Re: A translation (was Re: An update from the ICANN ISPCP meeting...)

[Eric Brunner-Williams <brunner () nic-naa net>]

David wrote:
> Indeed, and I must commend Warren and Eric for caring enough to actually engage in this stuff. While many people in the 
> NANOG/IETF/DNS Operations communities complain about the latest abomination ICANN is inflicting upon the world, there 
> aren't a whole lot of folks from those communities who take the (non-trivial) amount of time to try to understand and 
> address the situation. While I fully understand the rationales for not participating, the lack of strong representation from 
> the technical community does not help in preventing abominations.


The number of technically capable with multi-meeting attendance records 
is wicked limited, and most are silo'd off -- into SSAC or TAC or ASO or 
... or attending annual co-gigs like OARC, and so, with the exception of 
those working for registries, rarely involved in actual policy 
development where it actually happens -- at the GNSO Council -- as all 
policy relating to generic top-level domains originates in the GNSO, via 
a or the (by abuse of notation) Policy Development Process (PDP).

So if there is a point to a ISPCP stakeholders group (formerly the ISP 
Constituency), it is to have votes in the GNSO Council and so be capable 
of (a) originating a policy activity (a PDP), and (b) being eligible to 
chair the resulting working group, and (c) being eligible to vote on the 
recommendation(s) of the working group. Otherwise it is ornamental, a 
reflection of one of the several errors of judgement of the 
Roberts/Dyson/Touton team back when "multi-stakeholder(ism)" was being 
made up as an alternative to the contractor-agency binary relationship.

It takes years to get things done, and things happen, even on 
Constituency Day, as Warren noted, so this isn't a 
send-one-staffer-and-expect-goodness kind of investment. The competent 
teams are three or more, and work years of meetings to achieve their 
policy ends.

> I think it safe to say that much (but not all) of the warfare that goes on at ICANN meetings is between the folks 
> interested in protecting IPR (in this context, trademarks) and folks interested in selling oodles of domain names.

Generally true. Counter-examples: Sitefinder, FastFlux, ...

There are other axis of evils, somewhat orthogonal to the infringement 
vs volume conflict of interests, but absent what I think of as 
"operators" (of oodles of wire or piles of cooling kit), all issues that 
involve name-to-resource mappings where ICANN policy, not national law, 
is dispositive, are and will continue to be determined by one or the 
other of the infringement vs volume parties.


Eric