Il 08/03/2011 15:48, Andrea Glorioso ha scritto:

Perche` dici che il piano e` tornato d'attualita`?

Ciao Andrea, sia perché ora è di nuovo promosso simultaneamente da diversi governi, vedi per esempio <http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20040431-281.html> (dalle affermazioni di Del Bianco e meeting di Brussels della scorsa settimana in poi). sia perché (limitatamente alla parte di esautorarlo della sua autorità, non di trasferire i suoi poteri alle Nazioni Uniti) le pressioni dell'amministrazione Obama sembrerebbero volere arrogarsi un controllo totale sui nomi di dominio e sui TLD, sia per la posizione del GAC. Ciao, Paolo

Sull'argomento suggerisco anche la lettura di questo blog post di Milton Mueller - non perche` sia la verita` rivelata, ma perche` Milton e` uno dei massimi esperti mondiali di ICANN/Internet Governance e, come sa chi ha avuto il piacere di conoscerlo, non ha peli sulla lingua. :) http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2011/3/7/4765678.html Commerce Department: “Foreign devils made us do it” by Milton Mueller on Mon 07 Mar 2011 11:12 AM EST | Permanent Link | ShareThis The slowly dawning knowledge that the US Commerce Department's NTIA has been pushing to give national governments more power over ICANN has generated cognitive dissonance in this country. Isn't this supposed to be the land of Internet freedom, not the land of intergovernmental control? Wasn’t it the Commerce Department who created a private sector governance agency in the first place? The NTIA is now compounding the confusion by claiming that its newly aggressive stance toward ICANN is an attempt to stave off a takeover by the UN or some other intergovernmental conspiracy. We are told that there are “increasing pressures on ICANN” from foreign powers, and that a strengthened GAC is the only way to appease them. This meme was planted in the mind of a Washington Post reporter, new to the ICANN beat, and has spread from there to a columnist for Time Magazine. But the NTIA's argument is completely bogus. There are no “increasing pressures” on ICANN from other countries. The pressures have, in fact, dramatically subsided in the past five years. The pressure is made in the USA. Let's examine first the so-called "threat" of foreign takeover. Depending on how one counts, there have been three or four attempts by external entities to pre-empt or “take over” the functions now performed by ICANN, dating back to 1995. Each one has failed and in each case they failed because the U.S. didn’t want them to succeed. Since 2005, each threat has become progressively weaker, even as ICANN’s size, budget and staff have grown and its presence has become more entrenched. Back in 1996, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an intergovernmental organization based in Geneva, had the support of the Internet Society and Internet pioneer Jon Postel when it first made an attempt to grab what are now ICANN’s responsibilities. That effort, known as IAHC, failed because the U.S. said no. The newly formed ICANN was indeed very weak and shaky from 2000-2002, but that was because it has no money and could not get the cooperation and support of VeriSign, the dominant company in domain name registrations. ICANN overcame that threat by recognizing VeriSign’s property right over .com and allowing it to raise rates, creating a powerful symbiosis. The World Summit on the Information Society, which occurred from 2002 – 2005, mounted the biggest and most coordinated international challenge to ICANN so far. But even that failed to put a dent in ICANN’s private sector nature, both because there was no clearly superior alternative and because the US didn’t let it. Last year the ITU, at its quadrennial Plenipotentiary conference, made a last-ditch attempt to raise the issue of intergovernmental control of critical Internet resources. That effort led to nothing but an ITU pledge to work with ICANN and the first written recognition of ICANN’s existence in the ITU’s official documents. Moving beyond smallish matters of Internet governance, where on earth did anyone get the idea that the US is helpless unless desperate measures are taken to appease foreigners? The US has no trouble resisting UN takeovers of anything it doesn’t want taken over. It provides a goodly portion of the UN budget, and when agencies such as UNESCO are perceived to threaten US interests that money goes away, fast. The US has no trouble vetoing UN votes even when they involve resolutions with the support of virtually every other government in the world. The US entered the war in Iraq against the strenuous opposition of most of the world’s states, including longtime allies such as Germany and France. The idea that an institutional creature strongly supported by the US will somehow be yanked involuntarily into the UN's orbit is just ridiculous. Even if you think the world’s governments are itching to take over ICANN, there is no plausible mechanism for them to do it, unless the U.S. government and the big players in the Internet industry want them to. I challenge anyone with substantive knowledge of international law and institutions to set out a plausible scenario by which ICANN and the IANA contract could be forced into the UN or some other intergovernmental arrangement without the consent and support of the U.S. The Commerce Department ploy persists nevertheless. It is a classic gambit: governments build support for their actions by playing up the fear of an external enemy. It plays on mental models that are deeply ingrained in most Americans. The USA is assumed to be the beacon of freedom. The rest of the world can be divided into either distasteful authoritarian states or mushy socialist democracies, and either of them (in this mindset) would regulate the Internet to death if given the chance. So if there’s any threat to Internet freedom lurking in the world, it must come from someone else, not us. To business people especially, it is literally inconceivable that the most powerful threats to the Internet’s freedom might come from their own government. Unfortunately, it does. While the US does have some of the world’s most liberal institutions, it also has the largest and most powerful government and military-industrial complex in the world. The only government that has ever threatened to blow up ICANN because of a controversial top level domain is – you guessed it – the US government (.xxx). The US and China are the only governments in the world I know of to declare that cyberspace is a “national asset.” But when China says that, they mean a bordered, territorial Chinese Internet; when the savants in Congress and Washington think tanks say that, they mean the whole bloody thing. We have the greatest capacity for online surveillance and cyberwar of any nation on earth. We have unmatched levels of control over and visibility into international financial flows that can be leveraged to control lots of things outside our borders, including the Internet. Just ask Wikileaks. As the host to the world’s most powerful multinational copyright and trademark holders, we are the most susceptible to regulating the entire internet – not just our part of it – on behalf of intellectual property rights protection. It is the US and the US alone that has the capability of exerting more control globally than any of its rivals, given current conditions. You don’t need to believe the US is evil to appreciate this point; just think of what happens when an elephant dances among chickens; no matter how nice its intentions are, any misstep it makes can have fatal consequences. The point I am making is that the Commerce Department spinmeisters are not telling the truth when they claim that their strenuous attempts to subordinate ICANN’s nongovernmental policy making processes are justified by some desperate attempt to stave off foreign barbarians. NTIA is doing what it is doing because there are strong economic and political forces right here in this country who want it to yank the tether. Journalists, advocacy groups, and citizens should not be fooled by claims of foreign pressures. When discussing U.S. policy with U.S. policy makers we need to ask tough, pointed questions about who in this country gains from the policies being sought by the Commerce Department. Ask them which constituencies in this country (including government agencies such as DoD and NSA as well as businesses) asked for which policies and why they think bringing ICANN under the control of a governmental committee led by the US Commerce Department would benefit them. Ask them about the interagency meetings and task forces that vet their policy choices, who is represented on them and what they discuss. And don't buy it when the deflect responsibility to unnamed foreign entities. 2011/3/9 Andrea Glorioso <andrea@digitalpolicy.it>:

Caro Paolo, cari tutti,

dato che la Commissione Europea partecipa (da tempo) alle discussioni relative ad ICANN e alla governance di Internet, sono ahimé costretto a tediarvi ancora con il solito disclaimer - quello che dico non rappresenta necessariamente una posizione ufficiale della Commissione.

On 3/8/2011 6:30 PM, Paolo Brini wrote:

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Il 08/03/2011 15:48, Andrea Glorioso ha scritto:

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Perche` dici che il piano e` tornato d'attualita`?

Ciao Andrea,

sia perché ora è di nuovo promosso simultaneamente da diversi governi, vedi per esempio <http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20040431-281.html> (dalle affermazioni di Del Bianco e meeting di Brussels della scorsa settimana in poi).

Prima di tutto, gli articoli di Declan McCullagh vanno presi con una certa cautela. McCullagh - che per altro leggo sempre con piacere - ben rappresenta una certa ideologia, molto diffusa negli Stati Uniti (e non solo), che vede le Nazioni Unite come il fumo negli occhi. Si può poi discutere dei meriti e dei demeriti delle diverse posizioni in merito, ma è importante tenere questo punto in mente.

Infatti, che io sappia, durante il meeting di Bruxelles (un incontro tra il Board di ICANN e il Governmental Advisory Committee, per discutere i punti di disaccordo relativi all'introduzione dei nuovi "generic Top Level Domains") un singolo paese - Kenya - ha semplicemente osservato una banalità, ovvero che è difficile per i rappresentanti dei paesi in via di sviluppo giustificare le spese per partecipare agli incontri di ICANN. Tutto ciò nell'ambito di un punto molto specifico, ovvero la richiesta del GAC che gli Stati siano esenti dal pagamento delle "objection fees" all'introduzione di nuovi gTLDs (il problema non è essere braccini, ma introdurre delle linee di budget formali per far fronte a queste possibili "fees", che come sanno tutti coloro che lavorano nelle pubbliche amministrazioni è sempre un bagno di sangue).

Inoltre, Kenya - e leggo le trascrizioni - ha detto "[developing countries] will just go to the ITU *for the information*". McCullagh si è convenientemente scordato quel "for the information".

Del Bianco non rappresenta uno Stato. Le sue opinioni sono interessanti, ma sono le opinioni di un'organizzazione che rappresenta un certo numero di aziende, guarda un po', statunitensi. Almeno una di queste aziende trae una parte sostanziale dei propri introiti dal sistema ICANN così com'è.

Per altro, che piaccia o meno a McCullagh, Del Bianco e altri, le Nazioni Unite e le relative agenzie hanno una chiara responsabilità in vari aspetti della governance di Internet. Ciò non significa che le Nazioni Unite debbano o possano o vogliano "governare Internet", ma non si può nemmeno far finta che un'organizzazione privata con sede in California e con un chiaro contratto di dipendenza dagli Stati Uniti possa completamente rimpiazzare delle sedi istituzionali e multilaterali.

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sia perché (limitatamente alla parte di esautorarlo della sua autorità, non di trasferire i suoi poteri alle Nazioni Uniti) le pressioni dell'amministrazione Obama sembrerebbero volere arrogarsi un controllo totale sui nomi di dominio e sui TLD, sia per la posizione del GAC.

La proposta degli Stati Uniti di imporre un "veto" all'introduzione di nuovi gTLD, come avrai visto, non ha trovato consenso all'interno del GAC stesso. Ma in ogni caso, dire che gli Stati Uniti vogliano "esautorare" ICANN significa dimenticarsi che ICANN opera sulla base di un contratto con il Governo degli Stati Uniti; all'interno del territorio degli Stati Uniti; sottoposto alla giurisdizione degli Stati Uniti.

Quindi gli Stati Uniti, dal mio punto di vista, non stanno "esautorando" granché. Stanno semplicemente ricordando - in maniera a mio parere alquanto goffa - che ICANN non è mai stata e non è indipendente da loro.

Che poi la soluzione a questo problema oggettivo debba o possa essere un trasferimento di alcune o di tutte le funzioni di ICANN alle Nazioni Unite o ad una delle sue agenzie, è una discussione molto interessante, ma che secondo me, in questo particolare momento, è poco più di un "red herring".

Ciao,

Andrea