[ALAC] Fwd: draft NCSG accountability statement

[Holly Raiche]

Hi Evan

I largely agree with this.  

ALAC is very much a late comer to the ICANN structure and as long as all that we want is tweaking around the edges to make things more user friendly, it can be accommodated.  But I think we are asking ICANN - indeed the whole transition process is asking ICANN - to step back and look at the structure.  The easy answer - and one that, in the end may be accepted, is that the ASO and all of its structures within - work well and can managed the really fundamental tasks of numbering and routing.  The real issues lie with the names - the growing number of them - and how to manage that in a way that has, as its core (not on the periphery) users.  The accountability piece fits in there - which is why it fits so nicely into the FCWG - and why it will be soooo difficult.

That said, the immediate task is to have the comments summarised.  Which brings us back to the letter - which I think we all support in principle, so it’s a matter both of wording and maybe a direct approach, explaining that the FCWG will be dealing with the accountability issue, and does not want to reinvent the wheel, so could we please, have a summary.

Does that work for you?

Holly


On 13 Aug 2014, at 6:32 am, Evan Leibovitch <evan at telly.org> wrote:

> 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
>