[CCWG-ACCT] yet another human rights question

Avri Doria avri at acm.org
Mon Jul 27 07:44:41 UTC 2015


Hi,

I am currently writing up my minority report and came to a question I
could not answer.

Point 4 of the NTIA requirements includes:

  * Maintain the openness of the Internet.

This is a Human rights requirement that I do not see reflected in our
stress tests.  Can someone point me at the stress test?  Openness of the
Internet is a derivative or 'umbrella' right that is defined by
reference to human rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of
association, privacy, property, security &c and their interplay.

This is one of the stress factors:

  * the US and thus NTIA, is a human rights duty bearer.
  * if we were to violate human rights, NTIA in its oversight role would
    have to stop us from doing so and I am sure they would have done so.
      o e.g. if we were to start making rules that discriminated and
        were to injure human rights such as expressions or association
        in our policies, policies that infringed on the requirement of
        openness of the Internet, they would have to do something about it.
  * Without the NTIA as oversight, what is to stop us from infringing on
    the human right of an Open Internet?

We do not have, as far as I can tell, a stress test that covers this.

We need, as part of WS1, a bylaw that covers this deficiency.  Despite
the fact that there has been a 'vote' to exclude any mention of human
rights and human rights impact analyses from the bylaws, I persist in
the belief that we need a bylaw to cover this and meet the NTIA
requirements.

I understand that for some I went too far in suggesting a remedy for how
we might do that, within the bylaw I orinigally suggested and want to
try another suggestion before I go back to writing my minority report.

/In order to enure that openness of the Internet within ICANN's mission
may be maintained,  human rights impact assessments will be done/ /on
ICANN policies [as appropriate]/.


Note this is not per--se requiring us to live up to human rights, but is
requiring that we understand the impact of our actions.  It can also
includes the weasel words 'as appropriate' at the end if required.

Figuring how we do this then becomes the WS2 issue.

Thanks and apologies for bringing it up again, but on realizing that we
do not stress test against the requirements for maintaining the human
right of openness of the Internet made me realize that the deficiency
was larger than just one of ignoring comments on our draft.

avri


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