[council] Rod on Internet governance

[William Drake]

Hi David,

I certainly sympathize with Rod's predicament.  Five years ago I did a thing in Madrid for the Telefonica Foundation and they set up some interviews that resulted in newspaper articles with completely botched renditions of my comments.  The worst was El Pais, which took my noting that there are developing countries who'd like the UN to play a bigger role in Internet governance and turned it into a headline "La ONU debería centralizar el gobierno de Internet" ("The UN should centralize the governance of Internet") glowering over my pic.   I wrote asking for correction but the thing lives on in Google space, prompting the occasional puzzled email.  Presumably Rod will have better luck getting a response than I did.

Beware of journalists writing about IG, for they generally know not what they say.

Best,

Bill


On Jun 2, 2010, at 4:22 PM, David Olive wrote:

> Bill:
> 
> I wanted to share with you and the GNSO Council List Barbara Clay's note on
> this article.
> 
> Regards,           David
> 
> =========================================================================
> 
> Barbara Ann Clay - VP Marketing & Communications
> 
> 
> The Reuters story, based on an interview with Rod which I attended,
> doesn’t capture what he actually said and we have protested to the
> journalist and to his editor.
> 
> The journalist asked what changes could come in the context of the
> Affirmation of Commitments, and Rod said he would not speculate.
> He then asked if ICANN would ever cede authority to a UN body or a G12 type
> group. Rod responded that this would be hard to imagine, but that “it would
> be up to the [ICANN] community to decide”. He then said that his role is to
> run the staff and lead the organization, and not to say what ICANN’s
> stakeholder groups will decide in the future.
> 
> That part of his answer is not in the story and without it, the article
> leaves the incorrect impression that Rod stated active opposition to a UN
> “takeover”, a subject on which he remained studiously neutral in the
> interview. He did not “caution” or “warn” anyone on this or any other
> subject.
> 
> In my protest, I stated that the problem is not just that any decision on
> this would not be in Rod’s hands. It is that ICANN has a bottom-up
> decision-making structure that Rod respects; that is why he stressed that
> “it’s up to the community to decide” and laid out his exact and limited
> role as leader of the organization.
> 
> So while the quotes that appear in the article are - strictly speaking -
> accurate, the headline and the terms “warns” and “cautioned” considerably
> overstate his comments and the article does not correctly reflect what he
> said.
> 
> ==========================================================================
> 
> 
> 
> On 5/27/10 11:56 AM, "William Drake" <william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch>
> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> This is relevant to the thread about whether to discuss ICANN's strategic
>> response to global Internet governance debates at the Council-Board dinner.
>> In light of all that that has gone on over the past few years and the
>> continuing discontent of a majority of governments with ICANN's constitutional
>> structure, is it enough to simply argue that any departure from the status quo
>> would make ICANN less "nimble"?
>> 
>> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/icann-head-warns-against-puttin
>> g-internet-addresses-under-un-control/article1579820/
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> David A. Olive
> Vice President, Policy Development
> ICANN
> Office: 310.578.8617
> Cell:  202.341.3611
> 
> 

***********************************************************
William J. Drake  
Senior Associate
Centre for International Governance
Graduate Institute of International and
  Development Studies
Geneva, Switzerland
william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch
www.graduateinstitute.ch/cig/drake.html
***********************************************************