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



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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