[CPWG] A white knight on the horizon for .ORG?

[David Mackey]

Evan,

Thank you for your thoughts.

"Its history of extreme risk-aversion make it easy for ICANN's board to
take advice from its legal counsel that may silently override any emotional
or ethical arguments."
It makes a lot of sense to be cognizant of the rules established in the
ICANN bylaws and prudently stay within the boundaries as they are currently
written. Venturing too far beyond ICANN's remit may result in unwanted
and unproductive chaos. However, the risk in the long run of being too narrow
and not thinking beyond the letter of the law is that policy debates may be
whittled down to discussions about how many angels can fit on a the head of
a pin. This is not desirable either.

But that does not mean we have nothing to say, it's just how we say it."
Understood. Side Question: I reviewed the ICANN bylaws and found section
12.2.d.i which could be considered relevant to how our advice is given ... "The
role of the ALAC shall be to consider and provide advice on the activities
of ICANN, insofar as they relate to the interests of individual Internet
users." Are there any other written pieces of documentation that provides
guidelines on what is or is not acceptable advice?

"... an issue of stability, trust and security..."
In general, I agree with your choice of words and how you said them.
Specifically, I can see how the issue of trust comes into play with this
transaction. I'm mostly averse to picking any single hill to die on, but it
seems to me that issue is outside the norm of most policy discussions and
has long term consequences too.

Another side note: I heard a question in the general question session at
ICANN66 from a former staff member who questioned the rules of staff not
being allowed to interact with ICANN participants in social gatherings.
Without getting into the larger ethical debate the answer given was to
gently restate the existing policy of non-interaction. It seems to me that
there's a relevant question for interaction between former staff and former
ICANN leadership in the makeup of the Ethos organization. ICANN is a
relatively young organization, so it's not surprising that it doesn't yet
have a complete set of rules to guide staff/leadership interaction.
However, maybe there's an opportunity to look at improving policy/bylaws
for this type of behaviour in the future. It's not always easy to
anticipate which pieces of the Internet infrastructure will be worth a
billion dollars in the future, but better post-employment and
post-leadership policies might help moderate human behaviour motivated by
money which don't add value to end users. Just a thought.

Cheers!
David


On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 9:32 AM Evan Leibovitch <evan at telly.org> wrote:

>
> On Sun, 12 Jan 2020 at 20:40, David Mackey <mackey361 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> "If we can keep our discussion on track, we will get to a result more
>> quickly." Your wording seems a bit oblique.
>>
>> Are you suggesting that discussions around phrases like "End users
>> benefit from a long-term commitment to the open and noncommercial
>> internet" are off track?
>>
>
> Actually, in ICANN's narrow context, it might well be interpreted that way.
>
> ICANN's mandate is about trust, stability and security of the DNS,
> everything it does supposedly stems from that. It's not within ICANN's
> remit to make value judgments on the inherent value of anything being open
> and non-commercial. Yes, that means plenty to *us*, but when confronted
> with that demand ICANN can just ignore it as out of scope. Its history of
> extreme risk-aversion make it easy for ICANN's board to take advice from
> its legal counsel that may silently override any emotional or ethical
> arguments.
>
> But that does not mean we have nothing to say, it's just how we say it.
>
> ICANN's interest in the public good for its own sake is hard to come by.
> So IMO our job, should we choose to accept it, is to paint the ISOC
> abandonment of .ORG as an issue of stability, trust and security, so it's
> directly in scope. Something that was assumed to be stable no longer is, an
> assumed endowment of a rare resource is now being treated as a commodity,
> and the secrecy of the transaction gives rise to potentially more
> instability, especially if new owners prices or policies push registrants
> away en-masse to other TLDs.
>
> ICANN knows (or at least suspects) that if it derails the sale to Ethos
> it's going to get sued, by insiders who know how ICANN works and how best
> to threaten it. The case needs to be made that
>
>
>    - - Lawsuits on not, letting the re-delegation to Ethos goes through contravenes
>    either ICANN's mission or commitments made when .ORG was given to ISOC
>    - - The lawsuits and government interventions to come by letting the
>    sale go through, that threaten ICANN itself, may exceed the danger of
>    Ethos' lawsuits if it blocks.
>
>
>
> - Evan
>
>
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