OReilly Media on "ICANN without restraints: the difficulties of coordinating stakeholders"

[Robin Gross]

FYI:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/icann-without-restraints-the-d.html

ICANN without restraints: the difficulties of coordinating stakeholders
by Andy Oram

People interested in coalitions and policy-making on a global scale--
topics that are increasingly relevant in a world whose borders are
irrelevant to carbon dioxide, flu viruses, and other critical
entities--need to learn from other organizations that are dealing
with these issues. This week brings particularly important news about
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN),
which has been making policy for eleven years under a number of
difficult premises:
It was created hastily and arbitrarily without roots in the
communities most interested in its mandate.
Its concept of stakeholders is boundless, potentially involving
anyone who uses the Internet or gets information that has passed at
some point over the Internet.
Its reach is global, and its decisions are affected by issues of
language and culture.
Those in charge of ICANN have compounded these intrinsic problems
with poor decisions and bad leadership. But ICANN is currently
undergoing one of its regular reorganizations. Hopes were on the rise
that it may overcome the barriers I've listed as well as its own
history--at least till this week.
On September 30, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is ICANN's
publicly accountable overseer, announced the most important decision
affecting ICANN since its founding: the U.S. government will give up
its role as overseer and make ICANN independent. ICANN's missteps in
the past pushed the Commerce Department to seriously consider
revoking ICANN's authority. But that can never happen now.

Instead, a body called the Governmental Advisory Committee provides
input to be heeded or ignored by ICANN, at its option. And because
this committee is so diffuse, its members possessing different
interests and agendas, one can hardly imagine them coming together to
strongly voice opposition to a controversial ICANN decision.

Reactions among Internet observers also indicate that this
unprecedented assignment of authority was handled in secrecy, which
is an odd way, to say the least, for a government agency to carry out
a critical policy.

Therefore, the questions that ICANN's history raises about governance
and participation become even more relevant.

The stakes for ICANN and its stakeholders
 From October 25-30, at ICANN's regular meeting in Seoul, board
members will meet with representatives of its noncommercial users
constituency (NCUC) to consider a proposal to improve relations with
these communities. The non-commercial users constituency is an
umbrella for a wide range of interested parties, ranging from
political action organizations and academic researchers to artists
and journalists who use the Internet for distribution and collaboration.

To some extent, the non-commercial users constituency is the soul of
ICANN, where the domain-name registrars and registries are its
machinery and the commercial users constituency its fuel. ICANN needs
all these constituencies--now they're being renamed "stakeholder
groups"--but they are currently way out of balance.

Robin Gross, a long-time volunteer activist with the NCUC, described
to me a regulatory environment on ICANN that is all too familiar to
people working for the public interest in other settings. The other
three stakeholder groups pay experts to work full-time on ICANN
issues; these experts travel to all the meetings and are on a first-
name basis with the board and staff. In contrast, the NCUC is cobbled
together from volunteers having different interests and backgrounds,
often struggling to fund a single representative at official gatherings.

It should be pointed out that the four stakeholder groups work
through just one branch of ICANN--but an important branch that deals
with the issues of most interest to ICANN observers, the top-level
domains such as .com, .org, and .edu. This branch of ICANN, called
the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), is the focus of the
current reorganization.

The source of hope lies in the increased role assigned to the NCUC
within the GNSO. (Spend just a couple more hours learning about
ICANN, and you too will start eliminating natural language from your
speech in favor of abbreviations.)

GNSO was originally made up of six constituencies. The NCUC used to
be one of them, and commercial interests encompassed three. Now that
the GNSO is made up of four stakeholder groups, one of which
corresponds to the NCC, non-commercial interests seem to have a
correspondingly larger footprint. But even though only one
stakeholder group is now officially commercial, it has far more in
common than the NCC does with the registrars and registries (all
businesses, of course) to which the other two stakeholder groups are
dedicated. So the non-commercial interests are still a minority, not
to mention a poor cousin.

Having made some progress and been acknowledged as an important set
of stakeholders, the NCUC is focused now on the question of how their
representatives will be elected. I won't go into detail about this
question, because I'd lose my readers after the sixth or seventh
paragraph, but you can take a peek at a press release from NCUC
activists. A more general examination of the GNSO reorganization has
been written by Professor Milton Mueller.

The important point I want to make is that ICANN is on the cusp of
improving the effectiveness of the NCUC, and through them the wider
public interest that goes beyond the interests of individual
registrars, trademark holders, etc.

In search of a responsive governing body
I've covered the policy issues in domain names repeatedly over the
years and have followed ICANN since its first public meeting in 1998.
Most of its attempts at public input exemplified practices to avoid--
notably its idealistic but unfeasible worldwide membership program.

Thoughtful observers decided long ago that formal democracy won't
work in a geographically distributed organization with no boundaries
to membership. Attempts to make policy through voting, or to reach
consensus on anything, will falter from differences in the ability of
stakeholders to gain access and participate, the futility of winning
sustained participation from scattered stakeholders, and the barriers
to communication and community-building. The NCUC is concerned right
now with installing a voting system that facilitates communication
and community-building in the NCUC rather than undermining it.

Thus, an organization without clear roots in geography or a
particular interest group must be governed in a centralized manner,
but remain responsive to outside pressure. This is where ICANN has
lapsed. It has always been dominated by its staff, and has drawn most
of its board members from outsiders with little background in its
subject matter. The staff are accustomed to doing whatever they think
best and, when faced with a storm of public protest, hunkering down
for the duration.

Given this analysis, the decision by the Commerce Department to let
go the reins is disturbing. A body with a history like ICANN needs to
be concerned that external judgment will ultimately be rendered on
its decisions. Reviews by a responsible government agency would be
far more meaningful than a diluted participation in a forum of many
competing interests.

But ICANN has a new chair who, according to Robin Gross, wants to
overturn the board's traditional rubber-stamp role. Furthermore,
several board members have reacted warmly to approaches from NCUC
members and have agreed to meet directly with them in Seoul. The
decision on the voting structure for the NCUC will be small but
significant, and will tell us a lot about the ability of this
organization to reflect a wide range of interests.


IP JUSTICE
Robin Gross, Executive Director
1192 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA  94117  USA
p: +1-415-553-6261    f: +1-415-462-6451
w: http://www.ipjustice.org     e: robin at ipjustice.org



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