[CPWG] Sale of .ORG REJECTED

Fri May 1 09:06:22 UTC 2020

First of all, I owe an apology. When the PIR sale news first came to public attention, I did not think that ICANN would have rejected the change of control, at the most it would have asked to implement some safeguards. Of course, I did not think that in the end the decision would have been taken under the pressure of the CA-AG.
So, I fully agree with Vittorio. May I also add that the current regime might have loosened the ties with the US politics, in the sense that political pressure to determine ICANN’s decisions is a bit more difficult, but the influence naturally exerted by the fact of ICANN is under US jurisdiction is still there.
This said, I believe that we have to be extremely careful not to put the cart before the oxen - that means not to start discussions over jurisdiction before saving solved the self-governance issues.
The current model, or rather its implementation, is crippled. I am still convinced that the global-equal-multi-stakeholder model is the best option, but I have to recognize that the current implementation of multi-stakeholderism is neither global nor equal.
As a matter of fact, the simple mention of global equal multi-stakeholder has disappeared from ICANN’s literature, and only survives in the name of the band.
But this is not the only problem that the internet user community has. I may be wrong, but I do believe that this rejection has not buried forever the intention of ISOC of divesting itself from the dependency of its financial sources by the domain names market. To say it bluntly, the recent events have made clear that ISOC is no longer the appropriate representative of the internet users interests as related to the domain name industry, because it has proven to be able to take decisions that are maybe in the best interest of some parts of the community, but surely not in the best interest of the .org registrants and users.
This, in my opinion, calls for an action by the people and organizations affected by the .org policies and behaviour. We are in a situation for PIR that is similar to what has been for ICANN the “IANA transition”. My reasoning is as follows: if we can no longer trust ISOC to be acting as .org steward in the best interest of its stakeholders, what do we need to put in place so that these two things happen:
1. for the time being decisions are taken in the best interest of the .org community (e.g. price cap, etc.)
2. for the future, in a possible change of control, how can these interests be preserved and survive a change of ownership
Although now the issue is not urgent, because no imminent irreversible event is about to happen, it remains nevertheless important. I personally believe that we need to address it now that we have the necessary time to think and avoid having to act once again under emergency situation: the question is not “if” we will have to face a PIR sale proposal, but “when”. And it might not be that far away, I fear.
From my experience as PIR Board Director - and Chair for a couple of years - I can bring these two points as a reflection.
First, in the recent years the profile of the ISOC-chosen Director has changed. In spite of explicit requests the two outgoing Directors who had direct expertise with non profits, and a strong sensibility to the related matters, have been replaced by Directors with a different profile. I don’t know the situation inside ISOC, and it is probably outside the scope of this mailing list, but from the outside it seems that the choices with respect to PIR ar driven more by the IETF soul than the Chapters soul.
The second aspect is the Advisory Council. When I become Chair the AC was only having a formal yearly meeting, most of the PIR Board was not even aware of the existence of it, let alone the discussions that were taking place. Even after the attempts of involving more communication between AC and Board, the formalisation of a seat for ALAC, some innovative ideas by Jay Daley to revitalise the collaboration, the Council remained by and large toothless. Anyway, in short, the basic question is how the interests of the .org community can be meaningfully represented and have a reasonable weight in the decisions that will affect them.
If our (ALAC) document has been referenced even by the CA-AG, it might not have been so badly done - so it might be a starting point for proposing a discussion on .org governance.
Cheers,
Roberto

On 01.05.2020, at 08:20, Vittorio Bertola via CPWG <cpwg at icann.org<mailto:cpwg at icann.org>> wrote:

Il 2020-05-01 05:05 Evan Leibovitch ha scritto:

https://www.icann.org/news/blog/icann-board-withholds-consent-for-a-change-of-control-of-the-public-interest-registry-pir

I think ICANN did the less bad thing it could do, and in the overall this is the best choice for all of us who own a .org.
At the same time, this really casts shadows over the credibility of the IANA Transition, and ICANN will have to think at how to better insulate itself from any direct governmental control. Starting from twenty years ago, a range of solutions has been proposed, from moving to classic neutral countries (e.g. Switzerland) to establishing a U.N.-style host country agreement with the U.S. I'm sure that many countries will raise this issue again.
Ciao,
--
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu<http://bertola.eu>   <--------
-------->        now blogging & more at http://bertola.eu/   <--------
_______________________________________________
CPWG mailing list
CPWG at icann.org<mailto:CPWG at icann.org>
https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cpwg

_______________________________________________
By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/cpwg/attachments/20200501/e272936b/attachment.html>