[ALAC] Fwd: draft NCSG accountability statement

[Evan Leibovitch]

My own take -- repeated from comments on the NARALO call -- is that the
cause for the current mess is neither malice nor incompetence on the part
of ICANN management.

ICANN's staffers are generally intelligent people who do not seek actively
to put down the community. Having said that, I think that we have clear and
ongoing evidence that the ICANN bureaucracy -- especially at the highest
levels -- have never understood the imperative to fully engage stakeholders
at the bottom of the pyramid. This is especially true regarding those
stakeholders upon whom ICANN is not directly dependent for revenue.
Fundamental misunderstanding of the global public's needs from ICANN has
led to a top down approach, because staff simply does not have (and has
never really had) any idea how to do it otherwise.

Until now, ICANN has been able to brush aside such difficulty thanks to an
active domain industry and a relatively low profile. With the massive gTLD
expansion causing so many unanticipated policy problems and the coming
globalization of the IANA stewardship, that low profile is gone. The
response has been an attempt to manage a community whose importance, and
whose needs, ICANN has traditionally been able to ignore.

Legally, ICANN is a California nonprofit whose Directors have a fiduciary
duty to ... ICANN. Functionally, however, it acts as a global regulator and
manager of a critical Internet resource; since it is not a treaty
organization or recognized regulatory agency, it must perform its work
through contracts and allocations while banning internal use of the "R"
word. These contracts and allocations have been driven by policy
development which, while superficially multi-stakeholder, has been
dominated by self-interested parties (registries, their agents and
commodity domain traders) which have now essentially made ICANN's financial
health dependent on theirs.

This friction ... between ICANN's professed duty to serve the public and
its internal duty to serve the industry which is its majority revenue
source ... is IMO at the heart of its staff's inability to accommodate what
are in fact multiple different (and quite divergent) "community"
accountability needs. Indeed, it is my observation that the needs of the
domain industry are quite different from those of the public interest; all
we really agree upon is that the current process is unworkable. The current
tinkering does not address the core problems and IMO is incapable of
producing a result that satisfies the ICANN accountability needs required
to serve the global public interest.

​While I agree with the NCSG statement in its identification of the
problems in the current staff proposal, I am increasingly pessimistic about
the ability of *any* process that is designed and managed by an ICANN
​bureaucracy that has its own self-interest in the outcome, and still does
not grasp the true global responsibility at hand. I am trying to come up
with an alternative but will hold back further comment until the next SO/AC
meeting later this week.

- Evan