Nicely said Andrew! I’ll note we’ve wandered somewhat from Parminder’s original note - it was regarding transparency, and I actually think there’s very little disagreement in that regard - ICANN should operate to the highest transparency standards. I would argue that such is a underlying required principle of policy-setting and operations for all of the various IANA registries (as elaborated in RFC 7500 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7500>), whereas Parminder seems to assert such a requirement due to his perception that ICANN's resembles some form of “public governance body. “ Either way, the important outcome is the requirement for transparency. /John p.s. my views alone.
On Aug 14, 2016, at 11:56 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 09:26:48AM -0500, Pranesh Prakash wrote:
Those are standards-setting bodies. Those of us who study patents (and especially patent pools) believe that they too wield power, and are important governance actors. They aren't mere "coordination" bodies.
Could you say more about what you think the differences are among "coordination", "wielding power", and "governance"; and also whether you think there is a difference between the way that those terms apply to standards development organizations that work as effective patent pools and those that do not? It seems to me that some of these distinctions could make a difference.
here. If one goes by the definition of "Internet governance" that emerged from the WGIG ("Internet governance is the development and application of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programs that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.") then ICANN clearly engages in Internet governance.
[and later]
more it engages in a "governance" function. (A nation-state, even a minimalist one, after all, is a "coordination body - one that sets polices and charges various fees related to national affairs", but also a governance body.)
But the difference here is surely one of sovereignty. A nation-state's government can undertake "governance" in the sense that it can not only develop and apply "shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programs", but also that it can decide which of those are ones the violations of which people can be fined or go to jail or whatever. That is not something that other bodies can do.
Part of the reason some people (I, at least; I won't speak for John) get concerned about the word "governance" is because there is a tendency to slide pretty fast from "here are the rules" to "here are the controls by which we shall enforce your conformance to these rules." That latter move has a faint scent of the illegitimate about it, because in a network of networks there isn't anybody -- and shouldn't be anybody -- who has the legimtate authority to make the former move. For instance, …
only one canonical set of domain names. Even if you believe that ICANN only does "coordinating" (it emphatically doesn't), it's "coordination" definitely leads to my being governed by my ISP's choice to use ICANN-recognized root servers.
… it most definitely does not lead to that. Indeed, an awful lot of networks connected to the Internet _aren't_ using only the ICANN-recognized root servers, because just about everyone uses split DNS some of the time. Split DNS is just another way of accepting that the global name space is in fact not the only one. It's the only _global_ one, but there are lots of local ones. (This is a problem for global co-ordination, I agree.)
Moreover, you could just use another DNS root, if you wanted, even if your ISP didn't want to. The reason we don't see a lot of root splintering is not because of governance or rules. It's because fracturing the global namespace is much worse for everyone than having these choices. There is nothing in any rule or technology preventing an alternative root. What there is, however, is the vast utiity that accrues to everyone if we have just one namespace. So we have a tussle to work out what that namespace will look like.
So, I think that the emphasis on "governance" is at least problematic in two ways: it emphasises the role of sovereignty in a system that is designed almost exactly to resist such sovereignty, and it fails to acknowledge that the outcomes we appear to have are driven primarily by utility functions rather than governance.
Best regards,
A
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