On Sun, Mar 06, 2016 at 09:28:14AM +0000, Nigel Roberts wrote:
This is excellent and gets right to the heart of (one) of the misrepresentatons about the transition (that ICANN's fundamental structure will not change).
But it also unfortunately repeats another long-standing trope that leaves people with the impression ICANN has a more central role than it really does: "This includes developing and implementing policies on how key technical functions of the Internet operate." ICANN develops policies for one key technical function only: the root zone of the DNS. It is true that it implements other policies, but in the straightforward sense of "follows the instructions of the policy-developing organization" (i.e. the IETF and the RIRs). Moreover, this CCWG has worked very hard to make sure the ICANN mission is carefully limited in that one policy-development function. This CCWG has also worked hard to make sure that it would be very hard to change that mission in order to widen the scope. I don't want to suggest that the root is not important: it is. But ICANN doesn't control the DNS, only the root; so the change in ICANN's structure (which I freely acknowledge) does not mean that non-US governments are somehow getting control over the DNS. ICANN also doesn't control the Internet more generally, and if governments and the GAC were somehow able to use the new capabilites of the GAC to attempt (say) to impose new conditions on IANA operation of protocol parameters registries, I think we'd see pretty quickly a demonstration of the operation of the IANA oversight measures. And someone who is worried about that anyway has to explain how the new GAC powers actually make it capable of doing this anyway (the GAC is, after all, only one of the SOs and ACs in the Empowered Community). It isn't enough to observe that the structure of ICANN is changing. It is necessary at the same time to understand the limitations on action and the empowerment of the ICANN community that also comes along with this structural change. In my opinion, the trade off is worth it, because I believe the community is sufficiently mature to exercise its powers and thereby to counterbalance appropriately any change in the role of the GAC. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com