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
