[CPWG] ICANN’s Contractual Governance Regime

Tue Jul 25 01:24:09 UTC 2023

A few thoughts about Milton's blog

Registry Voluntary Commitments cannot really be about anything as Milton makes it sound, first and for most these commitments need to be in the public interest in some form or another or at least serve a well defined and accepatble purpose.

If a registry decides to abide by some rules that would govern its operations, someone needs to make sure that the registry follows what it says it would do. Simply put if you are offering a product and claiming that this product includes some features, those features need to exist otherwise you are lying to your customers.

Acceptance of an application goes through an entire process. This process has been developed through a multi-stakeholder policy development process and thus I don't see the RVCs as a result of only one to one negotiations between ICANN and the contracted registry.

Hadia    

________________________________
From: CPWG <cpwg-bounces at icann.org> on behalf of Evan Leibovitch via CPWG <cpwg at icann.org>
Sent: 25 July 2023 03:34
To: Jonathan Zuck
Cc: CPWG
Subject: Re: [CPWG] ICANN’s Contractual Governance Regime

From my own experiences (granted, about a decade ago, but the issues are not significantly different)...

Indeed, the balance -- between registrant rights and end-users wanting to minimize abuse -- has always been delicate. In the past ALAC has tended to be closer to the GAC position on this balance. Both of us are outside the ICANN food chain, so to speak, so our motivations are not driven by profitability, sunk costs, or proliferation.
There is a fundamental flaw in the V in RVCs. Registries will promise anything if it means the difference between acceptance or rejection; upon delegation they will do what they want. PICs (or what they're called now) exist so long as convenient, but never survive their first challenge to the financial bottom line.

Personally I don't accept, at all, the claimed equivalence between "consumer protection" and "regime protection". Any government that would want restrictions on the DNS in order to maintain political power certainly have many other -- more effective -- such tools at its disposal, many of which are beyond ICANN's reach. So I would tend to side with a GAC that is (usually) most-vocally represented by states who have genuine interest in balancing business and citizen needs.

As a result, the best approach to take is a home-grown ALAC one that looks at both the unfettered-freedom-for-registrant advocates and the government regulator-wannabe approaches. It's up to us to examine every decision point on its individual merits if (and only if) we establish that the decision at hand is one that impacts end-users. There are many battles in this arena in which we have no stake; both volunteer effort and our collective stress is minimized if we meticulously avoid that which doesn't impact our mandate.

Cheers,

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56

On Mon, Jul 24, 2023 at 4:17 PM Jonathan Zuck via CPWG <cpwg at icann.org<mailto:cpwg at icann.org>> wrote:
Milton, and most of the NCUC, is focused on the rights of registrants, not the interests of end users. That's their remit and I'm glad someone is doing it. The slippery slope of "consumer protection" is that it can be used by some governments as a cloak for "regime protection." So if we put the GAC, in particular, in the position of dictating what gTLDs must do, in terms of content, that could effectively become group censorship. If it's a regional TLD, it could become even more dangerous individual government censorship. So it's important that we're vigilant about that. That said, with 1,500 TLDs, if the GAC wants to heavily regulated industries to have lightly regulated strings, there's probably, on balance, a benefit. That's OUR remit to always be searching for that balance.

So, not to speak for Milton, but I imagine he would suggest that the GAC not be given free reign to dictate RVCs for any string but instead to require a pretty hard core public interest justification. Just a thought.
J
________________________________
From: CPWG <cpwg-bounces at icann.org<mailto:cpwg-bounces at icann.org>> on behalf of Roberto Gaetano via CPWG <cpwg at icann.org<mailto:cpwg at icann.org>>
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2023 11:59 AM
To: Alberto Soto Roldan <alberto at soto.net.ar<mailto:alberto at soto.net.ar>>
Cc: CPWG <cpwg at icann.org<mailto:cpwg at icann.org>>
Subject: Re: [CPWG] ICANN’s Contractual Governance Regime

🤫🙄

Inviato da iPhone

Il giorno 24.07.2023, alle ore 20:56, Alberto Soto Roldan via CPWG <cpwg at icann.org<mailto:cpwg at icann.org>> ha scritto:

And what is Mlton's proposal?

Regards

Alberto

De: CPWG <cpwg-bounces at icann.org<mailto:cpwg-bounces at icann.org>> En nombre de David Mackey via CPWG
Enviado el: lunes, 24 de julio de 2023 12:40
Para: CPWG <cpwg at icann.org<mailto:cpwg at icann.org>>
Asunto: [CPWG] ICANN’s Contractual Governance Regime

fyi: Sharing this blog post by Milton Mueller<https://ntra.mv.net.eg/2023/06/15/the-big-question-facing-icanns-contractual-governance-regime/,DanaInfo=www.internetgovernance.org,SSL+> regarding a discussion held at ICANN 77, because it seems relevant to the At-Large CPWG community ...

"ICANN never ceases to pose fascinating issues in global governance. At ICANN 77, held in Washington DC June 12 – 16, a dramatic debate took place about ICANN’s proper scope of authority. Some interest groups (mainly Registries and GAC) want ICANN to be empowered to enforce compliance with Registry Voluntary Commitments (RVCs), formerly known as Public Interest Commitments (PICs). Civil society groups and some Internet businesses see in the proposed change a threat to freedom of expression on the internet and an attempt to undermine ICANN’s multistakeholder policy development process.

Underlying this debate are important questions about the relationship between private contracting, multistakeholder governance, and public policy."

...

"The RVC problem is really a derivative of a more fundamental flaw in ICANN’s new TLD processes. Instead of defining clear, simple rules for nondiscriminatory awards of new TLDs, ICANN has created a bureaucratic morass of regulations and veto powers. The fate of a TLD application is not governed by any predictable rules. It is all discretionary, and the GAC in particular wants to be in a position to veto or modify applications and names that it doesn’t like.

Fortunately, Registry commitments that are designed to regulate content and services and make ICANN their enforcer are clearly violations of ICANN’s fundamental bylaws. The plot to bypass bottom up policy making process cannot succeed unless those bylaws are modified, and the modification would be so fundamental and the social gain so miniscule that it is hard to imagine it ever happening.

Never underestimate the ability of ICANN’s board, the GAC and DNS industry short-term self-interest to screw things up, however. Keep an eye on this process, and we hope this blog post helped you understand the stakes."

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