[CWG-Stewardship] My concerns with the draft proposal and an alternative option

[Milton L Mueller]

Alan, based on some of your comments I am having trouble comprehending what your disagreement is about anymore. See comments inline:

There has been general agreement on the principle that policy making and its implementation in the root zone should be separate and distinct processes. That is why IETF is separate from IANA, why RIRs are separate from IANA. And while there is no hard and fast line barring ICANN from doing both under proper safeguards, most people recognize the inherent danger of a corporate entity with the unchecked power

Bingo. And that unchecked power was what I was attempting to demonstrate could be fixed. And fixing it would have a VERY significant benefit to the policy process as well. And we have little hope of fixing them without using the IANA contract as leverage.

MM: Agreed, the IANA contract has to be used as leverage, _both_ to keep ICANN's policy processes in bounds, _and_ to ensure adequate performance. So why are you opposing the contracting model?

Thus my reference to lost opportunities.

MM: "Lost opportunities" is the phrase I heard from Malcolm Hutty in Frankfurt, after he was told that it would be out of scope for the IANA transition process to be used as leverage to keep ICANN policy making in bounds. I agreed with Malcolm, I believe Chuck Gomes did, too, and I think the group started to reconsider that. But again, people who support Malcolm's view are people who are strongly committed to the external contracting model of governance. So where do you stand on this now?

 And since your message also made some comments about the acceptability of the current proposal to the US government, let me point out to you that the Kelly bill actually would _require_ IANA to be pulled out of ICANN and formed as a separate corporation

To quote Milton Mueller referring to the Kelly bill, "There are some very good ideas and some very bad ideas in this proposal". If we cannot take all of the aspects of the Kelly bill as gospel, then you cannot use a particular one to demonstrate what the US government wants.  Sensible, desirable, far-fetched and overly micromanaged are clearly in the eyes of the beholder.

MM: My point in the original message to you was not that we should take the Kelly bill as gospel, but that you were mistaken to claim that the "US government" will not accept separating IANA from ICANN. If a significant part of the US government is writing legislation demanding that IANA be separated before they will allow the transition to occur, I don't see how anyone can claim that separating IANA from ICANN is unacceptable to the USG.

MM: As a general matter, I don't think it's appropriate for anyone here to use "what the USG will accept" as an argument for or against any provision of the plan, unless a) they are part of the US government and b) such provision clearly contradicts the criteria that the NTIA has set out. The simple fact is that the NTIA criteria do not say anything about whether IANA is contracted or not, separable or not, or inside or outside of ICANN.

MM: While we are on the subject of the USG, let me direct your attention to today's column by L. Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street journal. http://online.wsj.com/articles/gordon-crovitz-halfway-to-wrecking-internet-freedom-1417387404?cb=logged0.09525622939690948

In this opinion piece, Crovitz claims that the transition process is failing, that we have accomplished nothing, that "there has been no progress finding an alternative for protecting the Internet from authoritarian governments" and that "Icann has spent the past nine months trying to come up with a new governance model, to no avail." Obviously he is making this up, but most people aren't tracking our process and don't know better.

I'd suggest that before you nitpick the plan further you weigh very carefully the fact that there are vultures circling who would like nothing better than for this effort to fail and for the status quo to remain in place.
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