[NA-Discuss] Foreign Policy and the Internet

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Hi Glenn,

I'm running for the North American RALO ALAC Rep, not writer for
Foreign Policy, so I'm going to skip over the low hanging fruit like
whether the ITU is an obscure UN agency and so forth.

The At-Large issue is the ALAC advice to the corporation board ...
will it help the board or ... not, and the NARALO issue is which of
its candidates to elect, representing the region, which will best
contribute to the ALAC authoring advice which will help the Board.

You may recall that the US DoC/NTIA issued a Request for Information
on the IANA Function, a NOTICE under the Administrative Procedures Act
(APA).  The response of the CEO, and presumably the Board, a COMMENT
under the APA, viewed the IANA Functions as integral to the larger
role of the contractor (ICANN).

The views of then-CEO Beckstrom were endorsed by the ALAC in its COMMENT.

The DoC/NTIA received several comments which offered a significantly
different view on the contractual dependency of the IANA Functions and
other functions exercised by the contractor (ICANN). I wrote one,
co-signed by Beau Brendler and Jean-Jacques Subrenat, as did Bill
Manning and Dimtry Burkov.

You may also recall that the DoC/NTIA rejected the theory offered in
the Beckstrom letter and subsequently published a Request for
Proposals in the Federal Register for a competitive award of the IANA
Function, independent of the other roles carried out by the current
contractor.

The point I'm attempting to make is that agreement isn't advice, and
the ALAC, which includes a candidate in the current election, agreed
with a view rejected by government -- its advice did not help the Board.

Obviously, which candidate this RALO elects as its ALAC Rep can have
an effect on the counsel available to the Board from the ALAC.

This is a long note, and I've not even gotten to the thicket of
interests, issues and choices that eventually do present the
opportunity for ALAC to advise the Board -- possibly not in agreement
with the prevailing expressions of interest and framing of issues and
consequences of choices.  I'll take these up in what I hope will be a
two cups of coffee note, like this one, tomorrow, or the next day I
have network access, somewhere on the north shore of Lake Superior.

Eric Brunner-Williams
Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012