Elections

[Dan Krimm]

At 10:04 PM -0600 10/24/07, Cheryl Preston wrote:

> ... When I attended my first NCUC meeting last
>Spring in San Juan, I was presented with the "Keep the Net Neutral"
>petition NCUC had drafted and sponsored.  It included a statement
>charging ICANN to do everything in its power to impose an absolute free
>expression value at every level of the DNS system.
>
>I admit that I was rather stunned that the NCUC was so deeply involved
>in promoting a particular social, political and legal position regarding
>the role of ICANN.  We were able to work a compromise by striking the
>affirmative charge language in the petition, but the petition and the
>later workshop sponsored by NCUC evidenced a clear commitment to this
>absolutist ideological view.


As Campaign Director for the 'Keep The Core Neutral' coalition (KTCN), I
have to speak up and say that this is not an entirely accurate description
of the KTCN position or the statement.

KTCN does not hold an "absolutist" position about free expression "at every
level of the DNS system".  The main thrust of the campaign is that ICANN is
an entirely inappropriate political venue to decide such matters, which
should be decided as locally as possible in the political hierarchy, so
that differing communities with differences of opinion may decide for
themselves how to control information access among themselves without
imposing those decision on others who legitimately disagree.

Cheryl's complaint about the one more affirmative sentence in the initial
draft of the petition was, in my own personal view, justified, and I felt
that removing it strengthened the statement overall by avoiding potential
confusion implying that we were asking ICANN to impose anything on anyone.
We are in fact asking ICANN to refrain from imposing anything on anyone
else, so that others may make their own decisions without imposing *their*
decisions on yet others using ICANN as a coercive force.

I am in fact personally in accord with much of what Cheryl says about ICANN
and the Internet, especially in her initial points 1, 2, 3, and 5, but I
would disagree with point #6 in that ICANN is not an appropriate venue to
be making decisions for how we balance our various important human rights,
and in fact there may be no centralized global jurisdiction that can
legitimately create a global standard for culture around the world,
especially in cultural domains where there is and perhaps can be *no*
global consensus.

Point #4 seems somewhat spurious.  The main thing to recognize here is that
"a thoughtful, balanced and realistic view of what few extreme forms of
speech are more harmful than helpful" is simply not likely in any
foreseeable future to find a global consensus in detail, and we should not
proceed on the assumption that this is at all possible.  Rather, it seems
entirely impossible at this point in time, and it definitely should not be
forced in any political sense.  Where less-than-global jurisdictions can
come to a genuine local consensus, those jurisdictions ought to be able to
define their own regulations without interference from ICANN or any other
purportedly global venue.

KTCN does not seek to "bind ICANN to a value/politics laden ... legal
position" -- in fact just the opposite.  KTCN believes that ICANN should
recuse itself from such political considerations so as not to pre-empt the
deliberations of legitimate political jurisdictions.  If ICANN has been
given "trust and stewardship" over anything, KTCN's position is that it
does not (and should not) reach non-technical and non-operational (i.e.,
political) criteria in the operation of gTLD registries.

Dan