sort of "accountability interface" that
could be placed there.  This is an admittedly less ambitious approach
than the proposals that have been previously circulated, but I wonder
whether this might not cut the problem down to a manageable size.  It
seems to me that much of the conceptual work that has been done could
be re-jigged to match that narrower task, too, and so we might be able
to make speedy progress.

Of course, that still leaves us with a difficult dependency, because
the CCWG-Accountability work would need to complete and be compatible
with what we might suggest.  But I think that is manageable, it's in
any case a requirement, and it allows us to declare general
discussions of, "wWhat if the Board does X?" out of scope here.

Does this seem in any way a helpful direction, or am I off my gourd?

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com