Dear Evan, please be so kind to find my responses interspersed in your text: On 01/03/2019 11:39, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
There are other models of MS which I have liked better than ICANN's. The IETF does IMO a good job keeping corporate interests heard but not forced upon it. The model used at the Netmundial conference in 2014 struck a better balance between business, government and public interest, and deserves consideration. There may be other models of which I am not aware.
Of course some will dispute the IETF as being expensive for participants since one has to pay to register to attend an IETF meeting and it is nearly impossible to get a standard through the IETF process without physically attending an IETF meeting - or more than one. Others, primarily from Civil Society, will tell you that NetMundial was a complete failure. Remember how Civil Society withdrew its support at the end? So your balance may not be the balance that others see as being balanced. And that's already the first problem of MS models.
Meanwhile ... the current status quo is propped up by never-ending FUD that the only alternative to ICANN's model of industry capture is the ITU model of government capture. Of course, the ITU does its part to support ICANN by periodically holding meetings so incompetently run so to justify the fear. What is not spoken about is the fact that genuine options exist beyond these two undesirable extremes.
Please elaborate on these options. I remember when ICANN was created there were several alternative options on the table. I wonder what would have happened, had we followed these options rather than ICANN.
Once upon a time I believed that the Internet Governance Forum was the perfect place in which alternative models could be designed and proposed. That belief has diminished as I have found the IGF over time to revel in its own insignificance, and contents itself to fret over the situation without considering real change. I have no idea where true innovation in this field will come, and this realization is a major source of my current cynicism.
Recently the MAG Chair has attempted to address the deficit of (a) funding and (b) involvement from the Private Sector by holding discussions with the World Economic Forum (WEF). The pushback from Civil Society was vigorous. With such parochial outlook I cannot see the IGF being able to evolve into a true multi-stakeholder dialogue... let alone being able to actually run anything operationally.
If a sane alternative does not arise, we will continue to be presented with nothing more than choice between the ICANN or ITU ways of doing things. Eventually the ITU will win this binary duel because ultimately governments will tire of the unwillingness of ICANN to truly incorporate the public interest into its decision-making. And I remind once again that there is no international treaty requiring the countries of the world to acknowledge ICANN as manager of the global DNS; ICANN's mandate is maintained through inertia and (ever-diminishing) goodwill.
That is the only point which I do not agree with you. I am not so sure that the ITU will win because it is so incredibly inefficient, political and clueless when it comes to anything operational. The ITU sustains development and negotiates standards. It is totally incapable of managing resources operationally. Second, regarding international treaties: the Internet sits outside international treaties full stop. It would have never existed had it required any kind of international treaty. Networks that had previously been build with the mandate of an international treaty failed commercially. The Internet is a network of networks where all networks participating strike agreements with others to carry their traffic and their interlocutors strike agreements with others to carry their and your traffic - and this is all based on trust and peering contracts. Nothing stops any network from losing trust in the Internet and pulling out. That's indeed what several countries keep on threatening and they forget that in the 90s, they were the ones that asked to get connected to the Internet to start with. I know that first hand as I helped connect some of them. The Internet runs on a circle of trust. The 13 root servers are trusted to be a stable and reliable source of top level domain data that's amended in the A root, itself trusted to be a stable and reliable database of a stable addressing tree of generic top level domains and country code top level domains. ICANN is trusted by all parties to be the right location to issue orders regarding this database, using clearly laid out and stable procedures. It is also trusted by all parties to be the location for discussing the policy related to generic top level domains and to take decisions about these. So if one or more of the parties loses that trust, then they are welcome to leave. And that's the fragile world that ICANN lives in. If the GAC gets fed up that it is completely ignored, it can leave. It could look to find a home within ITU for example - a dream that Richard Hill has had for some time. If the ASO, doing so little in ICANN and most of its work within the RIRs decides to leave, it could do. Ultimately if these organisations were to leave, it would weaken ICANN's multistakeholder model as without governments, ICANN's model is no longer multistakeholder. ICANN would also lose a lot of legitimacy in the face of governments without an incumbent forum for governments within its ranks. So where does this take us? Well the question I periodically ask is "Are we ready, we, as in the wider ICANN community that includes all stakeholders, for an ICANN Version 3.0"? - ICANN 1.0: ICANN as it was set-up with a caretaker Board, and then a global direct At-Large election process to fill at least half of the ICANN Board seats. Deemed to have failed. - ICANN 2.0: in 2002/2003 creation of ALAC, stripping Board director. SOs/ACs structure that we know today, with reduced power for ACs and increased powers for SOs, especially the GNSO. - ICANN 2.5: ICANN 2.0 with the US government contract replaced by an empowered community that has powers to keep the ICANN Board under control. - ICANN 3.0: a new structure with a core public interest mandate. Recently I held long discussions with some old timers in the UK and elsewhere. Whilst I lived the transition from ICANN 1.0 to ICANN 2.0 from the fringes, I was not part of the core group then, and I wanted to understand what was the overwhelming force that came upon ICANN to go from version 1.0 to version 2.0. I was told this was complex but it involved some of the very big players out there, that drove it forward, not necessarily players that knew the consequences of what the changes were going to be, but there apparently was a real will to improve ICANN then. I am a rather pragmatic player when it comes to such things, with sometimes a sense of immobility that betrays my age. Right now, I do not see the overwhelming force out there to evolve ICANN from 2.0 to 3.0. I do not see enough big players adhering to this scenario. I do not see matters being so bad as to warrant an emergency summit to "save ICANN" - because only then, would the huge commercial forces currently holding ICANN into its current state because it serves their purposes, bow down as for them it would be a choice between reluctantly accepting a new ICANN 3.0 or losing it all. Now I might be completely wrong too. I infamously told Larry Strickling during dinner at an ATRT2 meeting that if he wanted to be remembered for his action, he could take the unprecedented step of relinquishing the US Government control on the Root but that if he was to launch such a process, he would face the biggest hurdle in the US Congress -- and that I was therefore convinced that it could not be done within less than 5 years. Well, Larry had the courage and determination to do it much faster and although it was not without its dramas, it worked. Perhaps should we follow the motto "Who Dares Wins". But as I have said it in the past, this is likely to be a high stakes, high power, particularly treacherous path which would need a lot of allies. It could be very dangerous for ICANN itself. But then the world has never advanced by sticking to the status quo. Kindest regards, Olivier