[Chapter-delegates] The kinds of objections (was Re: Join our call to stop the sale of .org)

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

I appreciate this message; it's helpful to be clear about the kinds of
objections people have.  But I'm not sure your list is complete.  I
think there are two large categories of objection, which can be
distinguished, and I am not sure I understand them all.  Below is an
attempt to lay out some objections I think people have, but I'm not
sure it's complete and I'm not sure I'm describing them correctly.
I'd welcome feedback on the categorization or the attempts to
describe.

On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 09:54:50AM +0200, Coenraad Loubser via Chapter-delegates wrote:

> It's clear that the first announcement from ISOC should've been to the
> effect of: "Should we detach .ORG PIR from ISOC?" rather than "it's getting
> sold." - and that the first release to the effect of a sale, if agreed
> upon, should be such that it could read: "It is the consensus of the ISOC
> constituents that the .ORG PIR should be sold."

	1.  The consultative objection	

I think this description is of one particular line of objection, which
has sub-categories.  This objection is basically what I think of as a
consultative one: "[people] were not consulted".  There is more than
one expansion of [people].

	1.1		Consultation inside the Internet Society

One expansion is that the chapters were not consulted in advance.
Another is that the members of ISOC were not consulted.  Not all
members are chapter members (and organizational members are a
different class).  Both of these positions in effect claim that the
appointment of people to the Board of Trustees is inadequate for
governance of certain kinds of decisions, and in the case of such
decisions the chapters or members need to be consulted directly.  I
think I understand this position, though I think it is at odds with
our governance structures.

	1.2		Consultation outside the Internet Society

A different line of objection I have seen is that the [people]
expansion should have been the ICANN community, or "the .org
community" (which seems to be really a stand-in for a certain stripe
of global non-profits, and not everyone with a .org name
registration), or all .org registrants, or the global community of
anyone interested in the Internet.  In this case, the consultation is
not in any way constrained by ISOC governance rules.  It isn't clear
to me how this sort of thing would work, but I guess I can imagine a
few ways to start.  One could maintain that this is an obligation ISOC
took on (implicitly, since it's definitely not explicit in any
agreement or commitment) when it took on the .org registry back in
2002-3.

	2.	The public good objection

This objection is very different from the previous one, because it
basically claims that there is no legitimate way for ISOC to act to
remove the responsibility to .org.  The idea here is that .org is not
a business and can't be conceived that way.  Therefore, if ISOC wanted
to do this, it would be removing its own legitimacy and attacking .org
in some deep way.  (I think I'm not doing a very good job at
describing this, so if this seems like a caricature, I apologise.  I
only get the gist of this position, and don't really understand it.)
This is probaly often related to expressions of 1.2 above, but really
they're distinct things.

	2.1		Not-for-profit is required

A subsidiary version of this is that there is some essential quality
that flows from the designation of PIR as a non-profit or (I think
more plausibly) as owned by a not-for-profit entity.  This objection
is not exactly to the sale of the operation _at all_, but to the idea
that if it could be transferred it could never be to a for-profit
entity.

This is the position, I _think_, that is contained in statements that
it's wrong to talk about PIR as a business (as I heard in a radio
interview yesterday) or that it is illegitimate "even to consider" the
idea of selling .org.



Accepting any or all of these positions would yield different results
about whether one should ever consult (and whom one should if so)
about the idea of ISOC selling PIR.  But before we have that
discussion, I'd like to know whether I've understood the different
lines of objection and whether I've missed any.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
President & CEO, Internet Society
sullivan at isoc.org
+1 416 731 1261