On Fri, Jul 08, 2016 at 05:40:29PM -0400, Greg Shatan wrote:
the mission (once stated in the Articles but now only in the Bylaws). What does the "operational stability of the Internet" mean? Based on 17 years of experience, that should not be narrowly defined. If ICANN's interest was truly limited to keeping the pipes open and flowing, the whole New gTLD Program would be outside the mission. Any innovation would be aimed solely at keeping the trains running (e.g., IPv6) but not to making a market in domain names (at any level).
I thought a significant part of the rather tortured discussion we had about the Mission was precisely to counter that the tendency of ICANN (or others) to think that its scope of interest -- public or otherwise -- in the stability of the Internet is properly limited. The Internet doesn't need ICANN or anyone else to invent innovations for the Internet -- the operators and inventors of Internet technology are quite good at doing that all on their own, as I think the 17 years of experience equally demonstrates.
In any event, any serious discussion of the Global Public Interest would have to start with the question of "The Global Public Interest in what?"
This I couldn't agree with more. A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com