Minds + Machines

Yesterday, at the .ORG Forum, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said,

There’s a clash of models going on in the world. It’s a clash of this decentralized multi-stakerholder model versus traditional government top-down model or centralized models. And this model we’re working on is different, it’s a mix. Governments are stakeholders, but they’re not the only stakeholders. They’re participants, but they’re not dominant. And trying to maintain that balance is one of the great challenges all of us face, particularly when there are those who would that seek to control things. And the question we should always be asking is ‘What’s best for the public?’

And at the ICANN Studienkreis last week in Barcelona, I asked a panel that included Fiona Alexander from the U.S. NTIA how the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) saw its responsibilities to listen to the ICANN community now that the GAC has an effective veto on ICANN policy. Ms. Alexander told me that I was entirely mistaken to think that the GAC had a veto.

Officially, then, governments are just one group of many that participate at ICANN. If so, ICANN and the GAC need to get the word out, because the rest of the domain name world is treating a letter from GAC head Janis Karklins as if it were the thunderous voice of God.

This letter, which warned the ICANN Board not to consider the Expressions of Interest proposal until the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, has been greeted with such headlines as Governments Deliver Another Blow to New Top Level Domain Timeline, and privately ICANN Board members have told us that it’s now “impossible” to support Expressions of Interest prior to the Nairobi meeting for fear of annoying the GAC.

In contrast, the unanimous vote of the At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) in favor of Espressions of Interest has attracted no notice at all. The ALAC, which represents individual users of the Internet, has in in principle the same weight as any other advisory committee (such as the GAC), but apparently some equals are more equal than others.

The new Affirmation of Commitments, the “charter” for ICANN, clearly sets up an expanded role for the GAC. It is responsible (in part) for choosing the people who will conduct reviews of ICANN, and it is repeatedly mentioned in the Affirmation, while other ICANN groups are not.

The question is, does the new role of the GAC give them a veto power over ICANN? Formally, the answer is no. In practical terms, however, judging from the reaction to their “advice,” mere grumbling from the GAC can upset ICANN timelines.

It’s up to the ICANN Board and the CEO to determine where they are going to draw the lines with GAC. It’s up to the ICANN community to insist that as an important part of that community, the GAC not only injects its opinion into the debate, but listens as well. The stakes are high, because as Rod Beckstrom correctly notes:

The Internet has not been successful because one company or five companies got together and formed a cartel, and said “this is going to be the standard,” or a government said “this is going to be the standard”…. Mankind is facing global issues that have to be managed on a global basis. What we’re doing here [at ICANN] is an exciting and important new model for what can be used for addressing and solving many of these problems.

Whether the new model is “exciting,” as Mr. Beckstrom says, or depressing, as many fear, will turn in large part on determining the influence of governments within ICANN. The first indications will come from ICANN’s Board of Directors at their next meeting in February.