There is no requirement in the revised Bylaws that the Global Public Interest be determined, or that such a determination is needed (or even desirable) for ICANN (the Board, the Corporation and/or the Community) to make decisions..

There is a requirement that if the Global Public Interest is determined, it will be done by the multistakeholder community through an inclusive bottom-up multistakeholder community process.

MM: Agreed.

a determination of the "public interest."  ICANN is no exception.  The "Global Public Interest" standard has been in ICANN's Bylaws since the beginning; this is nothing new

MM: No, it hasn’t. Check if you wish: https://www.icann.org/resources/unthemed-pages/bylaws-1998-11-23-en

ICANN was incorporated as a California “public benefit corporation” (i.e., a nonprofit) but the “global public interest” standard is quite new and those of us with knowledge of history of utility regulation in the U.S. understand where a public interest standard comes from and what are its implications (basically, blanket grant of authority to determine what is good for us). Most of us don’t want ICANN to have that power. Some people still can’t cough out an acknowledgment that ICANN is a regulator.

Dr. Milton L. Mueller

Professor, School of Public Policy

Georgia Institute of Technology