[discuss] governments and rule of law (was: Possible approaches to solving...)

[Michel Gauthier]

At 07:52 27/02/2014, Avri Doria wrote:
>And hopefully just the knowledge that a decision might be made by 
>the Board is enough to stop the deadlockers from deadlocking and 
>forcing them to play by the rule and negotiate in good faith.

By which rule?

Rules in an MS context can only be agreed by the stakeholders (what 
leads to the deadlock in that case). So what you advocate is that the 
Board has its own rule to violate the MS rule. There are three 
situations I can think of.

1. there is no violation because the Board does not manage anything 
obeing any MS rule because being itself a stakeholder among the 
others. This is no problem but the Board cannot manage a monopoly.

2. the Board is usurping a power which does belong to an MS context.

3. this is a critical situation: it will resolve itself along 
self-organizing criticality natural (mathematical) rules of the 
universe. René Thom theory of catastrophes, Per Back's SOC theory. I 
understand VGNs as this kind of resolution.

The main question seems to be a lack of analsys of what are MSism, 
subsidiarity and substitution. IMHO a good example should be the way 
the internet itself works. How does the network itself decide. By 
nature a distributed network (whatever the kind of relations and 
nodes is an MS network.

What I observe is that in the /1net debate there is a constant 
confusion between monarchic, democratic and polycratic paradigms. 
People have to chose: nothing opposes that they coexist in different 
centralised, decentralised and distributed entities, but they cannot 
mix when considering the governance of a given entity or relational 
space. Is the governance of the decentralised internet to 
centralised, decentralised or distributed? This is an "or", there 
cannot be "and". And only a distributed governance seems to have a 
chance to be stable and last.

I am just an observer and an analyst. I do not decide, but I can 
identify where the bug is. The Jefsey's identification of the BUG 
(being unilateraly global) seems correct to me. However, I do not 
object if ICANN is unilateral within the ICANN community, as long as 
this does not affect/commit the whole Internet community members, and 
more generally all the stakeholders.

This also addresses the Gregory's odd contribution:

>At 02:18 27/02/2014, Shatan, Gregory S. wrote:
>The Mandate of the EWG was as follows:

Who decided the mandate?
I note that he explains the GNSO and PDP acronyms. Not EWG which by 
nature discriminates among stakeholders and supposed experts (i.e. 
people who would know better than stakeholders what stakeholders want 
or imagine).

>So, there is plenty of community, stakeholder and user involvement 
>in this EWG.  And of course, the reason that Steve cited a 
>Board-initiated group was based on the question he was responding 
>to.  There are plenty of times where work is initiated by groups 
>other than the Board.

The monarchic, democratic and polycratic confusion is here clearly 
detailed: community, stakeholder, user, experts where there should 
only be a single unique MSWG.

I accept that the analysis, and more over the catalysis, are 
difficult as everything is weaved together: this is the single 
authoritative root of complexity :-). Complexus in latin means 
something weaved. A catalysis in complexity consists in rebuilding 
together (like in an agora) all the elements that make things working 
better than a simple logical synthesis. This is why if you ask a 
computer it will respond. If you ask a logical process it will 
conclude. If you ask an MS agora something may only emerge - 
democracy it is by vote, polycracy says it is by the addition of the 
consequences of the individual decisions.

M G