In June I had my first experience at an ICANN meeting. I was tagged with a bright green badge as a “newcomer” as soon as I registered. Later, I came to realise what that meant in practice: “This person here with the green badge needs help!” Help to identify the right sessions, help to understand ICANN’s extremely complex structure, help to remember the dozens of acronyms freely used as if they were some sort of secret code.
“I remember a long time ago when ICANN was full of engineers, now it is full of lawyers,” a colleague of mine accurately pointed out while taking a look around the hall. That comment, as light as it may sound for some people, really made an impact on my reading of what was going on there. And not just any lawyers: mainly intellectual property lawyers.
My newcomer journey started on 20 June by attending the “civil society outreach” event, organised by the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC), which is the home for civil society organisations and individuals at ICANN. It was quite promising, because right there I could identify with many of the debates taking place, and the conversations around human and internet rights. Milton Mueller spoke about IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and the transitioning of US control; James Gannon exposed the implications around privacy entailed in the WHOIS and registry services; and Robin Gross offered insight about access to knowledge and intellectual property. Development, freedom of expression, human rights generally, accountability mechanisms, and ICANN in the broader internet governance landscape were also discussed as part of the NCUC’s work in ICANN policy arenas. But that was basically the beginning and the end of my platonic love affair with ICANN.
ICANN also organised a special session for newcomers, which was useful in order to have an overall idea of the structure, policies and procedures of the organisation, but right afterwards all sessions went straight to the point. Then I remembered I hadn’t memorised that endless list of acronyms: NCUC, IANA, GNSO, NPOC, GAC, gTLD, ccTLD, DNS, ARPA, TCP – and these are just some of the easy ones. In the back of my head, I heard this Radiohead song that says “Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths.” This is how you will feel as a newcomer in ICANN.
“Accountability” was one word that popped up wherever you went. The ICANN mantra. “Transition” was another one, linked to the previous one. Who is going to keep ICANN accountable now that the United States will not be in charge of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions any more?
Noah’s ark
ICANN’s multistakeholder model is being publicised as the “perfect” model. I am not an expert in multistakeholder governance, but common sense tells me that being multistakeholder is not the same as gathering different stakeholders in separate rooms. Nor does it mean having an absurd predominance of one of those stakeholders – mainly the ones representing the commercial and business interests. Note to self: need to balance this!
“ICANN’s inclusive approach treats the public sector, the private sector, and technical experts as peers,” you can read on ICANN’s website. “All points of view receive consideration on their own merits. ICANN’s fundamental belief is that all users of the Internet deserve a say in how it is run.” ICANN’s work, according the website, “moves forward in a style we describe as the ‘bottom-up, consensus-driven, multi-stakeholder model’.” My question is, what kind of guarantees are built into this model to ensure that all stakeholders are on an equal footing to begin with, and that their “says” are equally heard? ICANN’s multistakeholder governance model is evidently private-sector led, which also speaks to me about the growing corporate interests taking over the internet and the commodification of rights.
I was also gobsmacked by the extremely prominent figure of Fadi Chehade, ICANN CEO, occupying this post only until March 2016 since he surprisingly decided to leave his mandate earlier. Strong leadership is good, but is this kind of personalised leadership necessarily healthy in a multistakeholder environment? When I think of the IGF, no specific faces or names come to my mind immediately – at least not in this overwhelming way. And what happens when, as in this case, the person decides to leave, at probably the most challenging time in the history of ICANN? Is ICANN’s model at the extreme right of the multistakeholder spectrum, while the IGF’s is on the left?
To be or not to be
“ICANN’s role is very limited,” they claim on their website, “and it is not responsible for many issues associated with the internet, such as financial transactions, internet content control, spam (unsolicited commercial email), internet gambling, or data protection and privacy.” Well, we have an issue when it comes to the point on privacy, and the one on internet content control. They can claim they don’t have an impact, but in the reality of the corridors it all depends on how policies, procedures and legislative frameworks are tweaked to adapt them to sectoral interests. That is the case with all the discussion around the DNS as suitable for the application of trademark laws, as is being advocated by intellectual property lawyers, and also the case of the privacy concerns raised by WHOIS.
How does ICANN handle human rights considerations in its policy process? Because even if they are not spoken about out loud, the rights implications in ICANN’s area of work are everywhere: the right to privacy, the right to freedom of expression, accessibility, cultural rights, due process of law…
ARTICLE 19 just launched a policy brief on ICANN’s Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights, addressing the privacy and freedom of expression issues that arise in relation to ICANN’s policies and procedures, and exploring the corporate responsibility of ICANN to respect human rights from a global perspective, differently from the mainly European perspective adopted in the Council of Europe (CoE) report.
Among its recommendations, ARTICLE 19’s report says that ICANN should: weigh the human rights impact of its policies and procedures; develop strategies to ensure that staff and other stakeholders understand this impact; develop and articulate a human rights policy, and make sure that employees and other stakeholders know, understand and implement it; and develop metrics to monitor ICANN’s human rights performance.
The Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NETmundial), organised in Brazil in 2014, declared by consensus that the internet is a global resource which should be managed in the public interest, and that states have primary legal and political accountability to protect human rights.
The CoE report arrives at similar recommendations for the way forward: to include reference to human rights in ICANN’s bylaws; to define public interest objectives; to improve the human rights expertise in and early engagement of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC); to develop an early engagement mechanism for the safeguard of human rights; and to review ICANN’s legal basis and explore innovative solutions for developing an international or quasi-international status for ICANN.
This is definitely telling us something. As a civil society organisation member, I can say that the more I know ICANN, the more I love the IGF. But it shouldn’t be that way – and that was my main learning.
Image by seolinkbuilding.org used under Creative Commons license .