[At-Large] At-Large Digest, Vol 34, Issue 24

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

I think a point to make is the kinds of "public interest" ...

The GAC is capable of representing the public interests of competing, 
and cooperating, sovereigns.

The ALAC is capable of representing the public interests uninformed by 
sovereigns.

ISOC's scope is not specific to the addresses, domain names, and
autonomous system numbers, the public end point and resource 
identifiers and the public routing infrastructure, in its conception 
of the public interest and promotion of network technology.

The W3C is a corporate member organization, with very limited invited 
expert involvement.

The IAB shares the diversity of interest property of the ISOC, and to 
a very large extent, shares the corporate focus of the W3C.

Each of the W3C and the IAB lack the means to organically include 
substantive participation by populations currently served by "narrow 
band" or "intermittent" link technologies.

So the broadband-is-the-world view of the IAB/W3C/ISOC is defensible 
for the G8 member states, but it misses what the structure of the ALAC 
brings to ICANN (whether ICANN cares about narrow-or-no-band or not), 
and what the rest of the GAC, not just the G8 reps, also bring to ICANN.

I spent most of the past 24 hours in transit and not sleeping so I'm 
not offering a perfect paragraph. But three years off-grid using a 
VSAT taught me a lot about networking that isn't high-speed and 
high-capital and high-profile.

Eric