Thank you Mathieu and everyone who has worked on this document.
This is a bit wordy and is basically thinking aloud for sharing a perspective with colleagues here in the CCWG.
I've read the paper a couple of times over this morning and in thinking about the whole of our work, and our links with the CWG's work, I have been mulling on the following question:
How can stakeholders assure themselves of having the means to hold ICANN to account, following the end of the IANA contract?
This comes to an underlying question of "who should have the power?"
Is this "power" question our paper should address more explicitly?
Is it a question we could ask of the advisors?
It's a question that seems implicit in the document and in much of the detail we've been working on (in both workstreams), and in some of the debates that have been complicating the CWG's work.
If you look at all this across the whole scope of ICANN's role, the protocol and numbers communities are saying "we have the power" as stakeholders - that's why their transition proposals include contracts/MOUs with ICANN as the service provider of the IANA functions.
Names hasn't decided yet, but the CWG is working on that question in respect of IANA.
For our CCWG, a question we have to answer about ICANN's general accountability is "who has the power to hold the corporation to account?" In doing so, we won't be able to ignore the question of whether this can be done entirely within ICANN's structures, or whether a wider set of structures is needed.
That's the issue that underpins debates like:
- should the power to remove the ICANN Board be vested in a community grouping, or simply be a procedure followed by ICANN bodies, and anyway is either option available under California law?
- does the IANA stewardship transition for names need an external trust or contract co to make accountability work?
I wonder whether this paper deals explicitly enough with the question of power.
I looked at the NetMundial text in particular and wonder about the fact that most of the stakeholders in the multistakeholder environment are accountable to someone - members, or stakeholders, or national governments, or shareholders, whatever. Most of the global institutions are either state-based or connected to such (e.g. the IGF), or have various sorts of membership structures. These linkages keep them all accountable in one way or another.
The global organisations that don't have this seem to be things like FIFA or the International Olympic Committee.... entities that don't hold positive lessons for us in designing a post-NTIA-contract settlement for ICANN, except perhaps as warnings to us about what doesn't work.
Anyhow, food for thought perhaps.