[Advisors] TLD governance (was Re: CIRA elections -- no my turn this time)

[Kerry Brown]

I agree with pretty much everything Evan said. I participated in the ICANN zoo for a couple of years and got so frustrated I removed myself from all participation. It seemed to me that a lot of the civil society participants were only there because of the travel. Fear of losing the free travel to some very cool places stopped them from making waves. The business side was worse. They were there to grab as much as they could and fiercely resisted anything that might possibly restrict their business. As Evan said the business side usually won any arguments.

I also agree with CIRA being one of the top three ccTLDs. The CIRA staff and the board have done an excellent job and I’m very proud of my time on the board. The community investment program (CIRA has committed to giving back a minimum of 5% of revenue) is exemplary. Their work at ICANN and the IGF continually pushing for a free and open Internet has allowed them an influence worldwide that is much greater than their size. In my time on the board I got know many of the staff. We sometimes disagreed but there was always mutual respect and I always knew that out core beliefs in how the Internet should work were very similar. That said some transparency in governance is sorely needed. There is a belief among some of the board members that the members are an obstacle that needs to be worked around. They are firmly entrenched in the corporate governance mode and do not understand how internet governance works. They are doing their best but they come from big business and don’t understand that managing a member based not for profit has different needs than a Fortune 500.

Kerry Brown


On Oct 11, 2018, at 12:00 PM, Evan Leibovitch <evan at telly.org<mailto:evan at telly.org>> wrote:

On Thu, 11 Oct 2018 at 01:44, Marita Moll <mmoll at ca.inter.net<mailto:mmoll at ca.inter.net>> wrote:

James, you are talking about the ICANN policy initiative -- Alyssa will be in Barcelona and CIRA is very conscious of this. The way ICANN works though, CIRA can have little impact on this. Country codes like .ca are already set aside. Policies around the new general top level domains are decided through discussions encompassing the entire community. In the end, if civil society and business can't come up with a good plan, I think government reps will step in -- but this would be highly unpopular. Like the UN, ICANN tries to work by consensus. It's very hard........

My take on it is a little different. And please forgive my bluntness.

What ICANN calls "the multi-stakeholder model" (I'll abbreviate as MSM) has devolved into capture by the domain industry -- registries, registrars, resellers and owners of large portfolios of speculative domains. The inmates are running the asylum, the industry that ICANN is supposed to oversee is clearly in control. ICANN's interpretation of MSM is that there's no such thing as conflict of interest so long as you declare it. Once declared you can bully and buy your way into ICANN's good graces and the top of the decision tree. By contrast, other multistakeholder bodies such as ISOC International and IETF have much more egalitarian models.

Governments representation in ICANN (through the GAC) has power but must operate by consensus, and the difficulty in getting unanimity has reduced its ability to effect real change (its most recent obsessions have over the entitlements to the .win and .amazon tope level domains). Civil society seems to do little but rail against law enforcement and advocate for unrestrained registrant privacy. And the At-Large Advisory Committee, of which Marita is now a member (and I was for six years), has become a Douglas Adams parody of itself; it spends so much of its time caught in procedure and fearful of losing its travel allowance that it spends nearly zero effort on proactive ICANN policy and even less on public education. Bikeshedding is rampant.

As a result, for instance, even though the last round of top-level domains was a total bust the industry is hell-bent on doing more rounds and there's not a thing anyone can do to stop it, and they don't even try. Any time there is real dissent, ICANN trots out the MSM and fearmongers that if it's weakened the ITU will step in and make domain names a multilateral treaty thing. (An increasing amount of the community wonders if that would really be worse.)

By comparison, country-code TLDs (like CIRA) are fiercely independent of ICANN and guard that autonomy as a matter of national sovereignty. The role of the country code community in ICANN is to contribute money, interface with the industry, and ensure that ICANN doesn't do anything to impede them.

(In fact, I have always considered it one of ICANN's dirty little secrets that the public is unaware of the distinction -- that ".co" is governed completely different from ".com" but is marketed identically.)

Truth be told, as bad as anyone thinks CIRA is, for all its opacity it's quite possibly the best-run country TLD in the world. Most certainly top 3. By contrast other operators such as in the UK and Australia are in a shambles. CIRA has created decent policies that deter rampant speculation and has a sensible approach (IMO) to Canadian presence, and the delicate balance between domain owner privacy and public accountability. Its management is stable and they have avoided the missteps that so many other CCTLDs have encountered.

(Disclaimer: I speak on behalf of nobody but me. I am an owner of .ca, .com and .org domains, none of them for resale. I have never served on CIRA board or staff.)

- Evan

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