Evan, 

Thank you for your thoughts. 

"Its history of extreme risk-aversion make it easy for ICANN's board to take advice from its legal counsel that may silently override any emotional or ethical arguments."
It makes a lot of sense to be cognizant of the rules established in the ICANN bylaws and prudently stay within the boundaries as they are currently written. Venturing too far beyond ICANN's remit may result in unwanted and unproductive chaos. However, the risk in the long run of being too narrow and not thinking beyond the letter of the law is that policy debates may be whittled down to discussions about how many angels can fit on a the head of a pin. This is not desirable either.   

But that does not mean we have nothing to say, it's just how we say it."
Understood. Side Question: I reviewed the ICANN bylaws and found section 12.2.d.i which could be considered relevant to how our advice is given ... "The role of the ALAC shall be to consider and provide advice on the activities of ICANN, insofar as they relate to the interests of individual Internet users." Are there any other written pieces of documentation that provides guidelines on what is or is not acceptable advice? 

"... an issue of stability, trust and security..."
In general, I agree with your choice of words and how you said them. Specifically, I can see how the issue of trust comes into play with this transaction. I'm mostly averse to picking any single hill to die on, but it seems to me that issue is outside the norm of most policy discussions and has long term consequences too. 

Another side note: I heard a question in the general question session at ICANN66 from a former staff member who questioned the rules of staff not being allowed to interact with ICANN participants in social gatherings. Without getting into the larger ethical debate the answer given was to gently restate the existing policy of non-interaction. It seems to me that there's a relevant question for interaction between former staff and former ICANN leadership in the makeup of the Ethos organization. ICANN is a relatively young organization, so it's not surprising that it doesn't yet have a complete set of rules to guide staff/leadership interaction. However, maybe there's an opportunity to look at improving policy/bylaws for this type of behaviour in the future. It's not always easy to anticipate which pieces of the Internet infrastructure will be worth a billion dollars in the future, but better post-employment and post-leadership policies might help moderate human behaviour motivated by money which don't add value to end users. Just a thought. 

Cheers!
David   


On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 9:32 AM Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jan 2020 at 20:40, David Mackey <mackey361@gmail.com> wrote:
 
"If we can keep our discussion on track, we will get to a result more quickly." Your wording seems a bit oblique. 

Are you suggesting that discussions around phrases like "End users benefit from a long-term commitment to the open and noncommercial internet" are off track?

Actually, in ICANN's narrow context, it might well be interpreted that way.

ICANN's mandate is about trust, stability and security of the DNS, everything it does supposedly stems from that. It's not within ICANN's remit to make value judgments on the inherent value of anything being open and non-commercial. Yes, that means plenty to us, but when confronted with that demand ICANN can just ignore it as out of scope. Its history of extreme risk-aversion make it easy for ICANN's board to take advice from its legal counsel that may silently override any emotional or ethical arguments.

But that does not mean we have nothing to say, it's just how we say it.

ICANN's interest in the public good for its own sake is hard to come by. So IMO our job, should we choose to accept it, is to paint the ISOC abandonment of .ORG as an issue of stability, trust and security, so it's directly in scope. Something that was assumed to be stable no longer is, an assumed endowment of a rare resource is now being treated as a commodity, and the secrecy of the transaction gives rise to potentially more instability, especially if new owners prices or policies push registrants away en-masse to other TLDs.

ICANN knows (or at least suspects) that if it derails the sale to Ethos it's going to get sued, by insiders who know how ICANN works and how best to threaten it. The case needs to be made that

  • - Lawsuits on not, letting the re-delegation to Ethos goes through contravenes either ICANN's mission or commitments made when .ORG was given to ISOC
  • - The lawsuits and government interventions to come by letting the sale go through, that threaten ICANN itself, may exceed the danger of Ethos' lawsuits if it blocks.
    - Evan