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Re: [atlarge-discuss] Re: [ncdnhc-discuss] global government without representation ICANN style



All -and Vint as the ICANN Chair -
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Williams" <jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com>
To: "James Love" <james.love@cptech.org>
Cc: "NCDNHC-discuss list" <discuss@icann-ncc.org>; "General Assembly of the
DNSO" <ga@dnso.org>; "atlarge discuss list" <atlarge-discuss@lists.fitug.de>
Sent: Saturday, June 01, 2002 6:56 PM
Subject: [atlarge-discuss] Re: [ncdnhc-discuss] global government without
representation ICANN style


> Jamie, all assembly members, stakeholders, or interested parties,
>
>   I must say I cannot understand this reasoning provided yesterdays
> ICANN's recommendations for reform either!  Truly bizarre and
> not even close to the requirements of the WHite Paper or the MoU.

Why doesnt someone then just start a lawsuit against ICANN saying that it
cannot, by its very makeup or process, represent the global interestets of a
planetary-wide Internet, especially as a lone California Corporation. What
more needs to be said?  Further why not escalate this and file a formal
complaint with the California Secretary's of State's office to challenge its
status as a California Corporation in that it claims to represents the
interests of the people it serves, when it clearly does not.

By the way - the easiest  proof to the argument regarding "that ICANN is
incompetent to operate as it is", is by asking the question whether the DoC
has the legal authority to speak for the other nations that are NIC
impacted? I think that at this time the answer is a simple "No, not at this
time".   And since the Internet is no longer the US Government alone... we
have a problem here.

What DoC is empowered to do now is to speak for the American People and to
that end they can establish the contracts for the service inside the network
boundries (nebulous as they are) for the US. But it ends there, unless they
have contracts with these other countries to run their NIC's for them,
similar to the operations contracts that many of the NIST labs have with
others. This is a key concept since DNS is and was initially architected to
have a single registrar as its root and this is its inherent liability.

Personally I would like to see NIST's ITL take over the entire Management
services for the "US Root Zones", since this would make the operations model
directly accountable and easily managed by the people it was supposedly
built to serve.

Likewise, I would also like to see real eBorders produced and supported by
the White Houses Home Security Office. I think this is a key concept to
making Internet Law enforcable, at least here in the US. What you other
folks do in the rest of the world about your legal problems is your issue,
that is to say until there is a global representation at the UN for all
global Internet operations and a global Internet Bill of Rights.

>   It is my belief from reading this that the ICANN BoD and staff
> are deathly afraid of stakeholders/users, in fact even paranoid of
> us having any voice or vote on the internet in any way shape or
> form.

Yes I agree - and that because as a forum and organized group, we outnumber
them, by potentially a factor of tens of millions to one here in the US
alone if you consider the End-Users and not just operator/owers as well.
Wouldn't you be concerned too?

>
> James Love wrote:
>
> > WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?   The Committee on ICANN "reform" and evolution
has
> > released its most astonishing document yet.

Personally it does do some things correctly (the PSO divestitture) but I
agree that it misses the rest of the bigger-picture's point completely.

One of these bigger picture issues, is that ICANN itself cannot itself be an
Global Arbiter of the Internet since it cannot take into account the legal
requirements from each of the Internet-infected nations. It also is not
ratified as the sole arbiter of what goes on in the Internet world by anyone
but the US DoC that I can see, nor did it ever seek individual acceptance at
the Individual Country Level.

Further it has no real way of dealing with other constituency's like NANOG
*(the North American Network Operators Group) and others like it. So like
you, I have to ask how can it possibly claim to represent anything but its
own interests to date?

> >  It wipes away every single
> > area where there might be independence from a completely all powerful
board
> > of directors, which can pretty  do whatever it wants with the global DNS
> > system and controls its own elections (by hand picking its electors).

Clearly, it is an attempt to put in place an appointed autocracy. If the
directors couldnt get it right to start with why give them more power?

> It
> > takes the current dysfunctional body, the ICANN DNSO, which was supposed
to
> > make bottom up the

operating guidelines

> :> for domain name policy, and it replaces this group charter with a
> > system where the ICANN board directly picks its chair and as many
members of
> > the steering committee it considers appropriate.

Lets ampliify on this a tad. You also mean that ICANN replaces "it" (The
DNSO GA) with a operating model wherein it has no obligation to take
anything including input or mandate, from its GA group. The net of this is
that the GA group is totally disenfranchised in this new plan.

BTW - The DNSO is dysfunctional becuase of too many irons in the fire. If
the DNSO was recharted to be the voting voice of the DNS Owner/Operators it
would be what it is supposed to be, and that voice was specifically
chartered to take the collective voice into the Board of the ICANN as our
representation there, this would all be moot.

> > It eliminates an elected
> > chair of the DNSO General Assembly.

This is unacceptable.

> > It take away the DNSO's right to elect
> > members of the ICANN board, and the new "GNSO" can't really decide
anything
> > anymore anyway, just in case the total control by the ICANN board isn't
> > enough of a power grab.

See -   See the above commentary

> > It gets rid of the "PSO", which includes
> > independent groups as the IETF or the W3C, which have not been
sufficiently
> > docile.

This is actually a very good thing. Its time to neuter the PSO. It has no
business making political decisions and it does nothing else these days -
more on this in your commentary below.

> > The DoC MoU required independent review process, which was never
> > implemented, is now toast.

And the IETF is the core of this refusal to provide propriety in its
process - more on this in your commentary below.

> > There is a loser pays arbitration just to ask
> > if the ICANN board is not obeying its own bylaws, which of course it can
> > change at the drop of a hat if it needs to.

This is unacceptable.

> >
> > This document is so completely in your face to the US Department of
Commerce
> > and the Internet community one has to admire the guts of the current
ICANN
> > board.  Vint Cerf, Joe Sims and the Reform Committe make Bill Gates and
> > Steve Balmer look like wimps.  Jamie
> >
> > http://www.icann.org/committees/evol-reform/recommendations-31may02.htm
> >
> >          Recommendations for the Evolution and Reform of ICANN
> >       Posted: 31 May 2002
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >       Committee on ICANN Evolution and Reform
> >       Recommendations for the Evolution and Reform of ICANN
> >
> >       ========
> >
> >       II. Board Composition
> >
> >       These general principles lead us to the following conclusions on
Board
> > composition:
> >
> >         a.. The following should be ex officio Board seats, meaning the
> > person who currently holds that position occupies an ICANN Board seat:
> >           a. The CEO of ICANN
> >           b. The Chair (or delegate) of the GNSO Steering Committee
> > (Appointed by BOD)
> >           c. The Chair (or delegate) of the ASO Council
> >           d. The Chair (or delegate) of the CNSO Steering Committee
> >           e. The Chair (or delegate) of the GAC
> >           f. The Chair (or delegate) of the RSSAC
> >           g. The Chair (or delegate) of the SAC (appointed by ICANN CEO)
> >           h. The Chair (or delegate) of the TAC if established, or if
not,
> > the Chair (or delegate) of the IAB.  (TAC probably appointed by  CEO)
> >
> > * ICANN requests comments on whether or not some or all of these
> > should be non-voting members.
> >
> > * There should be [five to eleven] additional members of the
> > Board, selected by a Nominating Committee.
> >
> > * Nominating Committee both nominates and elects member the [five
> > to eleven] non-ex officio board members.  It also placed members
directly on
> > the GNSO and other ICANN "advisory" bodies.   It is chaired by an ICANN
> > board member.
> >
> > * Basically, the ICANN board chooses the Nominating Committee,
> > which in turn chooses the board.  The ICANN board may also have the
right to
> > reject candidates selected by its hand picked nominatng committee.
> >
> > NEW FACE OF DNSO (now called GNSO)
> >
> > ICANN board picks the chair of the new GNSO, and the GNSO
> > steering committee includes "an appropriate number of other members
selected
> > by the ICANN Nominating Committee."

This is totally unacceptable.

>>The head of the GA will be chaired by
> > the ICANN board selected chair of the GNSO.

No way -  its better that the GA will elect its own chair. We should control
the horizontal and the vertical, not you ICANN Board Members.

>>  GNSO selects zero ICANN board
> > members.

WRONG - Vint - I propose to ICANN that the new GNSO ***will *** elect at
least 3 of the existing directors seats, an no other seats will be added.
That these seats will appropriately come form the PSO and ASO director
pools.

Its also my feeling that its time that the powerbase in the ICANN
represented the people that use the Internet as well as the others. That
means the domain owners and operators but it also means the end-users as
well. Has ICANN ever done anything to take into account end-user rights and
privilegse and to defining what they are?

> >
> > NEW FACE OF PSO:
> >
> > "The Protocol Supporting Organization should be dissolved."

No!, not dissolved, but rather spun off and morphed into a more formal
framework.

PSO problems and the IETF
-----------------------------
The IETF's protocols have brought us to where we are today and as screwed up
as that is... we need the IETF, only it  needs to be real "standards group"
with voting and clear processes for proving protocals are admitted and
processsed towards standardization, fairly and equally. And that this is in
my opinion, very different than the way they are operated now.

They WG's within the IETF also need to take input from other places than its
own constituency, like as in making specific changes or additions to enable
management based changes to how the Internet is operated. This concept is
also something very foreign to the IETF of today. They would tell you to get
screwed and go away. That you were not competent to play in their world.

My take is that they must be made to also take imput from the Internet's
management teams as to what changes are needed in protocols existing today,
rather than only from the would-be inventors. This is one of the key
problems with the process of qualifying protocols for public use. Especially
since there is no public qualification process in the IETF's operations
model, nor in the IESG's nor in the IAB's  forqualifying anything for public
use onthe global Internet before releasing it - Hmmmmmm.

PSO's Directors
-----------------
It is also inappropriate for the Protocol Development groups to select ANY
ICANN DIRECTOR Seats and this must be changed immediately. They also have no
business making any determinations about what protocols are served on the
Internet, or in the politics of the Internet, only in the technical fabric
for implementing global policy and this means not the policy itself.

If you need justification for this, realize that the problems with global
SPAM and other Internet issues like DCMA are to a great deal exacerbated by
the ubiquitous release of uncontrolled technology on the Internet.  For
which the IETF/IESG and its IAB managers are the only ones responsible
today.

Restructuriung the IAB in particular
----------------------------------
The IAB is also a real sore spot in and of itself. It currently fills a dual
role of embracing the IESG's (its right hand) standards proposals and also
making these ubiqtously available. My take is that it in particular needs to
be neutered by its being split in half. What I am referring to is that the
IAB needs to no longer make any decisions on the physical architecture of
the Internet if it is to also continue to admisiter the creation of "Network
Standards".

Its primary function today, that of managing both the protocol development
and that of determining the architecture and what is routed on the Internet
is a problem since it creates a monopoly that is currently unmanagable. Thus
the IAB can only be saved if it is split in half and the currently existing
IAB satys to only the Standards Process. The other half, would become the
political keeper of what is and is not routed on the Internet. It is this
group which will own the treaties and agreements that will make up the
Internet today.

It also must be noted that in the reform presentation, ICANN has made no
provision for this, other than divesting itself of the PSO's which in my
book is further a problem and justification for restructuring ICANN. The
existing management are not about to fix this problem, just amputate it and
that is not right either.

In Closing
----------
Personally I think that if ICANN is to be resrtructured then it needs to be
a global restructuring which means the UN will have to at some time get
involved. In the mean time as an American, I can only work within the
confines of what I have power to control and that is the ICANN's operations
within the US. Although I also have the power to say that I dont want ICANN
as it is today operating as an International Concern under the blanket of a
Califronia Corporation. That ICANN becuause of the legal limitation of the
DoC's authority, cannot represent the World and that only the UN has that
authority.

In North America
------------------
As to what to do here in North America, I suggest that if it does want to
represent all of North America, that the ICANN Board submit letters to the
other countries in North America asking them to ratify a single NIC
operating structure for all of North America, and if there is a need for a
prototype for such an agreement, I suggest using the "uniform timebase
treaty of 1999" through NORAMET. This created the first eTimebase for all of
North America and oddly enough ICANN knows nothing of this, further making
me ask about its competency as a whole to run a global Internet.

TSG {:-{)

> >
> > --------------------------------

SNIP



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