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

[cdel at firsthand.net]

Fred Baker wrote:
> So I guess I hear two points of discussion:
> - some would like ICANN to become a treaty organization, and may have 
> good reasons for their viewpoint.
Treaty organisations do NOT need to be like UN / ITU etc, which were 
formed at at time when the governmental model was monolithic and 
centralised. Today increasingly large parts of "government" is being 
managed privately. This newer model for government structures could also 
be extended to the formation of Treaty organisations. A new Treaty 
organisation could also be a "public / private" partnership. Also such 
bodies do not require neither large bureaucracies nor inflated roles, in 
fact the opposite is the case. They are more effective if they are lean 
and mean.
> - I still think I hear anti-US sentiment.
>
Yes I think there is some anti- US sentiment around and about but this 
does not imply that this explains calls for internationalising oversight 
over key Internet resource management. You can be very pro US and still 
believe that Internet resources should be managed and have oversight 
structures that are internationally responsive.

> If the right thing to do is to make ICANN a treaty organization or 
> move its functions to one, then I'm willing to support that. I have to 
> say that the argument for doing so needs to be laid out pretty 
> clearly, as the current treaty organizations haven't been inspiring. 
> But I'm willing for someone to make the case. The argument "we're from 
> government, so 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, or that there was a way to definitively handle new 
> problems that might arise. 

There are two main issues and neither of them are whether ICANN etc etc 
have done a good or bad job to get us to where we are today.

The first issue is about real-politik. This is to do with a basic 
question of control over resources as applied to Internet. This can be 
described as no one country should have top level control over all 
Internet resources. (as opposed to just those resources within a 
government's jurisdiction) i.e., this real-politik issue lies outside 
ICANN's managment role to date. However this political dimension would 
lie within ICANN should the DoC finally allocate its powers to ICANN as 
contracted. The implications of this real-politik issue on ICANN and the 
Internet community participating at ICANN needs further discussion as I 
have some doubts as to whether such a handover of real politik to ICANN 
without some changes is in fact going to be good for the continuing 
stability of Internet resource allocation.

A seond issue relating to ICANN is its corporate US legal status. This 
is a jurisdictional issue. A way to explain this is to note the 
following phenomenon. Increasingly US prosecutors are extraditing people 
from around the world on charges involving activities with a US 
corporation by a non US company for whom they work entirely outside the 
US on charges which are not a crime in their own country of origin. This 
has happened several times this year in the UK. The latest case has 
involved two bankers of the UK's Nat West bank extradited on legislation 
passed to deal with terrorism but being extradited as part of 
investigations into a US corporation - Enron. This extra-territorial 
reach is being increasingly used by US prosecutors and has potentially 
enormous implications for Internet users and in particular for the 
Internet industry internationally with ICANN a US corporation. ICANN 
could potentially be usesd as a Trojan without its consent by aggressive 
US prosectors perhaps with a political axe to grind to reach across the 
world through the use of Internet resources. This would be an abuse of ICANN

Now if you put these two issues together we have a potential for 
situations that could jeapordise the good work currently being done by 
the Internet community (IAB. RIR's, tld registries, etc etc) 
co-ordinating through ICANN. So I think in the interests of the broader 
Internet stability as well as for Internet for Everyone we have to deal 
with this.

> 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. There is not currently a ccTLD for the Palestinian 
> Authority, because .pl hasn't made it onto the right ISO list, but 
> Palestinians can indeed get domain names - they just happen to be 
> Israeli. For the people of Taiwan to use VoIP across borders, they 
> have to work around the ITU's enum registry, and are currently moving 
> in that direction. ITU, by its mismanagement of the registry, may 
> completely lose control of it over time.
>
On Palestine check out http://www.nic.ps/about/about.html

We can't change the political world overnight. What we can and must do 
is make sure that Internet resources are available, and managed 
equitably for all and that the Internet remains open at the edges which 
is where the real innovation happens.

> <tangent>
> One of the things I find most clueless in that discussion, BTW, is a 
> particular slide I have seen in s zillion presentations. In 1999, I 
> (among others including Paul Wilson) met with the Ministry of 
> Information Industry in China, and told the Vice Minister that his 
> country needed to move to IPv6 for reasons related to addressing. That 
> was during the ChinaInet Conference in Beijing in June of that year. 
> In the same conference the following year, I showed a slide that 
> started from Geoff Huston's numbers regarding IP routes and 
> demonstrated that the IPv4 address space was become very fragmented. I 
> also spoke about IPv4 address allocations (IPv4 addresses are today 
> about 65% allocated, and depending on how you read the tea leaves 
> could be 100% allocated somewhere between 2008 and 2014), and the 
> number of addresses then allocated to China. I pointed out that for 
> historical reasons there was a certain university in the US that had 
> as many addresses as China, and that China's need for IPv4 addresses 
> presuming the same network penetration as in the US could not be met 
> in the IPv4 address space. I argued that China would do well to 
> seriously consider moving to IPv6 at the earliest possible juncture 
> (something China is actively doing). Those particular slides have made 
> it into talks from any number of corporations, and into ITU talks, and 
> in the latter are used to argue that the imbalance would never have 
> happened if the ITU had been managing the address space. Well, 
> bologna. First, it is making an irrelevant point from data that is not 
> relevant to that discussion. Second, it is without attribution (my 
> slide said it was copyright Cisco Systems). Third, if ITU had been 
> managing the address space, it would have had the same history and the 
> same set of considerations that went into managing the address space, 
> and would very likely have made similar allocations.
> </tangent>
Actually it might have been far worse if the ITU had allocated IP 
addresses as it would not have done so on the basis of internet 
georgraphy but on the basis of political geography This would have 
created shortages of IP addresses much earlier in the US and faster 
growing economies and possibly stymied the growth of Internet we've seen 
since 1995.


>
> 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. I get pretty used to encountering 
> yankee-go-home sentiment wherever I go, but that doesn't stop it from 
> grating on me.
>
>
Would the Orange order of Ulster be delighted to see this in Eire? And 
how delighted would the Chinese be to see this in Japan! :-)

> On Jun 7, 2005, at 10:02 AM, avri doria wrote:
>
>>
>> On 7 jun 2005, at 01.32, Fred Baker wrote:
>>
>>> If one assumes that DoC does not renew its contract with ICANN but 
>>> rather cedes control to ICANN entirely, would his arguments about 
>>> ICANN then persuade you that ICANN is a global organization that 
>>> happens to be incorporated in California, much like ITU is a global 
>>> organization that happens to have a physical instantiation in 
>>> Geneva? If not, why not? Is this simply anti-US sentiment on your 
>>> part, or is it based on something more solid?
>>
>>
>> I made the same argument you made Fred (go figure) while talking to 
>> professionals who knew about treaty organizations and host country 
>> agreements. And though they gave me a much more erudite response then 
>> I am able to give, they essentially indicated that there is an 
>> essential difference between an organization that has a host 
>> agreement with a country and an organization that is incorporated 
>> under US (or any other country's) law.
>>
>> When an organization like the Red Cross is hosted by Switzerland, and 
>> there are many other examples, they make agreements to abide with 
>> local laws, such as sanitation and labor laws, but are not subject to 
>> any national legislation, instead being governed by the agreement or 
>> treaty made with the host government.
>>
>> On the other hand, a US corporation, whether for profit or non-profit 
>> is subject to all US laws, including laws that specify which other 
>> countries they can do business with and conditions they must follow 
>> in so doing. Saying this is not anti-US rhetoric, but US law as i 
>> understand it. Now, it may be anti-US bias to assume that the US 
>> would use it law making capability to force ICANN to punish an evil 
>> doer, but it is not anti-US bias to say that they would be within 
>> legal rights in doing so if they wished.
>>
>> So, to my mind, ICANN cannot become a full fledged international 
>> organization without shifting from its current existence as a US 
>> corp, to becoming an organization established with a host country 
>> agreement - even if that country were the US (the UN and others have 
>> host country agreements of the type discussed with the US).
>>
>> a.
Yes.

But we need a lightweight top level public / private structure for this 
and not an institution built on 19th Century frameworks such as the ITU. 
This is not to knock the ITU and its many good works. It is just not the 
right place for this activity.

ICANN is a hugely innovative structure that has lasted for 7 years plus. 
It has always been damaged by its US corporate status and has failed 
consequently to be seen as a completely international entity. We need to 
continue to push for the value of establishing innovative international 
structures that meet real needs of a global society. Governements are 
hugely important to this but they need strong private institutions to 
work with.


Christian