On 2015-07-13 04:48, George Sadowsky wrote:
But I would like to push back on your belief that past practice, while interesting, is not relevant to our discussion. I believe that it is relevant, if only to agree with George Santayana's statement that people who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. [..]
But it should also help the CCWG, in that where there is factually verified and agreed upon evidence of out of bounds behavior by the Board (or for that matter any other organization in the ICANN orbit), one of your "stress tests"should be to discuss what kind of reaction that behavior would produce if one or more of your accountability models had been in place at the time. I would think that this is a necessary test of any new accountability proposal. Wouldn't not doing this be a failure of due diligence?
Generally I agree with Jonathan when he says that accountability is desirable per se, and improvements should be put in place because they are desirable in their own right, and should not have to be justified by reference to some past misdemeanour they are intended to correct. On the other hand, the advice I quote above from George is also compelling: if we fail to address identifiable problems that have arisen before, then that would be delinquency on our part. So it seems to me that the question of past issues is not symmetrical: evidence of past problems is relevant input to justify a proposed accountability improvement, but a lack of evidence of past misbehaviour is not relevant input as to why a proposed accountability improvement is not necessary. Malcolm -- Malcolm Hutty | tel: +44 20 7645 3523 Head of Public Affairs | Read the LINX Public Affairs blog London Internet Exchange | http://publicaffairs.linx.net/ London Internet Exchange Ltd 21-27 St Thomas Street, London SE1 9RY Company Registered in England No. 3137929 Trinity Court, Trinity Street, Peterborough PE1 1DA