[CCWG-ACCT] CCWG-Accountability - Draft Comment for Public Consultation on Articles of Incorporation (AOC)

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 05:40:29PM -0400, Greg Shatan wrote:
> the mission (once stated in the Articles but now only in the Bylaws).  What
> does the "operational stability of the Internet" mean?  Based on 17 years
> of experience, that should not be narrowly defined.  If ICANN's interest
> was truly limited to keeping the pipes open and flowing, the whole New gTLD
> Program would be outside the mission.  Any innovation would be aimed solely
> at keeping the trains running (e.g., IPv6) but not to making a market in
> domain names (at any level).

I thought a significant part of the rather tortured discussion we had
about the Mission was precisely to counter that the tendency of ICANN
(or others) to think that its scope of interest -- public or otherwise
-- in the stability of the Internet is properly limited.  The Internet
doesn't need ICANN or anyone else to invent innovations for the
Internet -- the operators and inventors of Internet technology are
quite good at doing that all on their own, as I think the 17 years of
experience equally demonstrates.

> In any event, any serious discussion of the Global Public Interest would
> have to start with the question of "The Global Public Interest in what?"

This I couldn't agree with more.

A


-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com