Andrew, I don't think you are off your gourd. Greg On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 05:06:25AM -0800, Kieren McCarthy wrote:
There are a few signs that ICANN corporate is being a little more open
minded and helpful than in most of the previous SEVEN accountability reviews (but not all).
But when it comes to non-cosmetic changes, particularly over ICANN
corporate's unquestionable final authority, I have seen only critical and defensive responses, as well as accusations of bad faith and various efforts to undermine the commenter - the same pattern that has played out for over a decade.
This is not to pick on Kieren McCarthy, but those paragraphs where helpful to hang my remarks on. I've been thinking about something along these lines since Singapore and thought I'd take this occasion to send.
It seems to me that we heard in Singapore some pretty strong suggestions from parts of the community that we ought to concentrate on the narrow question of the IANA transition and how to make those arrangements at least as reliable and safe as the current arrangements are. In my opinion, Larry Strickling also asked some pretty pointed questions about this group's focus on that narrow issue.
It seems to me that the IETF and RIRs have come up with fairly narrow discussions of their issues, and have focussed on the specific issues for their communities. I do not pretend that things are just the same in the names community, because of the way the IANA names functions and the policy functions are located in the same organization. But perhaps we could focus on the exact places where the existing organizational boundaries inside ICANN (for the IANA function) are, and see whether there is a sort of "accountability interface" that could be placed there. This is an admittedly less ambitious approach than the proposals that have been previously circulated, but I wonder whether this might not cut the problem down to a manageable size. It seems to me that much of the conceptual work that has been done could be re-jigged to match that narrower task, too, and so we might be able to make speedy progress.
Of course, that still leaves us with a difficult dependency, because the CCWG-Accountability work would need to complete and be compatible with what we might suggest. But I think that is manageable, it's in any case a requirement, and it allows us to declare general discussions of, "wWhat if the Board does X?" out of scope here.
Does this seem in any way a helpful direction, or am I off my gourd?
Best regards,
A
-- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com _______________________________________________ CWG-Stewardship mailing list CWG-Stewardship@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/cwg-stewardship
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