[discuss] elephant in the room

Tue Mar 18 06:46:25 UTC 2014

On Mar 18, 2014, at 2:16 AM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:

> John:
> You make some interesting comments about registries and their interests below: 
> 
>> Concerns about a rogue ICANN may also be equally easily reformulated as concerns about a "rogue registry >system" (i.e.. ICANN and co-aligned DNS registries) taking actions contrary to the outputs of the global >community, so while strong registry- based oversight of ICANN may indeed be desirable, it is unlikely to be >singularly sufficient to get the job done. 
> 
> Would you make the same comments about the RIRs? If I am not mistaken, RIRs are membership organizations composed of network operators who are IP address holders. Would you say that these governance institutions (the RIRs) operate in the general interest of the Internet and the public, or that the system is skewed toward the commercial interests of network operators. 

Milton - 

I would say that the IP registries  _do_ operate in the general interest of the Internet 
and the public,  but that does not remove the real but latent potential for them to 
operate otherwise - was the following in my message unclear on that point? 

>> (FYI - you may repeat the prior paragraph with "ICANN and IP regional registries"; 
>> any coordinated system of registries carries the potential for actions predominantly 
>> in its own interest and therefore also worth keeping in mind as we consider models 
>> for oversight of IANA [and the entire Internet registry system] in a post-NTIA model)

The potential of DNS or IP registries working in alignment contrary to public and 
Internet community is not a significant risk in a world which also has "last resort" 
oversight mechanism (e.g. NTIA), but clearly we're discussing proposals that need 
succeed under different circumstances.

FYI,
/John

Disclaimer: My views alone.