--On Tuesday, May 21, 2013 09:42 +0100 Steve Crocker
<Steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Like the IETF, ICANN is also an open organization. ICANN
> meetings are free, and a veritable ocean of documents are
> published regularly, many in multiple languages to increase
> availability.
>
> ICANN is purposefully organized to include participation from
> a range of communities, e.g. business, civil society,
> governments, and the technical community.
>...
> The roster of topics active within ICANN at any given time is
> fully documented and publicized, and I invite anyone who is
> interested to participate. We listen to everyone, and we
> publish tentative results, tentative policies, etc. for
> everyone to critique.
--On Tuesday, May 21, 2013 12:25 +0200 Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond
<ocl@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Quite frankly, I used to have the same feeling... until very
> recently. With Steve at the wheel, things have improved a lot.
>...
> Today, it's still not
> perfect, but you cannot fix a bus by shooting it - work on it
> instead, to fix it. I believe it's fixable.
Steve and Olivier,
As I think you both know, I've made personal decisions to avoid
saying what I'm about to say in places as public as the IETF
list and have been largely successful in that for the last
decade. I've been deliberating about the balance of advantages
and disadvantages of responding to your notes; hence the delay
in doing so. I've worked happily and successfully with both of
you on various Internet issues and have no doubts about either
your integrity or your commitment to a better Internet, with the
latter more or less the way the IETF would understand. That
shared background and assumptions combined with your very
optimistic postings seem to call for comment.
Olivier, certainly there has been change at ICANN over the last
several years. You comment implies to me that you think things
are monotonically improving; I don't believe that although I do
believe that, if one starts from selected examples and times,
huge improvements are easy to document. I'll address the issue
of public input and what happens to it below.
As a fairly trivial example, while issues are publicized (as
Steve notes), they are publicized on a web site that seems much
harder to find anything on, unless one is spending enough time
working on ICANN issues for it to feel familiar with its
organization, than it was a few years ago. I recommend trying
the experiment of pretending you don't know the site and then
trying to get quickly to information on the status, open issues,
and decisions already made about any particular substantive
issue in which you might be interested.
Steve, participation in ICANN is certainly not free, any more
than participation in the IETF is free. ICANN doesn't charge a
meeting registration fee, but its meetings tend to be in more
exotic places that are more costly to get to and/or stay at than
IETF's choices (and some of us still whine about the IETF ones,
especially when IAOC considers "mid $200 range" to be acceptable
for hotels and when the combination of the IETF meeting
schedule, associated meetings, and plane connections can easily
require a six or seven day stay).
My not entirely subjective impression is that participating in
ICANN, f2f, is considerably more expensive in an average year
than it is for IETF. More important, while I think the IETF's
remote participation mechanisms could still use a lot of
improvement, they do tend to work and our "decisions on mailing
lists" rules and provisions for very public appeals and
responses provide a lot of protection when they don't work. By
contrast, ICANN's remote participation mechanisms for meetings
often don't work (probably an unfortunate side-effect of some of
the places ICANN chooses to meet) and a very large fraction of
the key decision-making meetings and discussions don't even
pretend to be publicly or remotely accessible.
But the more important issue, at least from my perspective, is
that two things keep reappearing and have either gotten worse or
remained the same in recent years. They are:
(1) While ICANN accepts input from anyone who is interested,
there is very little evidence that any of that input has any
influence on results unless it comes from a well-established
constituency group. There is little evidence that either the
Board or Staff actually consider any of the public input and
considerable evidence (from examination of proposals before and
after the public review) that they do not. It is also possible
that they consider all such comments and justifiably conclude
that all of them are completely bogus or uninformed, but I just
can't believe that. That might be less of an issue were those
established constituency groups really representative of the
Internet community but, especially in the domain name space, the
influential groups seems to be entirely those with a vested
interest in the marketing and sales of domain names. Even in
the address space, there is little evidence that anyone but the
NRO/RIRs and their associated entities can really be heard at a
level that has an influence on policy. I'm sure they consider
their processes adequate to reflect all legitimate input and
therefore that the closed circle of influence is a good thing;
perhaps they are right. Consequently, what "bottom up" seems to
mean in the ICANN environment is that only ICANN-recognized and
established presumptive representatives of the "bottom" have any
voice in the system with "that proposal or objection didn't
arrive via the bottom up process" sometimes being used as an
excuse to ignore input.
(2) The established mechanism for dealing with a moderately
contentious issue is to appoint a committee of volunteers to
study it. The mechanism for even more contentious or complex
issues is to appoint many committees either serially or in
parallel. Those committees typically produce reports that tend
to run into the hundreds of pages. I don't know whether that is
because they don't have time to write shorter reports or because
they don't think the subject matter can be covered in more
concise reports, but the pattern is clear, When those
committees cannot agree or discover the the issues are, in fact,
contentious, they typically recommend the creation of more
committees.
Those committees are time-consuming enough that their design has
another effect: only those with a very strong commitment to the
work and resources to back that commitment up can participate in
practice. Those people usually turn out to be those with a
vested interest in particular results, interests that are
dominated by those with an organizational interest in buying and
selling names. Others who might be willing to invest personal
resources to participate in the best interests of the Internet
are typically driven out of active participation in the process,
if not initially than by the sequence and multitude of
committees and inability to even figure out where the leverage
points lie, much less participate everywhere that is necessary.
The many, many years in which one "whois" or "registry database"
committee followed another, each one addressing somewhat
overlapping aspects of the issues, but with no ability to get
any of them to address IDN or "multilingual" registrations in a
serious way (at least until very recently) is symptomatic of the
problem but I believe only one example among many. In the
meantime, staff (I believe trying sincerely to fill the vacuum)
charges ahead with their own approaches. Those approaches end
up either binding ICANN without even a sign of a legitimate
policy development process or, because they don't have community
support, going nowhere after considerable resources have been
wasted.
The result of the many committees is collections of long and
complex reports that often avoid asking, much less answering,
actual critical questions. Because of the length, number, and
complexity of the reports almost no one actually reads them,
much less gets a complete picture of the systems and issues
involved. Staff apparently sees their mandate in organizing,
overseeing, and presenting the resulting studies as "how do we
make this work and minimize the risks". A result is that one of
the questions that rarely or never gets asked, especially if
there is a loud or well-resourced constituency for some action,
is whether the action is a good idea for the Internet at all
rather than how to do it and mitigate the damage.
The Board doesn't seem to be inclined and able to fix any of
this. I don't know whether that is because too much of its
composition is the wrong people with the wrong knowledge and
skills, it isn't getting adequate information or an adequate and
comprehensive understanding of the issues about which it is
supposedly setting directions and policies, because it has come
to care more about ICANN's success (however measured) than that
of the Internet, of for other reasons. However, the result
seems to be that the same patterns keep repeating themselves
years after year with little real change.
I'm not at all sure how to fix these problems, at least without
a reorganization of ICANN that is at least as significant as the
2.0 one. But I'm fairly sure that the sort of complacency that
I interpret from the notes partially quoted above is an
impediment to even serious thinking about the issues.
I hope there is some way to do better in the future.
best regards,
john