[CWG-Stewardship] Comments from Richard Hill
Lise Fuhr
lise.fuhr at difo.dk
Fri Aug 7 09:31:00 UTC 2015
Hi Alissa,
The CWG-Stewardship co-chairs thank the ICG for forwarding the comments from
Richard Hill regarding the CWG-Stewardship proposal for the transition of
the IANA services and also for the ICG’s thoughtful evaluation of his
comments. We provide below selected quotes of his comments followed by our
responses in bulleted format and italic font.
We would also like to point out that the CWG-Stewardship did a comprehensive
review of all submissions received in the Public Comment periods including
those from Mr. Hill. To facilitate the ability to see our responses to Mr.
Hill’s comments we have attached an excerpt of our Public Comment Tool that
contains just his comments along with the CWG-Stewardship responses.
Referring to the CWG-Stewardship Response to the ICG RFP, Mr. Hill stated “.
. . it fails to state that the Final Proposal was not submitted for public
comment, and that at least some of the 115 input comments made on the draft
proposal were not accommodated in the Final Proposal. That is, all the
comments were considered, but at least some of them were rejected.”
· It is true that the Final Proposal was not submitted for public
comment using the normal public comment process. However, the
CWG-Stewardship would like to point out that it is not common practice in an
ICANN context to publish a final proposal for Public Comment, unless
substantive changes are made to the draft proposal. Furthermore, the Public
Comment forum clearly indicated that it was the intention to finalize the
proposal for submission to the chartering organizations following the review
of the Public Comment submissions. The CWG-Stewardship would like to point
out that an additional opportunity for public comment is provided by the
ICG, which is similar to the opportunity for Public Comment that is
typically provided in the context of policy recommendations following the
approval of a chartering organization, but prior to consideration by the
ICANN Board. Furthermore, the CWG-Stewardship notes that:
o In order to take advantage of the in-person meetings at ICANN 53 in
Buenos Aires for SO and AC consideration of the proposal and to provide
sufficient advance time for review of the proposal prior to ICANN 53, it was
necessary to send the proposal to the SOs and ACs as well as publish it for
full community review in early June.
o A Public Comment period on a largely complete proposal ended on 20 May
after which comments were reviewed and edits made to produce the final
version that was delivered to the SOs and ACs for their action.
o Each of the SOs and ACs provided opportunities for their constituents
to provide comments and contribute to their approval decision; most SOs and
ACs allow for input from those who are not formally associated with their
groups; and opportunities were provided at ICANN 53 for input in-person or
remotely from any interested parties.
· It is also true that not all comments were accommodated in the
Final Proposal, but the CWG-Stewardship would like to point out that there
is no obligation to simply accept all comments received, but instead there
is an expectation that a thorough analysis of the comments is carried out
and it is demonstrated of how the comments were considered and whether or
not any changes were made as a result of the comments received which the
CWG-Stewardship did in the Public Comment Review Tool (see
<https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/report-comments-cwg-stewardship
-draft-proposal-11jun15-en.pdf>
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/report-comments-cwg-stewardship-
draft-proposal-11jun15-en.pdf). Furthermore:
o It should be noted that it was impossible to accommodate all comments
because some of them supported competing views.
o Secondly, in a global community as diverse as the Internet community,
it is necessary to develop compromises that can accommodate as many
viewpoints as possible given the present timeframe and in reality even if we
have had more time it may not be possible to accommodate everyone’s
viewpoints.
o The CWG-Stewardship proposal says: “In developing its Transition
Proposal, work plan and any other reports, the CWG-Stewardship shall seek to
act by consensus.” It goes on to define consensus as “a position where a
small minority disagrees, but most agree”. We firmly believe that the
CWG-Stewardship succeeded in achieving this definition of consensus.
“In particular, as detailed below, many of my comments were dismissed.”
· Please note that this was true of submissions by many commenters;
that is a fact of consensus processes in a diverse community.
“Thus, while the Final Proposal represents the consensus of the
CWG-Stewardship itself, it does not necessarily represent the consensus of
the global multi-stakeholder community. Indeed, as I have pointed out
previously, CWG-Stewardship is an ICANN group, constituted under ICANN
rules, so it cannot be considered to be representative of the global
multi-stakeholder community.”
· The CWG-Stewardship was not in any way restricted to ICANN
participants; it was open to all members of the global multi-stakeholder
community and efforts were made to reach out to those outside of ICANN.
“Further, the proposal is conditional on changes in ICANN's accountability,
which have not yet been approved. Thus it would be premature to approve the
proposal.”
· If the ICANN accountability conditions are not met, the approval
will be reconsidered.
· Waiting to submit the CWG-Stewardship proposal until after the
CCWG-Accountability Work Stream 1 recommendations were finalized, approved
and implemented would have caused excessive delays in the IANA Stewardship
Transition; by submitting a conditional proposal, we allowed the ICG to do
its due diligence now, which we believe will save considerable time later
on.
· We note here that there have been regular communications between
the CWG-Stewardship and the CCWG-Accountability Chairs, and also that the
CCWG-Accountability group has, in their reply to the Public Comment periods
on the CWG-Stewardship proposal, stated that the requirements are
non-controversial to the CCWG-Accountability. Therefore the CWG-Stewardship
submission of the proposal with the conditions was a reasonable thing to do.
“Regarding the substance of the proposal, it can be characterized as "much
ado about nothing": it uses many pages of very detailed text to enshrine the
status quo, apart from accountability changes mentioned in paragraph 106.
PTI will be fully controlled by ICANN, so there is no meaningful separation
and no real change with respect to the current situation. In particular,
there will be no change in jurisdiction, so PTI will be subject to US law,
as is the case today for the IANA function. This means that, in effect, the
United States maintains its asymmetric role with respect to the management
of domain names and addresses (PTI would have to obey US court orders and US
laws), thus negating the objective of internationalizing the management of
Internet domain names and addresses.”
· We respectfully disagree that there is no meaningful change; we
believe that the legal separation of PTI will greatly facilitate complete
separation at a later point in time if it is ever needed and that the
possibility of such separation will serve to incent ICANN and PTI behavior
that is responsive to community needs and the public interest.
· The CWG-Stewardship decided fairly early in its process that any
jurisdiction issues would be better handled by the CCWG-Accountability;
there were at least two key reasons for this:
o Jurisdictional issues would require significantly more time and hence
would cause much longer delays in implementing the transition.
o We believed that the IANA Stewardship Transition proposal would be more
likely to be supported by the U.S. Government in a timely manner if
jurisdiction was not changed at the outset.
“Thus, in my view, that Final Proposal does not represent the consensus of
the global multi-stakeholder community.”
· Mr. Hill’s conclusion is only correct if ‘consensus’ is defined as
‘full consensus’ as defined in the charter: “a position where no minority
disagrees; identified by an absence of objection”. That would mean
unanimous support.
· The CWG-Stewardship never claimed unanimous support.
· We again want to make reference to the definition of consensus in
the CWG-Stewardship Charter: “a position where a small minority disagrees,
but most agree”; it is our assessment that this objective has been achieved.
Attachment
Attached is an excerpt of the CWG-Stewardship Public Comment Review Tool,
containing just Richard Hill’s comments along with the CWG-Stewardship
responses.
Best regards,
Jonathan & Lise
Fra: cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org
[mailto:cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org] På vegne af Alissa Cooper
Sendt: 5. august 2015 19:57
Til: jrobinson at afilias.info
Cc: cwg-stewardship at icann.org; Jonathan Robinson
Emne: Re: [CWG-Stewardship] Comments from Richard Hill
Hi Jonathan,
Regarding Richard's claim about the final proposal not having gone out for
public comment, in our view what he suggests could yield a process that
never ends, given that further comments can always be provided whenever a
document is put out for public comment. Thus requiring a “final” document to
be put out for public comment is an unreasonable requirement for a process
intended to terminate. Furthermore, there is a public comment period on the
combined proposal of the three operational communities. If the final CWG
proposal deviated substantially from what the global multistakeholder
community wants, that fact should be revealed.
Regarding his claim about the global multistakeholder community, our
understanding of the CWG’s charter is that the group is open to any
interested participant. The process was based in ICANN through the
chartering organisations and that is hardly surprising given the role of
ICANN (and indeed the invitation from NTIA). However, the process was open
to anyone, and was based around developing consensus – no votes and no
sustained opposition on compromises that allowed the CWG to move forward.
Regarding his claim about his specific comments on the proposal, we note
that the CWG proposal states on p. 51 that "The final proposal has received
the consensus support of the CWG-Stewardship with no objections or minority
statements recorded for Chartering Organization consideration.” We note that
rationales were given and CWG consensus positions explained for each comment
received during the public comment period that was not included in the
proposal (including Richard’s). It is our understanding that all of the
comments were discussed and that some of them, including the comments about
jurisdiction, were identified as items that could be addressed in future
work.
Best,
Alissa on behalf of the ICG
On Jul 28, 2015, at 2:54 AM, Jonathan Robinson <jrobinson at afilias.info>
wrote:
Alissa,
Thank-you for this, please do go ahead and send the ICG thoughts on this
through to the CWG.
Jonathan
From: Alissa Cooper [ <mailto:alissa at cooperw.in> mailto:alissa at cooperw.in]
Sent: 27 July 2015 16:39
To: <mailto:cwg-stewardship at icann.org> cwg-stewardship at icann.org IANA <
<mailto:cwg-stewardship at icann.org> cwg-stewardship at icann.org>
Subject: [CWG-Stewardship] Comments from Richard Hill
CWG,
The ICG has received the following from Richard Hill: <
<http://mm.ianacg.org/pipermail/icg-forum_ianacg.org/2015-June/000001.html>
http://mm.ianacg.org/pipermail/icg-forum_ianacg.org/2015-June/000001.html>
According to the process the ICG uses to handle forum comments <
<https://www.ianacg.org/icg-files/documents/Community-Comments-Handling-1May
15-final.pdf>
https://www.ianacg.org/icg-files/documents/Community-Comments-Handling-1May1
5-final.pdf>, the ICG assesses whether the comments are to be investigated
by the operational community itself, and if we draw that conclusion we make
the OC aware of the comment and ask whether the OC has any input. So we
would appreciate input you may have no later than August 10.
The ICG has also reviewed these questions in light of the CWG charter and
process, and we would be happy to send our thoughts if helpful to the CWG.
Thanks,
Alissa Cooper on behalf of the ICG
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