I quite agree with you that "legitimacy" is important and can be difficult to achieve. I had not thought of how ICANN's perceived authority is weakened as the world tends to de-globalize into competing fiefdoms. I'm glad you brought that up. (My sense is that you have revealed to us something that is going to be a growing issue in the coming years.) If we start to think of other jobs the Internet needs then there is value in looking at what ICANN got right and what it got wrong. (Among those potential jobs are some that are quite touchy and sensitive, such as identification/authentication tokens, and some that will irritate those who think in terms of trade secrets, such as getting better handles on sources of damaging traffic.) I've usually thought that any body - whether it be ICANN or the Red Cross or whatever - achieves legitimacy as sort of an additive process performed both by national governments (usually by treaty or something similar) and by the body itself through doing its job well for a long time. ICANN has definitely done some things well for a quarter of a century - but often in the realm of taking credit for the work of root server operators. ICANN's imposition of business models and its heavy cost burden on consumers (by my estimate this cost is in the $billions) is not something that has been done well. (ICANN [perhaps under the guise of IANA] also did valuable, yeoman work, in conjunction with the IETF, with regard to multi-lingualization and DNSSEC.) Then there is the 25 year old fact that ICANN was designed (if not intentionally than naively) to be captured by those who it purports to regulate and has since become a pliable vehicle for the trademark branch of my tribe, Intellectual Property attorneys. These things do not contribute to the weight of legitimacy as measured by others not so well situated, such as the community of Internet users. As anyone who knows me knows, I'm a strong believer that our institutions ought to have clear and reasonably direct lines of accountability to the living, breathing people who populate our planet. Add to that that I reject the injection of bookkeeping conveniences (we call them "corporations") into those lines of accountability because they create means for multiplying of the influence of some, block the influence of others, and create opacity rather than transparency of the strings of accountability. As such I have believed that ICANN ought to be under the sole control of the public. And, further, that a wise exercise of that public role ought to be to view those we call "stakeholders" entirely through the lens of the individual people who hold those interests and thus represent those interests merely as members of the public, rather than through some elevated, privileged, ordained role as "stakeholder". (Of course, any wise member of the public ought to recognize that those we today call "stakeholders" often have expertise and views we ought to hear and consider.) I've held myself apart from the ALAC system. Not because I reject its value. But rather that I reject the Procrustean form that was forced upon it. To my mind it was designed to be of weak voice with weaker influence. In balance, after 25 years, the name "ICANN" tends to elicit more groans than lauds. That's not a path that leads to a solid, enduring foundation of legitimacy. --karl-- On 9/14/23 2:59 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
On Thu, Sep 14, 2023 at 3:54 PM Karl Auerbach via At-Large <at-large@atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:
Democracy Versus Stakeholderism
https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/stakeholder_sock_puppet/
There are many forms of stakeholderism. Some, like Netmundial's, have potential to be sustainable and adaptable for other environments. Other models, developed in standards-making environments, provide examples as diverse as the IETF's and ISO's.
And then there's ICANN's inmates-running-the-asylum model, by far worst of the bunch, in numerous ways explicitly designed to serve industry at the expense of the public interest. For all of its A&T noise the world has seen that ICANN's only real external accountability is to the California Attorney-General.
It is no coincidence that for most international treaties, the ICANN script is flipped; it is governments and public-interest groups who set the agenda while industry advises. Without the backing of such treaties, ICANN's decisions survive only because of governmental tolerance rather than validation. And as a result of said lack of validation, we have issues arise such as we have in this thread: "ICANN-approved" gTLDs which are ignored by significant swaths of the Internet (and without anyone realizing it for YEARS).
How can anyone be surprised? It is notable that even this shocking news was revealed by an industry-insider website and has received no mainstream coverage of which I'm aware. Nobody outside the ICANN bubble cares.
And this is ICANN at peak respect. As globalization declines, ICANN's lack of treaty backing is going to prove even more costly to international connectivity as time passes. It's going to get worse, not better.
- Evan