[At-Large] [BMSPC-2020] Board seat 15 selection

Thu Nov 21 18:25:30 UTC 2019

The 1997-2001 period is a different country. The question I have is 
whether the sale of PIR by ISOC represents anything more than a bow to 
the now completely obvious.

Domain name registration via ICANN structures is not a public interest 
activity but a business with some strong cartel like features.

In this sense there is a real positive in ISOC acknowledging and 
clarifying the bigger picture by removing itself. The disposal suggests 
the need for a new approach by those concerned that people who are users 
of Internet resources are under influential in a structural long term 
sense in their governance and their management.

best Christian

On 21/11/2019 17:13, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
> After repeated failures of my email, I am posting with a new email 
> account, but it is still me, Roberto Gaetano   :-)
>
> I have a different reading than Olivier of both turning points that he 
> mentions. First of all, I am not so negative about the Bildt 
> recommendation. I might agree that the risk of having registrants 
> captured by domaines was a possibility, but I did not see it so 
> dangerous at that time, maybe because I was naif about the potential 
> push from civil society to avoid that.
> Also, I am a long time supporter of the approach where “the best is 
> good’s worst enemy” - I assume that you say that in English similarly 
> to how we say in Italian.
>
> A completely different story is my reading of the IAHC vs NewCo 
> proposals. I have been a supporter of the IAHC (actually, I was a 
> member of the POC - Policy Advisory Committee - as well as in the 
> Executive Committee of  CORE - Internet Council of Registrars - so I 
> admit I might have been biased.
> I never believed that NewCo would have delivered a “power to the 
> people” solution (neither would have the IAHC, btw), but at least they 
> could have broken NetSol’s monopoly - but even this minimal result was 
> achieved only partly, in the sense that the market share was left 
> almost untouched, but at least there has been a price control (the 
> very thing that is being now released). The Green Paper looked like 
> something that had been put together in a hurry, with the sole purpose 
> of stopping - or slowing down - the IAHC proposal, that with CORE 
> becoming operational as organization at the end of 1997 and with 
> development plans for an SRS ongoing was becoming dangerous. However, 
> the White Paper was different, it showed that there was a serious 
> effort to build an alternative proposal. That was obvious also looking 
> at the financial supporters, organisations like ATT, IBM, etc., 
> letting alone the power of USG. Having worked for 12 years for IBM I 
> have learned two things: they never release centralisation of the 
> power (this is the main reason why their network architecture failed, 
> but this is another story) and they never - or very, very rarely - bet 
> on losers.
> So I was convinced that, although the IAHC had the best approach, 
> NewCo would have prevailed in the end, and that it was a mistake not 
> to get involved in that project to try to obtain at least something. 
> This was a minority view in CORE and I ended up in being the only CORE 
> ExCom member to attend the first IFWP meeting in Reston.
> Anyway, long story short, had we the IAHC solution in operation, 
> registries would be acting as non-profit, leaving the competition and 
> the commercial aspect to registrars. This also means that we would not 
> have been here discussing about the sellout of a non-profit registry 
> to sa commercial investment fund that will transform it into something 
> different.
> But we can’t rewind history.
>
> On one point I fully agree with Olivier. As Chair of the DNSO GA, I 
> can confirm that some of the DNSO mailing lists discussions were 
> indeed toxic.
>
> Cheers,
> Roberto
>
>
>> On 19.11.2019, at 07:43, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond <ocl at gih.com 
>> <mailto:ocl at gih.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Wolfgang,
>>
>> thank you for your follow-up. Please find my comments inline:
>>
>> On 18/11/2019 22:05, Wolfgang Kleinwächter wrote:
>>> Bildt proposed that At Large membership should be open to 
>>> "individual domain name holders". The idea was to form six regional 
>>> At Large Councils (with five members) and a global At Large Council 
>>> (with 12 members/two from each of the six regions). Recognized At 
>>> Large members would have a right to vote for the five members of 
>>> their regional council and also vote for the regional Board 
>>> director. The plan was to have a balance in the ICANN board among 
>>> "developers" (technical community), providers (business) and users 
>>> (civil society) of services, with governments in an advisory capacity.
>>
>> A significant mistake was made by the Bildt Committee and that's to 
>> propose restricting membership to "individual domain name holders". 
>> The DNS is used by all users, not only by domain name holders. In 
>> fact, there is a designation for individuals that hold a large number 
>> of domain names and that's "domainer". So in fact Bildt was proposing 
>> ICANN to close itself into its microcosm of domain name businesses 
>> and domainers, quite the contrary from the openness that was 
>> displayed when ICANN first started.
>>
>> This was a significant step back for end users and I understand how 
>> some supporters of ICANN Version 1 were irritated enough to leave the 
>> process altogether. They felt betrayed. As someone who had been 
>> actively involved in supporting the "other" proposal, the Internet 
>> Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC - https://icannwiki.org/IAHC ), resulting in a 
>> gTLD MoU ( https://icannwiki.org/GTLD-MoU ) the debate became 
>> political very quickly, with concerns by US politicians that the Root 
>> and its resources would leave the USA. Upon hindsight, perhaps the 
>> IAHC's proposal was not end-user friendly, but I remember that one of 
>> the significant points made in the presentation of ICANN, along with 
>> the Green and White papers, was that it had a very strong end user 
>> component, through its election process. I think that a lot of 
>> people, reading this, myself included, shifted our view from 
>> supporting a gTLD MoU future to an ICANN future when this end user 
>> component was promoted. What happened during the re-organisation of 
>> ICANN was, in my view, nothing short of capture, and it took me until 
>> 2008 to accept it. BTW the DNSO mailing list discussions were toxic.
>> Kindest regards,
>>
>> Olivier
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