NCSG Policy Committee statement on IOC/RCRC proposal

[Andrew A. Adams]

Milton Mueller wrote:
> Any subgroup of academics that wants to issue a statement is able to
> do so at any time. There is no need to create additional
> organizational overhead. The Stakeholder Group can accommodate any ad
> hoc formation of a group of any kind. So, no need for a new
> constituency, and let's never confuse having a formal organization
> with having a meaningful voice, the two are quite distinct.

Milton was very persuasive on this point when the NCSG was forced by the
Board/staff to use a constituency model instead of a single group with
individual and group members which was the preferred option for the majority
of the members at the time. Few of the academic members seemed to see the
point of an academic constituency once the surrent charter was adopted and
studied and explained. If a significant numbers of representatives of HE
institutions as registrants of domain names (in .edu, .ac.<countrycode>,
.<countrycode> etc) were to join NCSG as the non-profit ones are entitled to
do, I would think, then they might form an HE institutions constituency and
many of the internet-governance-researcher academics (from law, CS, IS and
other disciplines) might also joint that but that would be a separate issue
to dividing the working academics from other non-commercial users into a
pointless overhead of maintaining a formal constituency.

Of course any non-profit HE institution which wished to join as an
organisation would probably fit within NPOC anyway.


--
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa at meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/