[CCWG-ACCT] got some lawyerly answers on membership structure

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

On 1/28/15 8:50 AM, Drazek, Keith wrote:
>
> If a ccTLD manager is not a member of the ccNSO, is paying no fees to 
> ICANN and is not bound by ccNSO policy, please help me understand how 
> they are impacted and why they would care about the ICANN Board's 
> accountability mechanisms to its community. I fully understand why 
> every TLD registry cares about the IANA functions and changes to the 
> root zone file, but our issue of greater ICANN Accountability is a 
> broader discussion than the IANA-specific concerns and accountability 
> mechanisms currently being addressed via the CWG Transition.
>

It is not so very long ago that a (previous) Executive and (previous) 
Board made changes requested by delegees of iso3166 code points 
conditional upon a form of agreement. The policy pursued by that 
Executive and that Board were not subject to substantive community 
review (notice and comment) prior to being implemented, with the 
accountability issue I hope many, not just the directly concerned, still 
recall.

Additionally, the interests of parties (of any type) need not encompass 
the union of all interests of all parties in the mechanisms and policies 
relating to accountability.

The pursuit of the narrow self-interest of a hypothetical ccTLD, or 
gTLD, delegee or contractual party, through its operator, should not, by 
itself, remove a party pursuing its narrow self-interest from what ever 
may eventually be a body of "members". Were it so, the removed would be 
at least some of those the USG observed in the AOC which constitute " a 
group of participants that engage in ICANN's processes to a greater 
extent than Internet users generally."

However, given the general awareness that the continued function of the 
Root Zone Management (RZM) partners is of fundamental importance, and 
the limited interest _as_delegees_or_contractees_ in issues other than 
the continued function of the Root Zone Management (RZM) partners, it 
seems unnecessary to encumber the problem of 
accountability-via-membership (already quite difficult if not 
intractable, in my opinion) with notions that delegees and contractees, 
as delegees or contractees, contribute an interest absent but for their 
status as "members", whether represented en toto, or as self-organized 
aggregates, or by lottery.

In simple terms, why registries-as-members at all? Does anyone believe 
only registries can provide the necessary oversight of the Board as it 
relates to the continued function of the Root Zone Management?

I think that the function of the Board is general oversight of the 
registries, arising from its technical coordination of unique endpoint 
identifiers delegated authority, and contractual oversight arising from 
its delegated contracting authority, so the assumption that registries 
have a necessary place in a hypothetical membership model is one that 
should be examined carefully for self-interest and self-dealing, as well 
as for necessity and utility.

Eric Brunner-Williams
Eugene, Oregon
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