RE: [ga] Questions for Joe Baptista / Eric Dierker, and why the GA list should be ended

[JFC Morfin <jefsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear George and all,
at this time there are many serious people in the US and around the 
world considering alternatives to ICANN. IMHO this is not advisable.
However, this is partly due to the governance of this list. This post 
is an attempt to propose and initiate feasible answer, based upon a 
realistic analysis. Therefore it is not a short post.
On 21:25 19/09/2007, George Kirikos said:
> > Could you please introduce them (no teasing meant. You explain
> > Danny's, I think we need to know yours').
>
> Sure. Read the enumerated points at:
> http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga-200709/msg00146.html
> which followed up on:
> http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga-200709/msg00138.html
I am sorry, I was not crystal clear myself. You said that Danny was 
chasing free traveling in participating to the ICANN debate (I do not 
think he did much, but why not if ICANN is paying :-)). I was 
referring to your own real long term objectives with ICANN.
> I wouldn't be more equal. I would participate remotely. :) My point was
> that if Danny earned the minimum wage per hour, for every hour spent
> bemoaning ICANN not giving him travel funding, he could go to LA or
> Paris on his own, if he wanted to.
Correct. Danny where you ever on an ICANN payroll?

> Personally, if ICANN spent a
> fraction of its budget on improving remote participation (e.g.
> Webex.com or comparable tools from Microsoft, etc.) they'd end up
> saving more in the long run. Indeed, perhaps some of those companies
> would even let ICANN do a meeting for "free", to test out the
> technology and showcase it to an IT-savvy audience.

This would be in tune with the mission of the ICANN that you/we would 
have liked.
However, let us be serious and constructive for once on this GA. This 
is not the mission of the ICANN that we currently have and not the 
problems that it currently faces.
ICANN is the International American NIC agency (you will note that 
all the people that you are considering belong to the British Empire 
and ex-Colonies). There is no harm in that. At the Tunis WSIS, we all 
agreed for this to continue, even if this was not very clear due to 
the necessity of the US/Europe deal managed by the UK. We agreed to 
the best common interest, provided that emergent issues are addressed 
at the IGF, in order to permit ICANN to progressively enter into an 
enhanced cooperation with other national, civil, industry, and 
international governances (not only constituencies) without balkanization.
The problem that we are facing invlolves the fact that the only ICANN 
existing "GA" (i.e. a structure in tune with the IGF), is supposed to 
be this mailing list. If we want ICANN and the resto fo the world to 
progress, , we need to assist the Tunis, consensually agreed upon, 
process, to proceed.
1. I agree with you. This list is obviously inappropriate as a GA. 
However, ICANN is a "no-member" structure, and therefore, a no Member 
GA. It has acknowledged (ALAC) the existence of @large Members, but 
this is not easy to know how to manage them.
2. The ALAC Paris meeting is a good occasion to have the concerned 
civil activists finalizing and agreeing upon a solution. This is why 
we should prepare it from now on.

Jefsey's Proposition

Sometimes one has to commit to a proposition, and possibly thereafter 
to action.
(some may ignore the logic of the World Summit on Information Society 
Internet Governance Forum WSIS/IGF: the Internet Governance is 
considered on a multistakeholder basis and carried inside special 
interest/working groups named Dynamic Coalitions. i.e. not static 
inter-Gov UN coalitions, but open coalitions that adapt to user 
reality. Everyone can initiate a DC, but it should become/target to 
be multipartite - civil society, private sector, Govs, international 
institutions. For example, Joop could easily initiate and IDNO-DC, 
which would probably use http://wsis-idnh.org - in line with other 
civil society DCs).
1. Action 1 (Avri?): to rename this list in an appropriate manner to 
formally make it what it is, which Avri has got accepted: a GNSO 
"open constituency" represented to the GNSO by other constituencies, 
and possibly having a moderator/chair as a GNSO observer (Avri to decide).
2. Action 2 (Roberto?): to make ALAC clarify what they want to be in 
the ICANN IGF involvement. I see no contradiction between the current 
ICANN and ALAC concepts. These are "at large members in a no inner 
member organization". They advise the BoD on the inner issues and 
possibly local concerns that they may have. I think this could be 
concerted with ISOC since there are in fact some suggestions to have 
ISOC concert with IETF on users' priorities.
3. Action 3 (us and/or BoD?): unless ALAC reforms in order to adopt a 
multistakeholder IGF approach, there is a need for an IGF ICANN 
Dynamic Coalition. There are then two main possibilities:
- an open standard WSIS-ICANN Dynamic Coalition approach, which the 
Civil Society could initiate in order to debate ICANN related topics.
- a more ICANN specific approach (ICANN is special within the IGF) 
that would lead to an ICANN-GA Dynamic Coalition, in which ICANN 
could be a special Member. We all are members of the ICANN community.
In both cases, I think ICANN misses an ICANN/IGFSO in order to 
interface the IGF. This is a rather urgent issue because up to now 
the IGF tended to confuse the Internet and ICANN with the DNS, and 
therefore, the GNSO. This is quickly changing and the main issues in 
Rio are going to be the CIR (critical Internet resources) where IP, 
routing, IDN, DNSSEC, stability, RSSAC, etc. will be discussed. I 
would like to introduce "interoperability" myself as the core issue. 
It will take time. This will lead to the reconsideration of the 
architectural and strategic IANA issues.

The background

We have to understand, among all the "ICANNers", that the WSIS has to 
acknowledge the current use of the ICANN Intenet by the world digital 
ecosystem. It has assigned the IGF to be the place for the other 
Internet to emerge, in good coordination and international 
cooperation. In addition to national Internet architectures, four of 
them are of importance:
1. the Multilingual Internet. It has not much to do with the US-ASCII 
Internationalized Internet not being fully documented yet by the 
IETF, not fully supported yet by Unicode, and not fully understood 
yet by ICANN.
2. the Users' Internet, the IETF is not interested in it. ISOC could 
eventually make it documented in order to prevent a messy grassroots 
InterNAT answer to the CIR/ROAP current increasing concerns, for example.
3. the Internationally Distributed Regalian Network. IGF is about 
using the network together. This involves local laws, justice, 
economy, and trade. For example:
- e-commerce (English inside) the current Internationalized Internet 
documented architecture and W3C standards favor, is for this reason 
in direct violation of the WTC regulations against the technical 
limitation to commerce, and to lingual human rights.
- insurances - what guarantees the stability of the DNS? Who is going 
to pay for the tremendous catastrophe that an ICANN failure in 
managing the root file could become?
- national defenses. How to prevent a repetition of the ".iq" case? 
How to protect national intelligence against the DNS root server archives.
4. the Semantic Internet. This is obviously the most massive issue. 
For the time being, the entire American Datacoms strategy is based on 
the idea that the world communication network is developed, 
documented, and operated in English. This means no competition to 
English based technology, decentralized management, and thinking - as 
per RFC 3935.
Semantic Internet totally changes that. If ICANN is going to manage 
for some times the US World Datacoms, we all need it to be stable, in order
- to ensure the transition to Globally Diverse Datacoms because 
Metacoms are diverse by essence,
- to keep playing the key role that they have for the USA.

This calls for a very urgent review of the situation. This is not 
only because of the interference of semantic addressing with the NTIA 
namespace, but also because the USA, ICANN, ITU, WSIS, ISO, etc. have 
investigated no strategy as of yet, and are therefore stark naked in 
front of the semantic emergence. However, Google, Wikipedia, 
folksonomies, Dublin Core, JTC1/SC32/WG2, MLTF, China, etc. have 
already thoroughly advanced on it. This can lead to an enormous 
disruption of everything by bringing new concepts, and torrents of 
new traffic that we have no bandwidth for. We are technically 
unprepared. An ICANN/SEMSO (Semantic Extended Management SO) along 
with brainware experts are very much needed.
The current danger

ICANN so far is considered as the leader of the Internet community. 
The US/UK deal in Tunis lead to a quadripartite governance (civil 
society, private sector, governments, and international 
institutions). This permitted to keep the CIR (Critical Internet 
Resources) out of the IGF, provided IETF was able to provide ICANN 
with, and ICANN was able to manage, the name (IDN), numbers (IPv6), 
parameters (innovation), language/country base (langtags), normative 
support (interoperability) the WSIS expected.
This is not the case. CIR are becoming a major issue. ICANN support 
is now fully involved through the landing of an "Internet Community", 
which is more or less considered as the missing technical fith party. 
This is acceptable as long as this is not to be understood as the 
"ICANN Community", and a way to retain technical control on the World 
Digital Ecosystem.
IMHO helping ICANN to become a better self, would help preventing an 
opposition with what could become the INTERNET-GA of an Internet 
Dynamic Coalition.
jfc