[Ccwg-auctionproceeds] Wrt (not) lobbying

[Daniel Dardailler]

Hello all

In the legal slides, lobbying is pointed out as a forbidden activity for 
ICANN and is loosely defined as "attempts to influence legislation".

I'd like to understand exactly what that means.

For instance, both IETF and W3C have been active in various European 
official fora (parliament, commission, national governments) to change 
the old EU legislation wrt public procurement so that procurers be 
allowed to reference our standards directly (e.g. IPV6 or HTML).
This is clearly about legislation, and it's more than an attempt, since 
we eventually succeeded (look for the EU Multistakeholder Platform for 
details).

Is this sort of policy oriented work to make the Internet and the Web 
technologies more "official", and therefore better deployed, without 
fragmentation, considered lobbying ?

Let's take another example. Suppose that some governments want to pass a 
brain-damaged legislation related to IP routing. Shouldn't ICANN be 
allowed to inform the public authority about the risks of doing just 
that ? If ICANN doesn't do it, who will ?

This is not a rhetorical case, every year or so, I get alerted by some 
advocacy groups that "deep linking" is about to become illegal somewhere 
on the planet (a deep link is just a link to a page "inside" another 
site, bypassing their "home" page) in order to protect some publisher 
business. Such an approach would undermine a fundamental piece of the 
Web architecture: freedom to link anywhere, and if we, the technical 
community, don't explain that point to policy makers, who will ?

There are dozens of public policy topics that are directly related to 
the Internet and the Web. They are all technical in nature of course and 
they only exist because of the net, because of us. As it happens, these 
topics are not very "hot" in the technical community, mostly because of 
their "policy/legal" flavor (not geek enough), so it's already difficult 
to find resources to represent our point-of-view.

My point is: at this point in time in Internet history, with lots of 
legislators trying to control the net without much of a clue of how 
things work, I think it would be a strategic mistake from the Internet 
technical community to self-censored itself in these debates.