[CWG-Stewardship] IANA Stewardship Transition

[Christopher Wilkinson]

Dear Friends and Colleagues:
Allow me to make a few comments. I trust that the opportunity may arise to discuss further in Helsinki.
The fact that PTI 'separability' encounters employment policy issues is neither a surprise nor unexpected. Abstracting from my own earlier warning about that aspect, should counsel have spent as much time on employment law as they did on IPR law, then we might not be in the present predicament. The professional assets of the staff are more important than a few domain names and trademarks.

Although we come to this from quite different perspectives, I find myself in broad agreement with Kurt. I defer to, and respect, his experience as a senior manager of a Californian corporation, including the employment policy aspects that those responsibilities must have entailed.
Chuck asked me to specify where I disagreed with Greg. Thus, as I see it, Greg expects that separation is a real and current prospect in the short term. I consider that to be false. I think that it is an asymptotic extreme case that will never be reached.

(a) long before the ICANN & PTI model would have 'failed' (not my word), other interests and authorities would have intervened, definitively. 
There is no question of any particular sub-set of the ICANN community ever taking over the IANA functions, nor part of them, through separation.

(b) we should all realise that far beyond the CWG and CCWG mailing lists there is a very large community of users who are greater than the scope of the ICANN community and of our working groups, who would be utterly shocked if they were ever to find that the Internet infrastructure had been destabilised by the actions of those whose primary responsibility is to ensure the opposite.
(c) long ago, governments realised that the management of the unique Internet root was critical to their economic, political and social interests in the stability of the global Internet.
Consequently, in the event of separation – which I do not expect – I am quite sure that the Governments and the other AC's would 'follow the root'. Thus, as I have already pointed out, the idea that PTI would not have AC's is unrealistic. PTI draft bylaws refer.

Jurisdiction: I think it was Phil who asked me to explain my point of view, which is basically to take jurisdiction off the agenda until there are viable alternatives on the table.
Meanwhile:

(a) it is quite clear that the USA is not yet willing to contemplate a change of jurisdiction
(b) most of the rest of the world does not support the US position; thus we confront an intrinsic element of instability in the global Internet in the long term. 
That which will have to be managed for the time being. As has already been the case.

(c) I concur that there is apparently not yet a platform of international law that would permit and welcome the incorporation of an international multistakeholder entity such as ICANN. That will happen, but not yet. But let's be creative; in 1996 the ICANN formula itself would not have been credible. (Thankyou, Ira.)
(d) Consequently, the idea that US Jurisdiction over ICANN should be entrenched in ICANN's 'Fundamental Bylaws' could very well be read, world-wide, as a provocation and give rise to reactions elsewhere that would not atall conform to the other – more important - objectives of the Transition. No. 

I trust that these comments help to clarify my point of view. I do not expect all of you to agree with them, and I hope that we may have an opportunity in Helsinki to move forward on some of these issues.

May I say, however, that whatever is the WS2 interest in jurisdiction, the main, immediate, issue for WS2 is the transparent accountability of the representatives of the SO's and the AC's to their own constituencies and to the ICANN community as a whole.

Regards

CW


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