RE: [ga] RE: Sponsorship of IGF Workshops

[JFC Morfin <jefsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:16 07/07/2007, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
> Karl Auerbach wrote:
> >
> > Given that ICANN has a limited charter and is funded, if
> > indirectly, out of the pockets of users of the internet, it
> > does seem that for ICANN to expend money and staff to
> > participate in the IGF efforts is ultra vires.
>
> In principle, I agree with Karl, it definitively would be the case.
> But unfortunately the IGF itself is going out of its charter and discussing
> alternate ways to dela with "critical resources", which is intended to be
> domain names and addresses. And this subject is exactly the charter of
> ICANN, so I believe that it is necessary that ICANN participates to the
> debate.

Dear Roberto,
I am afraid this not exactly the case. The Tunis agreement is that 
the USA (hence ICANN) manage the Internet as it is today. This in 
particular addresses the considerations voted by the US Congress and 
British interests. This also translates from the fact that IETF never 
wanted to participate to the WSIS, permitting easily the USA not to 
include the existing technical pole among the civil society, economy, 
government and international entities quadruple multi stakeholder 
governance. I consider this as an adequate patch due to the low 
technical awareness.

However, the agreement is that "emerging" issues (i.e. issues not 
included in the USG governed vision of the Internet) are the cup of 
tea of the IGF. This leads to an imprecise boarder to be actually de 
facto decided by ICANN and the USG. If an item is correctly addressed 
by them, they are in the lead because it is obviously not-emerging. 
Otherwise the IGF takes over. Since the IGF is merely an organisation 
equivalent to the IETF and has no IAB and IESG we are in a non 
defined situation. This is foreseen to be addressed by the "enhanced 
cooperation" mechanism to be discussed. Here we have certainly a 
difficulty because it has not been discussed yet, so, ICANN tends to 
think it is a an enhanced cooperation with ICANN, others it is an 
inter-governmental cooperation (and we have a possible conflict 
between ITU and ICANN/GAC), others think such a enhanced cooperation 
must involve all the "operational" stakeholders (civil society 
experts and user associations, economy decision makers, technical 
standardization organisations, governments, and international institutions).

Multilingual Internet is the initial technical issue. Critical 
resources can be the next one. They only becomes "emerging" issues 
because the world community tends to think the ICANN/USG approach is 
possibly inappropriate. The emergence of the so called IGF "Internet 
community" is perceived as a way to protect a financially rewarding 
but otherwise unsatisfactory status-quo (actively supported by some 
interests also active in the ICANNN community). Metacoms/Extended 
Services/Semantic addressing issues are certainly emerging issues by 
their own since they are outside of the ITU and of the IETF scope as 
consistently shown by the IETF attitude these last years.

There can be political influence attempts to address that situation 
in overcoming others' interest, introducing arbitrary technical 
limitations  (or what is perceived as such by some). We observe 
several of them. IMHO I think they lead to no where, because we all 
are in the same network system.

I think more positive a proposition such as the one I recently made 
at http://mltf.org/070622-prop.pdf over the geolinguistic 
metastructures of the Internet, or to everyone interested in 
contributing to an R&D debate over semantic addressing. Excluding 
emerging needs from the IETF/ICANN technology, such as 
multilingualization in trying to impose the sole English 
internationalization as do IETF/IDN, is bad. It can only push the 
world to consider multilingualization as "emerging" issue, therefore 
out of the scope of ICANN/IETF.

The same over the poor deployment of IPv6: IPv6 was an operator's 
need. Operators do not use it? Calling on users to force its 
deployment is certainly a good idea. However, it can only work in 
considering the networkwide applications that every users could 
benefit from (session/presentation layer, semantic addressing 
support, new types of universal needs, etc.)

This is why I think we must acknowledge our differences and possible 
conflicts and join forces, towards adequately structured 
multi-consensus (over the interoperability of several local 
consensuses). This GA _may_ help this due to its lurkers.

Cheers,
jfc