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

[Olévié Kouami]

Hi!
Great job !
Easily understandable.
Thank you Dr Müller.

Le 3 déc. 2017 18:37, "Tomslin Samme-Nlar" <mesumbeslin at gmail.com> a écrit :

> 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-leadershi
>> p-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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