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Blogs
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Hopes for Dublin by Jordan Carter | 12 October
ICANN Accountability - the chronology and Dublin thoughts by Jordan Carter | 8 October 2015
- IANA Transition, ICANN Accountability, "Has Always Been About POWER" by John Poole | 1 October 2015
Get on with it! Uncle Sam's right-hand man schools ICANN powwow by Kieren McCarthy | 26 September 2015
- Here, near the shore of Santa Monica, we see ICANN in its natural habitat – doing nothing by Kieren McCarthy | 25 September 2015
- NTIA Directs Smoke Signals Toward LA by Philip Corwin | 24 September
- China (CAICT) Objects to ICANN CCWG Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal by John Poole | 24 September 2015
- Thoughts Heading into Los Angeles by Steve Crocker | 24 September 2015
ICANN Accountability Enhancements Key in Moving IANA Transition Forward by Matthew Shears | 24 September 2015
- The Empire Strikes Back: ICANN Accountability at the Inflection Point by Philip Corwin | 23 September 2015
- Reflections on the IANA Stewardship Transition Process by Larry Strickling | 23 September 2015
- THE MYTH OF THE NEW GTLD BOTTOM UP MULTISTAKEHOLDER PROCESS by Avri Doria | 18 September 2015
Building Momentum: An Update from the CCWG-Accountability co-Chairs | 18 September 2015
ICANN Board Submits Final Comments to CCWG-Accountability Public Comment by Steve Crocker | 11 September 2015
Upcoming Comments from the ICANN Board to the ICG and CCWG-Accountability by Steve Crocker | 7 September 2015
- Working Together Through The Last Mile by Steve Crocker | 3 September 2015
- The Latest Update on the Board's Review of the CCWG Proposal by Steve Crocker | 28 August 2015
- The IANA Transition: The Work Ahead | 27 August 2015
- Updating our Community on our Review of the CCWG-Accountability Proposal | 26 August 2015
- IANA Contract Extension The Right Thing to Do | 18 August 2015
- An Update on NTIA's Announcement to Extent IANA Functions Contract | 18 August 2015
- An Update on the IANA Transition by Larry Strickling | 17 August 2015
- Speak Up on the IANA Transition and ICANN Accountability | 7 August 2015
- An Update on IANA Stewardship Discussions | 7 August 2015
- Let Your Voice be Heard on IANA Transition by Larry Strickling | 4 August 2015
- Additional Coordination Through New Transition Facilitation Calls | 16 July 2015
- The CCWG: From Buenos Aires to Paris to Dublin | 15 July 2015
- ICANN accountability, IANA stewardship - what's at stake? | 15 July 2015
- Three key issues for ICANN's Accountability Working Group | 15 July 2015
- Joining the Global Discussion at ICANN 52 | 7 February 2015
- December Monthly Update | 18 December 2015
- October-November Monthly Update | 17 November 2014
- Evaluation of the Enhancing ICANN Accountability Comment Period | 6 October 2014
- September Monthly Update | 26 September 2014
- August Monthly Update | 8 August 2014
Most Recent Blog Update
Author: Jordan Carter
Date: 8 12 October 2015
Original Link: httphttps://wwwinternetnz.domainmondo.comnz/2015blog/10/iana-transition-icann-accountability.htmlhopes-dublin
This post shares a referenced chronology of recent accountability-related milestones in the ICANN environment, and offers some thoughts about the stakes at ICANN's Dublin meeting next week.
You’ve probably had an experience in your life of being part of a difficult or complicated project – sometimes things go into a blur, or after months or years you find it hard to remember the order of significant events.
Well, the debate regarding ICANN’s accountability is nothing if not complicated (not to say difficult!). I’ve been a participant in it as a member of the Working Group representing country-code domains since December 2014, and even over not quite a year, things get a bit blurry.
To help me, and possibly you, I decided to pull together a short chronology of some of the key milestones. Dates of proposals, significant moments in the project, and so on.
You can review (and critique) the chronology here:
I didn’t expect that seeing this story in one short place would trigger some new insights, or remind me of some old ones, but it did. Here are some of them:
- Astonishing progress: since the end of last year, and the demise of ICANN’s resistance to a community-led accountability process, the Cross Community Working Group (CCWG) has made huge progress. It assessed previous suggested accountability mechanisms; built requirements for a new settlement; devised models that could deliver; took feedback in good faith and worked together to overcome problems exposed in public debate. The Second Draft Proposal of the group is workable, though it does not enjoy consensus in the ICANN community yet.
- Consistent resistance and delay: the powers-that-be at ICANN have resisted community-driven accountability reforms throughout this process. The multi-month delay to establishing the CCWG speaks volumes. The group’s work would have concluded next week in Dublin if we’d had the few more months back in 2014. I say that not to lament it, but to make it clear where responsibility lies for the current time pressure. Hint: the CCWG isn’t responsible.
- The rightness of multistakeholderism: the community has followed a true multistakeholder process. Compromise, diligence, thoroughness and a willingness to compromise and think outside the box – all these have been central to the work of the group. That work process is hard to maintain and has been seriously challenged by the ICANN Board alleging a right to insert “red lines” into part of the debate – on the critical matters of enforcement. Those interventions place the credibility of the multistakeholder process at risk. In doing so, the ICANN Board isn’t only putting the accountability reform process under pressure it doesn’t need, it is delaying the group’s ability to complete its task (others have more forceful views - see the note by William Currie, an Advisor to the CCWG appointed by the Public Experts Group last year, here). The follow on consequence: the IANA Stewardship transition itself is delayed, a consequence only a very few people would celebrate (and I am not one of them).
- Proof of need: looking over the short history of the current debate gives ample evidence of why the reforms demanded by the community are required. Without the spur provided by the IANA Stewardship transition, this opportunity would never have opened up. We should be grateful to the Obama administration for the chance provided to build a long term, responsible framework for ICANN accountability.
- Some welcome flexibility: a year ago, if you’d thought you would hear ICANN saying it would welcome binding arbitration, the ability to remove Board directors, a community right of veto in bylaws changes – many would have stared at you and laughed. If you’d suggested a community group working in open multistakeholder ways could deliver a work output the quality the CCWG has matched, the same stares and laughs. But both have happened. Things have moved.
Everyone involved with or watching this process will have different insights, or may agree happily or disagree sharply with mine. I offer them up in public as part of my own commitment to accountability: it is reasonable for people involved in the conversation to share their thinking. In any case, my own thought processes work best with dialogue – not with solitude.
ICANN is on the verge of historic, meaningful and positive reform. The Numbers and Protocols communities, watching this process through gritted teeth and very keen for the transition to go ahead, can hopefully celebrate what is happening. With ICANN having a curious dual role for the Names community (policy forum and IANA functions operator), there has been no alternative to making accountability improvements now.
(To my technical community friends - if there’s any doubt in your mind about why we need change – review the chronology, remember the pushback, remember what you guys faced early this year.)
We’re all close to the end of the debate. You can sense it – proposals are crystallising, timeframes are compressing, volunteers are at the end of reasonable commitments of time and energy.
The imperatives now are to see things through: to stick with the multistakeholder process that listens to all perspectives but gives nobody a right of veto; the accountability framework the community requires to accept the transition going ahead; and the changes to ICANN’s culture that will flow from a new accountability settlement.
Dublin is a week away. The elephant in the room (the CCWG’s proposal and the ICANN Board’s counterproposal for the way to crystallise accountability powers) will need to be resolved, or eaten, or thrown in the ocean.
My preference is of course for the product of the multistakeholder process, the model the CCWG has developed in public and with the involvement of all stakeholders. But unlike some others, I am not proclaiming bottom lines on any of the “how” – it is the “what,” the requirements and ability to meet them, that matter.
The “what” is ensuring the Internet community, able to organise through ICANN’s open groupings, can hold a corporation with hundreds of staff, hundreds of millions of dollars, tight links with the American government, a monopoly ability to extract rents from the domain name industry, and a natural institutional desire to be as free of restraint as it can – can hold all that to account, given the huge imbalance of power, knowledge, resources that tilt the playing field of accountability entirely in ICANN’s favour.
Beyond the "elephant," there are lots of other details that need to be sorted out. It all matters – NTIA have been clear the proposal has to be bullet proof.
In the end though, if there isn’t an accountability settlement that achieves consensus, then there isn’t going to be a proposal bullet proof or not.
No accountability proposal – no IANA Stewardship Transition proposal. No transition proposal – no transition.
No transition? All those risks the transition is designed to head off come back to life. And the multistakeholder approach discredited to boot.
Those are the stakes on the table as we head to Dublin.
Two final thoughts: where there’s a will there’s a way. And as an old high-school teacher used to say to me, “not easy, not optional.”
As the 54th ICANN Meeting in Dublin approaches, CCWG-Accountability member and InternetNZ Chief Executive Jordan Carter sets out his hopes for the meeting, and his firm conviction that a path to consensus and speedy resolution of the accountability debate is open – and should be grabbed.
It’s crunch time.
In Dublin starting this Friday, a significant test faces the Internet community and ICANN. A real opportunity is there for consensus to emerge around a solid plan for improvements to ICANN’s accountability. These are improvements that would see the completion of the accountability framework for ICANN's stewardship of the IANA functions (alongside what is in place for the other communities (numbers and protocols)).
Making that happen is going to require everyone to be flexible. That's a challenge, but an achievable one.
By way of context, the CCWG is one of the two tracks of the IANA Stewardship transition, together with the ICG. Both are working to make ICANN an effective steward of the Internet's domain name system and a responsible, secure & reliable operator of the IANA Functions for the three operational communities (names, numbers and protocols). The CCWG's working method has been a multistakeholder one, in keeping with how the Internet community makes policy best.
After starting work at the end of 2014, the CCWG released a first draft proposal for how to improve ICANN's accountability in May, and a second in August. Since public comments on the second draft proposal closed a month ago, the CCWG has been analysing the feedback offered by the community, and has also spent time in a side effort to understand the logic behind the Board’s counter-proposal.
In parallel, as has been the case after each moment of public feedback, CCWG participants have been thinking through how to take the proposal to the next level – taking the feedback into account, clarifying the proposal, thinking about how to change and improve things for a final effort at a proposal that can be tested for consensus.
Compared with the most recent draft, here are some key changes that are part of the discussion that could lead to a new synthesis:
- A consensus approach for decisions about using the new community powers proposed by the CCWG (replacing the voting-based system)
- Much clearer explanation of how the reserve powers the CCWG has been dealing with fit into and build on existing ICANN processes (particularly the importance of consultation and collaboration before community powers come into play)
- The replacement of a membership model with a designator model (which would reduce the direct enforceability of some of the community powers, but would guarantee that board/director removals and bylaws change approvals were beyond question – and which arguably is consistent with how ICANN operates today)
- A commitment to continuous improvement of ICANN’s accountability (including perhaps through a longer-term governance review)
- Retention of the basic framework of improved review and redress through a stronger IRP, fundamental bylaws and so on
The above synthesis gives all key parties some wins: the basic framework of the CCWG’s work would be intact, the model of multistakeholder policy development upheld, many of the Board’s concerns taken into account, and no significant delays added to slow the transition down. Legal advisors and CCWG members have been fleshing out this approach, ready for discussion on Friday.
It seems to me that it would be viable to complete a proposal along these lines and have it out for public comment before the end of the year, and SO/AC approval early in 2016. That’s probably the fastest possible, without putting at risk the quality of the proposal. And since we’ve done that twice, and caused confusion and concern by skimping time to get the proposal clear and readable, it isn’t sensible to make the same mistake a third time.
To me that looks like an outcome worth trying very hard for – and if we can manage it, an outcome to be very happy with.
As ever, there are some risks.
- Some participants have started throwing bottom lines around. Those participants need to back off that, otherwise the chances of a consensus being achievable become very small.
- There may be a temptation for the ICANN Board to “box the CCWG in”, trying to monster it or the community into adopting a proposal that doesn’t meet the community’s accountability requirements in the name of timeliness. (In a separate post I have already pointed out that it is ICANN that is responsible for the time pressure, so the irony of an approach like this would be rich.)
- The technical communities – numbers and protocols – could lose confidence that this accountability process, which is best seen as a "catch up" for names to attain accountability as good as protocols and numbers already have - will ever conclude. Yet if it doesn't, the accountability framework for the IANA functions would be incomplete. This in turn could risk the integrity of ICANN and its role as the IANA Functions Operator for the three communities.
- The ICANN leadership could make a mistake with the Dublin meeting, and try to repeat the failed pressure tactics it tried with the CCWG in September (on calls and in Los Angeles) – to put it politely, such an approach would be sure to backfire and reduce the chance of consensus being reached.
The bigger picture regarding risk here, which plays on my mind a lot, has to do with the fact that the world’s eyes are on us.
If the ICANN community cannot arrive at a consensus for accountability improvements, the chances are that the IANA Stewardship transition will be unnecessarily delayed – possibly not even being complete by 30 September 2016.
A further delay (and it would only be a delay – the cat is out of the bag, and the transition is inevitable – it’s only a question of when) would have a stack of downsides.
It would embolden critics of the multistakeholder model.
It would annoy and exasperate the technical communities, risking the effort to have a single IANA Functions Operator serving all three communities.
It would be a red light for Congress in paying very close attention to what is going on.
It would be an admission that the players in the ICANN environment can’t reach consensus on an important issue – not a great advertisement for a model that is premised on achieving consensus as its main strength in legitimately coordinating the Internet’s system of unique identifiers.
High stakes for all of us.
It’s reasonable to have some optimism about the chances of a consensus emerging. Nobody’s interests are compromised by the sort of synthesis the CCWG is working on.
As we count down the days to Dublin, let’s recommit ourselves to building an accountability settlement that works. Let’s remind ourselves that consensus and being flexible isn’t about “losing” anything and doesn’t have to be about second-bests.
It really can be a collaborative, open process that brings all of us to a better place. Idealistic? I don’t think so: it’s why I support ICANN, it’s why I support the transition, and it’s why I want us to succeed this week and next. It’s a model that works. Let’s use it.
That’s my hope for Dublin – a hope I welcome you to share and to turn into reality.
- JordanC's blog
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