[NCUC-DISCUSS] [Blog post] NCUC exerts policy leadership at ICANN 60 by Milton Mueller

[Tomslin Samme-Nlar]

Nicely reported and a job well done for the increasing NCUC influence.


----
Tomslin


On 3 December 2017 at 05:17, Renata Aquino Ribeiro <raquino at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello
>
> Please see below a new blog post on NCUC website as result from
> activities of NCUC Fellowship Program as well.
>
> Thank you for the author, Milton Mueller, for this comprehensive
> report of the meeting.
>
> Posting on plain text, please see embedded links on the online version.
>
> https://www.ncuc.org/2017/12/02/ncuc-exerts-policy-leadership-at-icann-60/
>
> NCUC exerts policy leadership at ICANN 60
>
> By Milton Mueller, Internet Governance Project, Georgia Institute of
> Technology
>
> ICANN 60 showed that NCUC is playing an increasingly prominent role in
> ICANN. In the past, we were mainly reacting to policy initiatives from
> other stakeholder groups – usually proposing things we oppose. At this
> meeting, we were setting an agenda and influencing the rest of the
> environment in several areas. This blog will cover only those areas in
> which I was able to directly observe what was going on. There were
> several other NCUC activities at ICANN 60 that I was not able to
> observe (notably I missed most of the GNSO Council meetings and most
> of the geonames meeetings).
>
> Outreach
>
> A joint outreach meeting of NCUC and At Large on Saturday was a very
> productive event. It drew a large audience, including many of the new
> fellows and supported travelers. ICANN is drawing many new people into
> its processes, but many of them are confused by the complex
> organizational structures within ICANN, and some have vague or
> inaccurate ideas about what ICANN does. NCUC Chair Farzaneh Badii
> clarified that NCUC, as part of the GNSO, is focused exclusively on
> policy development for generic domain names, whereas AL can offer
> advice about anything. She also made it clear that NCUC is for
> noncommercial interests within ICANN, whereas At Large membership can
> include both commercial and noncommercial end users. Some differences
> in the attitudes of NCUC and At Large emerged during the discussions,
> particularly around Whois/privacy issues, where NCUC takes more of a
> rights-based approach and At Large positions are driven more by those
> who want to regulate users.
>
> This meeting also featured a discussion between me and the current and
> future heads of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee,
> Patrik Faltstrom and Rod Rasmussen, on the topic of “DNS abuse.” We
> discussed what was the line between forms of abuse that involve
> domains only, and abusive or illegal content, which is outside of
> ICANN’s mission. We may have succeeded in making the SSAC people more
> sensitive to this distinction.
>
> Jurisdiction
>
> NCUC was also prominent in discussions of the jurisdiction issue. Led
> by Internet Governance Project colleagues Farzaneh Badii and myself,
> but with participation and support from NCUC members Claudio Lucena
> and Tatiana Tropina, we pushed for mitigating the effect of OFAC
> sanctions on ICANN’s neutrality as global domain administrator.
> Recommendations to commit ICANN to obtaining OFAC waivers whenever
> needed, and to push for a general OFAC license, were accepted by the
> subgroup. Opposition to the subgroup’s report developed within GAC,
> however. The problem, as Brazil’s GAC representative made clear, was
> not that they were “against” the OFAC-related recommendations. They
> are “very useful, very helpful,” he said. They feared that if they
> support the final report they are condoning the idea that the
> discussion of jurisdiction is over. Brazil and other countries still
> want to discuss further immunities. In meetings with the GAC, NCUC
> played a role in smoothing over the dissent by making it clear that we
> are not against continued discussion of immunities and the subgroup
> report was modified to allow this continued discussion.
>
> ICANN and content regulation
>
> NCUC actors made a major push against pressures to turn ICANN towards
> content regulation. Just before the meeting, NCUC member Internet
> Governance Project released a paper on registrar’s terms of service
> and their power to suspend domains based on their content. Member
> organization Electronic Frontier Foundation continued its campaign
> asking registrars not to “take up the censor’s pen.” These papers were
> discussed at the NCUC and NCSG meetings on constituency day and helped
> to inform members about the issue.
>
> We continued the pressure in our meeting with SSAC representatives, as
> noted above, and in our meeting with the ICANN board. Content
> regulation via ICANN was featured in one of the questions we asked of
> the board. We received a very strong and reassuring response from
> board member Becky Burr, which, due to its importance and the need to
> keep a record of the commitment, I copy from the transcript below:
>
> BECKY BURR: And the Board has resolved, …to be very clear in
> everything we do to articulate why we think what we’re doing is
> consistent with our mission. We want to put that out there to start a
> conversation, a dialogue with the community to make sure … that we all
> have mission at the top of mind. The purpose of that is to make sure
> that we collectively have a very clear understanding of what ICANN’s
> mission is, and we are consciously thinking about whether we are
> acting within ICANN’s mission at all times. That, really, to me, is a
> critical piece of making sure that everything we do goes back to
> ICANN’s mission, which, obviously, clearly excludes content control.
>
> MUELLER: Well, I think that’s as satisfactory an answer as I could
> expect Becky to give. And I do think that there are going to be some
> of these borderline questions. The thing that I like that I’m hearing
> is, going forward, a PIC (registry Public Internet Commitment) that
> strays into [content regulation] would not be considered something
> that ICANN would have to enforce through its compliance. Can we get a
> clear statement on it? New PICs?
>
> BECKY BURR: Well, I think it’s pretty clear that…that was the
> understanding of the community that new PICs going forward have to be
> — have to fall within ICANN’s mission.
>
> MUELLER: Okay. And then the registry itself might offer PICs — or even
> they wouldn’t be PICs, just policies that would allow them to regulate
> content within their own top-level domain. But ICANN wouldn’t be
> responsible for enforcing those commitments, right?
>
> BECKY BURR: No. So, for example, a number of registries are working
> with organizations on different ways of resolving disputes about
> copyright-related issues. Those are not within ICANN’s remit. ICANN is
> not involved in those. Those are private arrangements, private dispute
> resolution arrangements.
>
> MILTON MUELLER: Thank you.
>
> MARKUS KUMMER: So it seems we’re on the same page here, which is good.
>
> We also had a good meeting with the Registrars Stakeholder Group where
> we discussed the “registrar neutrality” ideas contained in the IGP
> paper. While there was general agreement about the need to detach
> domain administration from content regulation, it was clear that we
> will have trouble getting registrars to reduce discretion available to
> them. While sympathetic to neutrality, registrars would want carve
> outs for when they need to protect themselves for liability reasons.
>
> The issue of domain abuse vs. illegal content came up again on a panel
> about ICANN’s new Domain Abuse Activity Reporting data collection
> process. GNSO Council member Tatiana Tropina participated in this
> panel and reminded them of the need for due process and for not
> conflating domain abuse with website content.
>
> Whois/Privacy/RDS
>
> We were also active in the never-ending Whois/privacy issue. Whois is
> being re-branded as RDS (Registry Directory Services) but all the
> issues are the same. In a Sunday meeting of the RDS working group,
> NCUC members Stephanie Perrin, myself and Farzaneh Badii succeeded in
> challenging a false premise that much of the early work of the group
> has been based on, namely that the “purpose” of Whois can be derived
> from a list of all of its uses by various interests. The anti-privacy
> interests always approach the Whois purpose issue from this
> standpoint. They assert that because they are currently using their
> indiscriminate public access to personally identifiable information in
> a certain way, that that use should be considered as one of the
> “purposes” of Whois. NCUC advocates, on the other hand, noted that for
> a data collector such as ICANN, the purpose of Whois relates only to
> those functions ICANN needs the data for to perform specific purposes.
> The purpose of Whois restricts what data is legitimately collected. If
> the “purpose” of whois is to facilitate law enforcement, for example,
> then registrars should be collecting and publishing passport or social
> security numbers, as that would certainly make LEA’s job easier. But
> that is in fact NOT ICANN’s purpose for collecting Whois data. By the
> end of this meeting, we seem to have driven this point home, and
> people in the RDS group seemed to better appreciate the important
> distinction between “use cases” and “purpose” in data collection.
> Whether that will affect the RDS group’s final recommendations remains
> to be seen.
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