[MemberPubPol] Re: [chapter-delegates] FYI - in the coming discussion of the WGIG questionnaire

[Vittorio Bertola]

Fred Baker ha scritto:
> If the right thing to do is to make ICANN a treaty organization or move 
> its functions to one

That's not necessarily the only solution. Other options could include 
making ICANN an international organization not part of the UN system, 
but in any case not subject to the power of a single governments, both 
in terms of operations (i.e. that would require the elimination of the 
current veto power by the US DoC on root zone edits) and of regulation 
(the host country agreement thing that Avri was mentioning).

> we're obviously the right people for the job" doesn't work. I need an 
> argument that points out issues with the current structure - ICANN, 
> RIRs, registrars and registries, etc etc etc and demonstrates that none 
> of those problems would have happened if ICANN had been a treaty 
> organization and no new problems would have materialized,

No, sorry, the fact that something worked well in the past, in a 
homogeneous and collaborative environment like the Internet was until 
the end of the Nineties, does not prove that it will work well in the 
future, in a different environment. The past history of ICANN is made of 
successes (bringing competition to the registrar market, for example), 
mixed results (the UDRP), and failures (bringing real competition to the 
registry market, for example). But not just ICANN is at stake - see the 
examples I made about .iq or about aljazeera.net, which depend on the 
entire DNS management system rather than just on ICANN. I don't think 
that a UN organization would have so shamefully reappointed Verisign to 
manage .net, or let .iq be offline for over a year.

I think that a number of significant problems have been pointed out with 
the present system, and so we should understand how to fix them (of 
course, without breaking what works well in the present system).

> If you 
> sense skepticism in my voice, you sense well. My question about Taiwan's 
> country code is a very real one, and very painful for the people of 
> Taiwan...

At the same time, I prefer to have political injustices that are the 
result of global political negotiations among all governments in the 
proper institutional framework of the United Nations, rather than 
political injustices at the will of the US Government only.

> Regarding the anti-US sentiment, I have to say that I think the tone of 
> this entire discussion would be dramatically different if ICANN were a 
> non-treaty organization incorporated in some other country, such as 
> Ireland, Japan, or whatever.

In part, you are right (though it is not only the incorporation place of 
ICANN that counts, but also the specific powers given to the US 
Government by its procedures). However, this discussion did not start 
because of "anti-US sentiment", but because the US are actively and 
openly making menaces against quite some other countries of the world - 
and, in some cases, they are putting them in practice. Can you blame 
these countries if they want to ensure that the Internet is not used as 
a military or commercial warfare tool against them?

If one country wants to run or oversee global resources on behalf of the 
rest of the world, it has to gain the trust of the entire world 
(countries like Switzerland, for example, managed to do so). If the US 
foreign policy (which is an external factor to this discussion) prevents 
this from happening, all we can do is to find a manager that is more 
acceptable to everyone. At the same time, that's not "anti-US 
sentiment", but rather the consequence of a reasonable analysis of the 
situation.

In other words, I think that the discussion would have been the same if 
ICANN was incorporated in Ireland or Japan, if they were countries 
repeatedly starting wars against other countries.
-- 
vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<-----
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