[ncdnhc-discuss] The way forward with board CoI on .org

Fri May 24 02:31:18 CEST 2002

Dear Hendrik,
this is certainly a very good post. Full of clear point and interests. And 
the questions are of real importance.  I just want to add two "small" points.

1. the honesty climate at the BoD. Two years ago for the new TLDs, several 
Directors stepped down? Recently if I am right Amadeau also did. In this 
case four directors should have *before the discussion* (the discussion is 
of no real interest). Rob has been highlighted, all the more he is the COI 
comity Chair. And the three others you quote? I find this worrying: this 
people know they are wrong, they know we know, they continue to vote or 
discuss the ICANN reform as if nothing had occurred. What I want to 
underline - as you may not feel that in the USA - more and more people 
laugh when talking of the ICANN financial "oddities", gov, press, bosses. 
You cannot talk about the ICANN now in a meeting or on a phone call without 
talking of them.  Mainly what people are interested in is: which will be 
the first in jail. More than anything else it has killed the ICANN.

2. the involved money. When outsourcing .org  VRSN is to pay $M5 to the new 
Register if a non-profit. Plus the money it collected in advance renewals. 
The later being forgotten everywhere. I suppose that if the Registry is 
non-profit it will claim every revenue it can grab and will not abandon the 
collected money. If it is a for-profit, one can negotiate. If it is VRSN it 
is obviously better.

Now let imagine than Plan C is status quo. For .org and for .net. Try to 
imagine the scenario you should organize, and tell me if they would really 
be that different from what we see.

Please remember that for .org only there are M$ 10+ at stake plus M$ 18 per 
annum.
jfc

At 00:35 24/05/02, Hendrik Rood wrote:

>Milton Mueller posted on May 13th, 2002 an e-mail on a potential conflict of
>interest on .org which provoked intense discussions on this list.
>
>As ten days have passed it is becoming fruitfull to discuss how to advance
>the discussion and define a way forward. We start with some undisputable
>facts.
>
>1. The Names Council .org divestiture Task Force filed a final report at
>January 17th, 2002.
>http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/20020117.NCdotorg-report.html
>
>2. ICANN Board discussions at Accra on March 14th, 2002 lead to two
>significant modifications, one on the issue of surplus funds the other on
>the viewpoint that "the initial delegation of the .org TLD should be to a
>non-profit organization that is noncommercial in orientation" was altered in
>a "neutral" position on the nature of the TLD-organisation. Neutral meaning
>no ex-ante preference for a for-profit or a not-for-profit organisation.
>
> >From the transcript
>http://www.icann.org/accra/captioning-afternoon-14mar02.htm it is easily
>read that the first ICANN Board member that proposed a "neutral" position on
>the nature of the .org registry was ICANN Chairman Dr. Vinton Cerf.
>
>">>Cerf: Let me try to take up this point, and Karl, i hope i will be able
>to address some of your concerns with this suggestion. I think that there
>are at least three very specific points that the board might wish to make to
>the president. One of them is that the nature of the organization that
>undertakes to run dot org does not have to be not for profit or for profit.
>I think we should be neutral on this point. For clarification, the offer
>made by Verisign of the $5 million assistance is only applicable in the
>event that the selected organization is a not-for-profit organization;
>essentially, a noncompetitor. However, there is no constraint, in my view,
>on adopting, awarding this particular organization to a for-profit; it's
>just they would not have the benefit of that additional funding from
>Verisign."
>
>Before Cerf made his opinion Blokzijl provided the following viewpoints:
>
>">>Blokzijl: Whoever is going to run dot org in the near future inherits an
>existing user base of about 3 million people and organizations, some of them
>individual persons, some of them large organizations that are really
>dependent upon the proper operation of dot org. Just to name one, the
>international red cross today could not do its work without the registry dot
>org.
>[...]
>So there are not many organizations that have a demonstrated experience in
>running a registry with 3 million registered names. A registry which has
>about 10, 12 servers scattered around the world on crucial spots of the
>internet. This is a little bit more than running a country code top-level
>domain, for instance."
>
>
>The main departure between Cerf's opinion and that of the Names Council .org
>divestiture Task Force is that the TF-report created room for a for-profit
>registry operator (Section 4. Registry Operator, in their report 5.4) under
>the direction of a non-profit TLD-delegee, while the board decided
>unanimously after their discussion in Accra to be "neutral" on the
>(not-)for-profit nature of the .org TLD-delegee.
>
>3. The first remarks on the Board position of Blokzijl and the business
>affiliation of his wife with Neulevel, and the .org decision appeared at
>March 15th, 2002.
>http://forum.icann.org/cgi-bin/rpgmessage.cgi?org;3CE25C1A00000011
>
>4. The video of the Accra board meeting has been released by the University
>of Oregon at April 1st, 2002  http://videolab.uoregon.edu/events/ICANN/
>(date and time at bottom of page)
>
>5. The transcript of the meeting has been published at the ICANN website at
>April 14th, 2002.
>http://www.icann.org/accra/captioning-afternoon-14mar02.htm
>(date and time at bottom of page)
>
>6. Milton Mueller posted an e-mail on this list on May 13th, 2002.
>http://www.icann-ncc.org/pipermail/discuss/2002-May/002213.html
>
>Then my inbox for this list started to explode in mailings. As I often have
>experienced during the last semi-decade of domain name discussions.
>
>The interesting questions are:
>* Why did this issue took 2 months to start floating on this list, while the
>first public comment was made the day after the meeting was held.
>* How to redress such COI issues in the future, other than by self
>management
>* What to do with the COI of the three other ICANN directors, whom voted on
>this issue, while chairing, managing and/or advising ccTLD registries or
>their operators. All of whom are potential bidders or affiliates in a
>consortium that bids on the .org registry.
>* Public tendering laws in most countries have exclusion rules on prior
>involvement. E.g. companies or persons involved in the decision or
>preparation of the Request for Proposal are prohibited from participating in
>the bidding. This is an aspect I do not find elaborated in the fitness
>requirements (http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/fitness-disclosure.htm) or the
>prescriptions of the general setup of the proposal
>(http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/org-proposal.htm) for .org. The discussion
>here started way to late to insert some of these types of organisational
>requirements.
>I am too limited in my knowledge of legal jurisprudence on public tendering
>to assess exclusion cases on family ties. (Not-for-profit) Corporations also
>are allowed to more lenient regulations, but even then internal codes of
>conduct for tendering are often quite strict.
>* The "outplacement" of ".org" was the first effort. The contracts with
>Verisign also provide a future "outplacement" for ".net". The initial
>decision to start with the ".org" divestment looked very prudent and smart
>ex-ante, as the far tougher nut to crack is ".net". Thus the remaining issue
>is: what can we learn from these events and this discussion?
>
>In my view it would be smart to evaluate the full decision process for the
>".org" divestiture. This has also to result in describing (and/or modifying)
>the COI principles that have to steer ICANN-directors participation in the
>discussion for the future and even far larger and more important
>"divestment" of ".net". I will look with great interest on the statements on
>this discussion from the other two members of the ICANN COI-committee.
>
>The main reason that we have to look forward is that ".net" is extremely
>important as the whole ISP-infrastructure-industry-sector relies heavily on
>the stable and functional operation of ".net". Most routers and
>infrastructural equipment of ISP's is named in that part of the hierarchy
>(f.i. root-servers.net is under the .net gTLD). E.g. a failure of ".net"
>infects daily operations and reduces collaborative troubleshooting and fault
>location on the Internet. As so many ISP's (and nowadays also telco's) are
>operationally dependent on ".net", so are even more ICANN-directors may
>enter in a potential Conflict of Interest. Also all directors with ties to
>DNS-TLD-registries are again put in the same position.
>
>Therefore a specification for the ".net" case COI-rules for decision makers
>is utterly important. The hostcount under ".net" has surpassed ".com" in
>2001. Too lenient rules on COI will very probably provide us with a deja vu
>on accusations of COI-violations. Too strict rules of what constitutes COI,
>might create a recusation of halve the ICANN Board on the ".net"-divestiture
>decisions.
>
>My initial response, a year ago when the "gradual" divestiture from Verisign
>of the ".org" and ".net" was announced, was that starting with ".org" and
>proceeding later on with ".net" before terminating the contract with
>Verisign for ".com" looked a smart and prudent policy. Many people discussed
>it as too slow, but such bootstrapping steps of dismantling the former
>Verisign monopoly would allow the community also to learn from experiences
>with the divestiture of the least risky operational gTLD registry first.
>
>My guess was that the learning curve would be mainly on the "operational"
>and "business-economics" side of these transitions. After these 10 days I
>have learned that in the current ICANN-climate these transitions, allthough
>about the most substantive economic decisions ICANN made up to now, also
>provide "procedural" lessons, with to my surprise two off the people I would
>have suspected at least instance, upfront in the spotlight of scrutiny.
>
>There is also an important lesson when reviewing the delay between the
>Accra-meetings event. We had the immediate comment on March 15th and the
>start of this discussion after Milton's posting on May 13th.
>Not only does ICANN suffer from volunteer board members with too limited
>spare time to get more deeply involved and be able to redirect the
>profesional staff. Also ICANN's fiercest critics seem to operate as
>volunteers with too limited time available. As such any option for remedy
>has passed.
>
>Therefore starting to think now about what to do with foreseeable upcoming
>COI-issues around the divestiture of ".net" as pointed out above should be
>the minimum constructive effort we can take away from the last ten days of
>list discussion.
>
>with regards,
>
>Hendrik Rood
>--
>
>
>
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>
>
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