Fwd: Charter drafts - and the related process so far

[Norbert Klein]

FYI

Norbert Klein

=

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
Subject: Charter drafts - and the related process so far
Date: Friday, 24 July 2009 (Cambodia time - USA: 23 July)
From: Norbert Klein <nhklein at gmx.net>
To: gnso-stakeholder-charters at icann.org

Though I have seen that many voices from different parts of the world have
sent in their support for the original proposal, prepared within the
Non-Commercial Users Constituency in an intensive process of online and
international Internet communication, in which we received an overwhelming –
an almost unanimous consensus – I thought it might not be important to state
this again.

But I write because I am utterly surprised that – in spite of this process of
wide and open consultation – the result of this process was sidelined so far.
The litany of “bottom-up consensus building,” which is in so many official
ICANN statements, became  more and more hollow over the years.

I say so as a person who was involved in the pre-ICANN efforts – the 1998
Singapore meeting - and since 1999 – Santiago de Chile – I fairly regularly
did participate in ICANN affairs, the “ICANN fellowship” as I felt it was, in
the early years – learning a lot for my efforts to start the first Internet
connection in Cambodia, creating the country code .kh in 1996 and
administering it until 1998, and continuing to be involved in the UNICODE
codification of the Khmer script and then the localization of software etc.

Over the years, our situation seemed to get more and more into the background
of the ICANN dynamics – but WSIS 1 and 2 were an encouragement, when the
Declaration of Principles of WSIS 1  said:

“We, the representatives of the peoples of the world, assembled in Geneva from
10-12 December 2003 for the first phase of the World Summit on the
Information Society, declare our common desire and commitment to build a
people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society,
where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and
knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their
full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their
quality of life, premised on the purposes and principles of the Charter of
the United Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.”

Instead of a “people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information
Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and
knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their
full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their
quality of life,”  I do not see much of this vision in ICANN's efforts to
secure the stability and security of the network.

This vision has been held up especially in the Non-Commercial Users
Constituency and in the At-Large structures, where the people-centered,
inclusive activities have their representation, and where they hope to be
supported, so that the purposes and principles of the UN Declaration of Human
Rights will be kept central in our operations.

The details for this are well stated in what the Non-Commercial Users
Constituency has elaborated and presented before – as the result of a wide
participatory process. I do not need to repeat it – I only hope that the
members of the ICANN Board will really take note of this and not pass quickly
to some “pragmatic” suggestions which are not based on the principles on
which we started to cooperate.

I want, however, highlight one aspect where I see a grave failure in the
process, where the Non-Commercial Users Constituency – on the basis of what
the organizations and persons here cooperating – thought to be important. We
raised it repeatedly, but we remained without an answer. When the discussions
about new gTLD touched on the restrictions to be considered, the NCUC raised
the question that such restrictions must be included against efforts to erode
the fundamental rights (as stated above) - the protection of rights for this
new developments. Many of us live in environments where this is crucial.
Instead the problem of “generally accepted legal norms of morality and public
order” became more prominent, and the repeated official requests by the NCUC
Chair to the staff, how the staff identifies these principles,
supposedly “recognized under international principles of law,” did never get
an official response.

Many of those who are not part of the larger technical or economic bodies
cooperating in ICANN, but who live somewhere “on the periphery,” need that
ICANN finds again ways to live up to the “bottom-up principle” for our social
development and – in some cases – for our survival.

The Non-Commercial Users Constituency, built up from the bottom, is an
important instrument for this. The new move I read a while ago, that a WIPO
initiative is accepted as the basis for a revision of the UDRP – without
considering immediately what this means in terms of a bottom-up process – is
a sign that the fundamental orientation of ICANN – from the point of view of
its world wide membership – not from those who control it – remains a most
important task. The non-commercial and the at-large users are the most
important basis for giving bottom-up orientation.


Norbert Klein


Open Institute
Phnom Penh/Cambodia
Member of the NCUC


--
Editing a review of the Cambodian press - in English translation.
I leave this standard note here. It shows the context from which I participate
in ICANN.

If you want to know what is going on in Cambodia, please visit
The Mirror, a regular review of the Cambodian language press in English.

This is the latest weekly editorial:

Struggling to Understand - Faced with Different Reports and Opinions - Sunday,
19.7.2009
http://tinyurl.com/m2572j

(To read it, click on the line above.)

And here is something new every day:
http://cambodiamirror.wordpress.com