I appreciate the points that Evan makes here.

ICANN may have been given too large of a mandate - as both a technical body and as a body that is responsible for policy matters that are in the public interest, without actually being representative of or accountable to the public.

ICANN has proven itself unable to represent the public interest in negotiating market rates for the registry services that Verisign provides to ICANN, as ICANN is the beneficial owner of the legacy extensions and Verisign is merely a service provider.   PIR is paying its registry service provider $1.50 per domain name per year for essentially the same services that ICANN is contracting with Verisign for at over $10 per domain name per year, an unjustified transfer of over $1 billion per year from the global Internet community to the coffers of one US. corporation.  These are funds that should go to ICANN or be returned to domain name registrants.  ICANN claims that it is unable to negotiate prices in service contracts - although presumably it does so when hiring office cleaners to clean its offices.

ICANN has also established a quasi global court system through the UDRP - and then largely abandoned it to be operated by third parties, under no contracts and under no effective oversight by ICANN.  Under the UDRP, unaccountable administrators at the various UDRP providers pick and choose who they are going to accredit as panelists, and hand select which panelists will hear which disputes, and all this occurs with no ICANN oversight.  This leads to situations where people who are arguably unqualified or unfit are resolving complex business disputes with a financial impact in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, by employing a rudimentary policy only suited for resolving the clearest instances of cybersquatting.  Further, in many instances there is no recourse for an incorrect decision as the national courts that would have jurisdiction offer no cause of action that allows for the overturning of the UDRP decision.

It is a problem that ICANN has taken on a mandate in areas that are ill-suited for a technical body with a competence in assigning names and numbers.

Nat Cohen, Washington, DC.

On Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 12:57 PM Evan Leibovitch via CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> wrote:
As a followup to my critique of a recent CircleID "defense" of multistakeholderism on the NARALO mailing list, I want to offer up some brief constructive commentary on what is generally regarded as Internet Governance:

In a recent conversation with a well-known ICANNer, I was asked: if I could replace the current management of the Internet with some other model, what would it be? Complaining is easy, but does a superior alternative exist?

My answer didn't take too long: something largely similar to the model that governs the world's air travel.

The United Nations treaty agency ICAO and the airline industry IATA have their headquarters within a four-minute walk in downtown Montréal. They are highly interdependent -- maybe even symbiotic -- but have very specific roles that are generally not duplicated. They have public advisory bodies, regional bureaus and expert groups that propose standards and regulations. In other words, this infrastructure has been multistakeholder since the 1940s, long before the tech world thought it had invented the concept.

And, generally speaking, that infrastructure has been proven to work, even between warring countries. Airlines under intense international sanctions remain members. Safety and stability are the prime objectives of both, though IATA of course cares more about commercial sustainability while ICAO cares about interoperability and environmental sustainability.
Having two separate complementary bodies offers plenty of advantages because they keep each other in check; as a result we have neither full government capture nor full commercial capture. The public interest is promoted through both bodies, especially if one is more concerned about results (ie, a global airline industry that is safe, reliable, adaptable and sustainable) than process (ie, splitting hairs about representation).

I believe that this model is adaptable to Internet governance and that it would work better than what we think we have now. I also believe it is still possible. What needs to change is a) the arrogance of asserting the Internet is the first instance of multistakeholder governance, b) the misbelief that ICANN is a public-serving example of it, and c) the visceral hostility to anything multilateral, even as a partial component.

--
Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56
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