Malcolm, ICANN has been using the phrase "Global Public Interest" for years, and there has not been a problem. "Global Public Interest" in fact, defines the mission of ICANN in the right language. I would agree with anyone who prefers this phrase. If it is indeed risky to use the phrase "public interest", if it paves way for a Government claim that they are the ones authorized to care for public interest, if at all, then we could find and examine alternative phrases such as "Global User's Interest" or "Collective Interest" or "Stakeholder's common interest" or by coining a phrase using words such as benevolence. Sivasubramanian M Sivasubramanian M <https://www.facebook.com/sivasubramanian.muthusamy> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 2:55 PM, Malcolm Hutty <malcolm@linx.net> wrote:
On 2015-04-24 09:29, Burr, Becky wrote:
Malcolm, this reminds me that I have echoed Avri¹s sentiment that the public interest is something that can only be discovered through the bottom up multistakeholder process. Rather than take out references to ³the public interest² - which appears repeatedly in the AoC - I¹m going to take a stab at adding that concept.
Thanks for reminding me.
That would certainly help with the "'public interest' means 'government' (to some people at least)" aspect.
There's also the scope problem: the concern that, to some people, taking decisions in the public interest means co-opting ICANN's powers in relation to DNS as a tool to achieve public interest objectives that themselves have nothing to do with a well-functioning DNS per se. We're tried our best to constrain this through the scope and fundamental commitments, but it's a difficult problem and all efforts are necessarily imperfect.
I still worry that this language weighs in on the wrong side of this latter issue problem, and would like to find an alternative way of expressing what I think is meant, that didn't introduce this weakness. As I said, I think the wording in the Fundamental Commitments section is preferable to that proposed for the "core values" section.
Given the addition to the "Fundamental Commitments" section, does that not satisfy? Is there really any need to also add this to the "Core Values" at all? What additional purpose does it serve?
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