[CCWG-ACCT] Speaking of our Adviser recommendations

[parminder]

On Tuesday 02 June 2015 07:42 AM, Bruce Tonkin wrote:
> Hello Avri,
>
>
>>>  Just wanted to say how impressed I was to hear several of our advisers pointing out that the work we had done to date had not emphasized Human Rights in our principles.  And that it was important we did so.
> Perhaps it could be more explicit in our core values?
>
> I assume you are not talking so much about the right to food and shelter, or no-one should be a slave etc  (part from perhaps the volunteers at ICANN that might feel that way at times :-))  - but more specifically you are talking about the right to freedom of speech etc.   ie it would be useful to pull out the sections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that are relevant to ICANN's narrow mission.

It is a misplaced notion that economic, social and cultural rights not
have nothing to do with ICANN's work.... I earlier gave the example of
the possible issues around say a generic drugs company in India taking a
gtld and the implications thereof on availability and prices of drugs
across the world... Similar things could happen around the right to food
when such a dispute involves companies involved with agriculture - says,
seeds, agri data, and so on ..

I think most discussions here underestimate if not completely ignore the
manner in which (1) digital systems increasingly underpin almost all
social sectors and (2) the naming, numbering and technical parametres
systems can to important extents determine the countours of such
systems, including its power relationships,....  Such a narrow epistemic
take on the involved phenomenon and its larger social (and thus public
policy) implications is IMHO endemic to what is called the ICANN
community - which to me is a significant reason for ICANN to have
external political accountability. And such external political
accountability (which does not necessarily means accountability to any
particular inter gov or such configuration) is the most basic issue
involved in what is generally known as IANA or oversight transition...
However, this basic and most important issue has almost  been entirely
off the table in all these discussions.

It is very problematic that even decades after a set of universal human
rights, in their indivisible and interrelated nature, were adopted by
the global community, it is still possible to present some rights as
applicable and not others. Such a askew political environment in which
ICANN exists is indeed the real issue here. BTW, it may also be
pertinent to note that the US is among the very few countries that have
not ratified its signing of the covenant on social. economic and
cultural rights, and therefore is not bound by it... We need a a more
globally legitimate political regime to place the very important global
governance issues that the ICANN performs.

parminder
>
> Regards,
> Bruce Tonkin
>
> _______________________________________________
> Accountability-Cross-Community mailing list
> Accountability-Cross-Community at icann.org
> https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/accountability-cross-community
>