On Monday 08 August 2016 04:26 PM, John Curran wrote:
snip
Parminder - 

    ICANN by its function is not a "public governance body” - it is actually a coordination 
    body that supports the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s various identifier 
    systems.

Thanks for your response John. I dont see why the latter (Internet identifier coordination) cannot be or isnt a subset of the former (public governance) . More specifically, I dont see how, for instance, allocation of a generic language term, of immense cultural value, .book, as privately owned gTLD to Amazon, in complete violation of the spirit of trademark laws, is not a public governance or public policy issue.

OECD defines Public governance as ""the formal and informal arrangements that determine how public decisions are made and how public actions are carried out, from the perspective of maintaining a country’s constitutional values in the face of changing problems, actors and environments" . (You may just have to change from 'country's' to the 'world's' to talk about a global public governance function.)  Are ICANN decisions and actions not public decisions and public actions?

I dont see how the most important and contested functions of ICANN are of not a public governance nature. If it is were only doing some technical management, maybe 30 people sitting is a small office somewhere could have achieved it rather well, rather than this whole big juggernaut that we know ICANN to be.  

Also note that ICANN's charter speaks about its raison d'tre to be of 'lessening the burdens of government ' which clearly makes its work to be of public governance (and its implementation) nature. ((I know this term is used specifically to claim tax exemptions, but I am sure this cannot be a false claim.)



    This does not in any way impinge on your main point: i.e. that ICANN should operate
    under very high transparency requirements – only that it should do so because such
    transparency was a basic tenet of its establishment and remains so to this day.

So, if I paraphrase and extrapolate rightly,  you are saying that ICANN is just whatever it says it is, and that is it. No external cannons of public propriety - like transparency, accountability, etc can be applied to it. It is sui generis and sovereign in its constitution.  It is these kinds of unabashed political claims about ICANN that most worry many of us. (And the effort then to extend the ICANN model to other aspects of global, and then perhaps, national, public governance -  a post democratic governance system.)  And these, explicitly or implicitly, are inherent in much of the thinking of the current establishment around ICANN. It is difficult to engage and argue at the level of the details of institutional structures and systems, when the real difference is at such a higher political principles level.

parminder


Thanks!
/John

p.s.  my views alone (and perhaps that of the ICANN bylaws, to some extent…)