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[atlarge-discuss] Re: [ncdnhc-discuss] CYBER-FED No.15: The User Voice in Internet Governance -- ICANNatlarge.org

Dear Barbara,
why not just to say what all of us known all the way long and that Joe Sims spent his time telling us and that GAC Members explained to us from the very beginning and that we partly failed at correcting using the "democratic tool"?

The "A" in ICANN really stands for "Agency", what a GAC Member described as the well-known "AmerICANN". This Agency as any other Gov Agency in the world is here to enforce the law to the benefit of its country and of its citizens. In this case (47 USC 230 (f)(1)) the control by the USG, under the jurisdiction of the Congress, of every computer in the world plugged into a packet switch network interoperable with US resources. The flaw comes from the US constant data networking doctrine (and Arpanet architecture): the datanetwork is an access to a computer club, priority now to the US critical infrastructure club. Such a network has no/few specific reality by itself and offers no internal services to the users. Services are on the edges (what one might name 1D network vertical architecture, by opposition to 2D horizontal architecture including ancillary and added services and to 3D architecture extending to the global relational usage). Such a vision does not technically care about users. Only "3D" does, hence the imbalance between their offer and our expectations.

What was a fair commercial and political attempt to control the world through a cross contract policy too complex to unknot, has become since Sept/11 a US national security issue. Stuart Lynn never called on the Govs for money, but to determine who was supporting the US security policy and who was interested in being protected by the US e-umbrella. The @large smokescreen maintained by Mike Roberts, just in case, was initially evaluated as a source of risks and then kept at as a low cost and still possibly useful diversion. The ERC is just adapting the ICANN structure to a standard Agency structure. GAC and ITU are the ways to handle the Govs. ccTLDs as such are not of any real interest; they were ways to relate with their Govs.

The same as Shanghai Beijing oriented, I read Amsterdam as the nearest place from Brussels ICANN could chose to try a last attempt to enroll Europe, trying to use the still different internal European attitudes, knowing that within a few months the European position will be quite united. I suppose that by Dec 15th the US global position will have been settled among Gov and Industry stakeholders.

In this the @large and Civil society members are just talking, while politics are getting together towards positions and industry and some Govs are acting. Guess who will win?

I think that we are a single network and that therefore nobody should win: we should adapt to each other's and ally. I am afraid the momentum by White House/ICANN is such that we cannot do anything now, unless we put our efforts together and come up with realistic propositions (like http://dot-root.com ) and/or very convincing arguments, like Todds ones, helping them understand where their strategy is partly wrong.

1. TCP/IP is the problem. Todd we agree. But I do not think that this has been overlooked. I would be very interested in the working viable alternatives that some may start experimenting now. 2005 Internet maybe rather different from the 2002 one.

2. US Cyberspace security propositions claim to be local, regional and national to address a threat which is correctly assessed as global.
- one must accept that the response to a global threat is a global protection
- one must accept that there is a problem in the "global" understanding. "global" does not means "universal", the entire world with the USA as a central stronghold, but means that every nation must be considered as a place to protect and that true security will not come from a centrally protected USA e-colonizing the world with its security logic, but from mutually resilient interconnected and locally adapted security policies.

This means for example that we must build a coherent, equal and stable numbering system where every country should receive a national IPv6 block and accept to dedicate the same secondary block numbers to critical systems in case of emergency situations. For justice and security. So the US, the French or the Iraqi laws may decide to filter-out the traffic from another country or to maintain calls from critical systems only depending on situation, like in telephone.

As long as we leave the Internet to a few private interests, commercial greed and changing civil servants we will lack the policy stability and innovative spirit we need.
jfc

 

At 19:55 27/10/02, Barbara Simons wrote:

What does it mean for users' collective voice to persist?  It certainly
doesn't mean that users have any meaningful input into policy making, let
alone meaningful power.  To even suggest otherwise is to play into the hands
of those who claim that ICANN is representing everyone.

Why not come out and say that the so-called ICANN reform was a palace coup
that disenfranchised the user community and eliminated any remaining
vestiges of democracy within ICANN?  Why pretend otherwise?

I would have no problem with the elimination of user input if ICANN would
restrict itself to technical issues and not get involved with policy.  But
so long as ICANN also makes policy decisions, the lack of user input means
that only the voices of powerful special interests are heard.

Barbara

On 10/26/02 1:31 PM, "James Love" <james.love@cptech.org> wrote:

> ANother view is that icannatlarge.org is completely screwed up right now,
> largely because Hans as acting chair just eliminated any structure to
> decision making and just started announcing all sorts of policies on his
> own, without panel approval, and there does not exist anything remotely
> close to best or even ok practices in terms of how the group makes
> decisions, and this has lead quickly to several panel members just
> announcing their own policies and decision making processes, none of which
> are approved by the group in any formal way.   All of this could be fixed, I
> guess, if one wanted to.  But right now it is a mystery how decisions are
> made in the group.
>
> jamie
>
>
> Hans Klein wrote:
>>                      Please forward
>>
>>  ******************************************************************
>>      Cyber-Federalist No. 15         25 October 2002
[snip]
>>
>> ICANN has been a bold experiment in many areas, not least of which is
>> giving users a role in Internet policy-making.  However, user
>> representation on ICANN's board has been vigorously contested, and
>> ICANN's current board seems likely to eliminate it.  Nonetheless, even
>> if users are excluded from ICANN, their collective voice will persist.

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