Re: [At-Large] "placeholder" reps not placeholders?
Bill, I'm surprised by this note. You wrote:
I exchanged a number of messages with Beau, Alan and the NCUC in March- June trying to encourage cooperation on the registrants' rights charter, and I wrote to you saying please get involved and help take a lead if you have issues---no response. And after you flamed us for voting in MC to allow the process to move forward and then other stuff happened around the charter, it became hard to get anyone interested. I don't know all the history, but apparently there are people who would rather hari kari than try to work with you. I don't think that's an indictment of NCUC.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the RAA work seems to have come full circle, and I now find myself asked to co-chair another RAA working group, half of which is supposed to write up the registrants' rights charter, the other half, with Steve Metalitz chair, to talk content and amendments. When asked, I sort of scratched my head, as I thought that was all done and the NCUC/NCSG and its hundreds of international organizations representing la creme du societe civile had stepped up to do it, but apparently they have done absolutely rien de tout, or Jacques du Merde, since I dropped the ball in March -- as Milton, Robin, and, sigh, now you, repeatedly remind the public. If I am wrong about this, please point me to the definitive body of work the steadily swelling, enlightened ranks of Kansalaisjärjestöjen has left in its wake, so it may enlighten me as I go forward to carry the dropped torch. Danny is correct when he points out there is not a single representative of Shoqërisë Civile on either of the current groups, to my knowledge, though there are representatives from the contracted parties. Actually, on the registrants' rights document group there is not a single representative other than me. We are supposed to generate results 30 days after Seoul, so there's lots of work to do. Most of what I am using is based, by the way, on what ALAC did (with Danny's leading contribution) more than two years ago, along with what AUDA (an industry group) did five years ago (http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2004-04/). Perhaps the PhD-exclusive GigaNet think tank (I caught your presentation at the OECD meeting in Seoul a year or so ago, where you and I first met) would like to dispatch a handful of PhDs to give us some recommendations on this important matter of Internet governance? Or the NCUC might be able to contribute one or two lawyers? I am neither. The Internet user community needs your help. You also wrote:
I don't know all the history, but apparently there are people who would rather hari kari than try to work with you [Danny].<
Danny has been bitingly critical of ALAC, and there have been many occasions when I have taken his comments personally and walked away from the keyboard in anger. However, in my three years' experience, he usually refrains from personal attacks, and usually strives to be factually accurate, at least in his ALAC criticisms. He's also a volunteer with a full-time job that's not paid through some sort of professional internet governance concern, which is to say, like most people who use the Internet. This part of your note is alarmingly personal, reminiscent of the tactics of NCUC leadership over the last six months, and I'm disappointed to see it. -----Original Message-----
From: William Drake Sent: Oct 22, 2009 3:58 AM To: At-Large Worldwide Subject: Re: [At-Large] "placeholder" reps not placeholders?
On Oct 21, 2009, at 8:22 PM, Danny Younger wrote:
Hello Bill,
Hi, thanks for your note. We've never met and or even directly communicated for more than a sentence or two, so I welcome the opportunity to respond to your concerns.
Re: "We think hard wiring will result in fragmentation within self- regarding silos, with people treating the NCSG as a mere shell within which they can pursue their stand alone agendas rather than feeling an incentive to work with the broader civil society community."
There are several of us that regard the NCUC as a stand-alone silo focused solely on the privacy/freedom-of-expression agenda to the exclusion of all other topics.
Yes, I've learned that there are several folks who insist on holding to this view.
We have pointed to the oft-repeated failure of the NCUC to stand up for the registrant interest -- the failure to offer any recommendations whatsoever regarding the RAA amendments, and the failure to even join the working groups convened to deal with the matter.
I exchanged a number of messages with Beau, Alan and the NCUC in March- June trying to encourage cooperation on the registrants' rights charter, and I wrote to you saying please get involved and help take a lead if you have issues---no response. And after you flamed us for voting in MC to allow the process to move forward and then other stuff happened around the charter, it became hard to get anyone interested. I don't know all the history, but apparently there are people who would rather hari kari than try to work with you. I don't think that's an indictment of NCUC.
The NCUC clearly is not prepared to work with the broader civil society community on matters that concern the rest of us.
NCUC is a broad CS community, and it works with other broad CS communities, which is why the Internet Governance Caucus, the OECD CSISAC and others have supported us on the charter etc. And I and others in NCUC have made it clear we'd like to work with ALAC, which is why I'm trying to arrange a meeting. So in a word, bullshit.
I get the impression that you view the non-commercial world as some sort of homogeneous whole where people don't disagree on matters such as privacy -- on this point you are clearly mistaken.
And I get the impression that you don't know the first thing about what I think. I fully understand there are differences of view at every level, including within NCUC.
Many of us view your approach to privacy as a tool that further enables cybercriminality.
What do you know about my approach to privacy? And who are the many, why aren't they shouting at me too?
While your group favors proxy registrations, some of us stand vehemently opposed to the concept... so why should our ability to secure our own representatives necessarily be tied into whether your contingent agrees with our views?
Yes, I'm told NCUC has taken that stand in the past. That doesn't prevent people with other views standing for council seats in a democratic election and trying to persuade people who have different views. And if even if such persuasion fails, that doesn't necessarily mean they wouldn't get elected. People are normally able to agree on some things and disagree on others, just as they do now not only in NCUC, but within our council delegation. You seem to think that NCUC's 80 organizational and 89 individual members all think exactly the same on every point and take a Leninist view of all disagreement. Talk about fantasies of homogeneity!
The process that you have proposed is nothing short of a veiled attempt at capture.
The process I propose is democratic elections. You've made it abundantly clear that you don't want to subject yourself to the indignity of having to run and persuade people to support you, and that ICANN is therefore obliged to award you a birthright council seat in perpetuity from which you don't have to cooperate or even speak civilly to anyone else. Happily, the SIC appears to have come around to recognizing that this may not be a good basis upon which to design a structure everyone else has to live with.
Nice to meet you, BTW.
Bill
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Hi Beau On Oct 23, 2009, at 12:26 AM, Beau Brendler wrote:
Bill, I'm surprised by this note. You wrote:
I exchanged a number of messages with Beau, Alan and the NCUC in March- June trying to encourage cooperation on the registrants' rights charter, and I wrote to you saying please get involved and help take a lead if you have issues---no response. And after you flamed us for voting in MC to allow the process to move forward and then other stuff happened around the charter, it became hard to get anyone interested. I don't know all the history, but apparently there are people who would rather hari kari than try to work with you. I don't think that's an indictment of NCUC.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the RAA work seems to have come full circle, and I now find myself asked to co-chair another RAA working group, half of which is supposed to write up the registrants' rights charter, the other half, with Steve Metalitz chair, to talk content and amendments. When asked, I sort of scratched my head, as I thought that was all done and the NCUC/NCSG and its hundreds of international organizations representing la creme du societe civile had stepped up to do it, but apparently they have done absolutely rien de tout, or Jacques du Merde, since I dropped the ball in March -- as Milton, Robin, and, sigh, now you, repeatedly remind the public. If I am wrong about this, please point me to the definitive body of work the steadily swelling, enlightened ranks of Kansalaisjärjestöjen has left in its wake, so it may enlighten me as I go forward to carry the dropped torch.
I said nothing about you dropping any balls, zip nada nothing. I said only that I'd written to you back when I was trying to get NCUC interested. I understand you're sensitive about various past interactions with certain NCUC personas but please leave me out of it and don't process every communication from anyone in NCUC through the same filter, it serves no more purpose than me taking a message from one ALACer as indicative of how everyone in ALAC thinks. Danny was saying NCUC's not done anything on RAA and I was simply saying here's what I did (not all that much, just tried to get the conversation going) and here's what happened (nobody was too interested, for various reasons).
Danny is correct when he points out there is not a single representative of Shoqërisë Civile on either of the current groups, to my knowledge, though there are representatives from the contracted parties. Actually, on the registrants' rights document group there is not a single representative other than me. We are supposed to generate results 30 days after Seoul, so there's lots of work to do. Most of what I am using is based, by the way, on what ALAC did (with Danny's leading contribution) more than two years ago, along with what AUDA (an industry group) did five years ago (http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2004-04/ ).
I do recognize this is an important issue and I wish noncommercial people were more interested in engaging on it. I even tried reaching beyond the cloistered world of ICANN to the Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles in IGF and the CSISAC in OECD and said hey there's this charter effort it's important let me know if you want to get involved---nothing. I can't force anyone to be committed to a topic (in truth, unless one is pretty into registrant contract conditions and such, the issues may seem rather obscure) or desirous of entering into a particular collaboration. Maybe if we have some effective bridge building people will start to come around. If instead what they get is assaults and snarkiness probably they will remain uninterested. I know I am, at this moment.
Perhaps the PhD-exclusive GigaNet think tank (I caught your presentation at the OECD meeting in Seoul a year or so ago, where you and I first met) would like to dispatch a handful of PhDs to give us some recommendations on this important matter of Internet governance? Or the NCUC might be able to contribute one or two lawyers? I am neither. The Internet user community needs your help.
I don't see the point of being snarky about it, Beau. Lots of people don't recognize a singular holy obligation to get involved in RAA issues. But if you can patiently lay out the case for why people should care, sans the dripping sarcasm, I would certainly pass it along again and encourage people to consider it alongside all the other issues they're working on.
You also wrote:
I don't know all the history, but apparently there are people who would rather hari kari than try to work with you [Danny].<
Danny has been bitingly critical of ALAC, and there have been many occasions when I have taken his comments personally and walked away from the keyboard in anger. However, in my three years' experience, he usually refrains from personal attacks, and usually strives to be factually accurate, at least in his ALAC criticisms. He's also a volunteer with a full-time job that's not paid through some sort of professional internet governance concern, which is to say, like most people who use the Internet. This part of your note is alarmingly personal, reminiscent of the tactics of NCUC leadership over the last six months, and I'm disappointed to see it.
Sorry, but I don't take it all that well when someone I've never met and have only exchanged a couple of lines with basically calls me a liar and propagates paranoid fantasies about me and people I know, especially when I am trying to overcome that sort of thinking and say hey let's just get together and talk. His message was alarmingly personal, his comments on NCUC were not remotely factually accurate, and he was clearly telling ALAC people they should not want to work with NCUC (and in the same breath, NCUC's a bunch of jerks because they haven't wanted to collaborate on this!). And we are all volunteers, I don't get paid dime one for this and it has zip to do with my day job, so I'm not inclined to spend cycles being pissed on in public by a stranger based on his past conflicts with other people before I came around. Sorry. If ALAC folk want to get together with NCUC folk to explore areas of common concern and think about how we can move forward more productively, great, I/we reached out and tried to create a space for that. If you don't want to, ok, don't, but then please no complaints about NCUCers not working with you on RAA or anything else. Your call. I'll be at the reception Monday night, people will go out afterwards, come along or don't, as you like. Best, Bill
Hi Bill, 2009/10/22 William Drake <william.drake@graduateinstitute.ch> said: Danny is correct when he points out there is not a single representative of
Shoqërisë Civile on either of the current groups, to my knowledge, though there are representatives from the contracted parties. Actually, on the registrants' rights document group there is not a single representative other than me. We are supposed to generate results 30 days after Seoul, so there's lots of work to do. Most of what I am using is based, by the way, on what ALAC did (with Danny's leading contribution) more than two years ago, along with what AUDA (an industry group) did five years ago ( http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2004-04/).
I do recognize this is an important issue and I wish noncommercial people were more interested in engaging on it.
Making the case of how large or diverse a community NCUC is, falls absolutely flat when nobody steps up to participate in a substantive policy discussion. When the GNSO holds court on issues such as the definition of registrant abuse, and *nobody* from the non-commercial side shows up, then the contracted parties and domainers dominate. and the only abuse that matters to ICANN -- according to "consensus" policy among those who showed up -- is activity that irritates the vested interests. To an untrained eye this can come across as abdication of responsibility to the community. Either NCUC needs to find people to be interested in these things, or must not impede external efforts to fill those vacuums. On the contrary, it should be supporting efforts to find such new blood to participate, without preconsition that it must happen under the NCUC/NCSG umbrella. It should roll out the welcome mat and cheer that others may -- just may -- be encouraged to have an interest in those aspects of the GNSO that leaves NCUC cold. Even if it's just the *potential* for new blood, the effort must be encouraged. And if this means NCUC must share some of its traditional voting power, well that's the price it pays for not being able to find a broad enough spectrum to engage in all issues that matter to the public.
But if you can patiently lay out the case for why people should care, sans the dripping sarcasm, I would certainly pass it along again and encourage people to consider it alongside all the other issues they're working on.
Sorry, Bill. I was trying to stay out of this discussion, but I find this inexcusable. I would have remained a lurker if not for the above sentence. GNSO is neither the IGF nor a think tank. It has a specific focus, and ground level consequences to its actions -- so often the elements of that focus are boring-legal or boring-techie. That's what NCUC signed up for; if it needs to be externally convinced to care about the RAA and registrant abuse --patiently or otherwise -- then one could easily argue that it has no business serving the role it occupies. And it certainly has no moral claim to exclusivity in representing end-user interests within GNSO.
His message was alarmingly personal, his comments on NCUC were not remotely factually accurate, and he was clearly telling ALAC people they should not want to work with NCUC (and in the same breath, NCUC's a bunch of jerks because they haven't wanted to collaborate on this!).
Sounds like a mirror image of someone else we know if you swap "NCUC" and "ALAC" in the sentence above. So let's get Danny and Milton in a sealed room and they can have at each other till one gives up. The losing constituency/ committee has to send delegates to the next meeting of the registrant abuse working group (and attendance will be checked). We could sell tickets, though I think few spectators would last for the whole bout. I claim first rights to the Tylenol concession.
If ALAC folk want to get together with NCUC folk to explore areas of common concern and think about how we can move forward more productively, great, I/we reached out and tried to create a space for that.
That's already happening. There's already time reserved to discuss IP issues in the new DAG, with people from both ALAC and NCUC well represented in the group. There are still some of us more passionate in tackling the issues than fighting over how the issue-fighting pie gets sliced. - Evan
participants (3)
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Beau Brendler -
Evan Leibovitch -
William Drake