[WSIS CS-Plenary] ICANN and the public interest issue in CS priority document

[Meryem Marzouki]

Hi all,

It seems that we have a serious point of disagreement in the "Global 
ICT governance" section of the draft CS document. The sentence at stake 
in the document is:

> "To these ends, the current management of Internet names and numbers
> and other related mechanisms should be re-examined with the full
> participation of all stakeholders in light of serving public
> interests and compatibility with human rights standards."

A/ Those who request the deletion of this sentence - mostly members of 
the governance working group who are participating to the ICANN 
process, some of them having been elected at ICANN board - argue that, 
although ICANN is far from perfect, such a sentence would be a call for 
the governements to take over the Internet management system, while 
they consider that nothing would be worse than an intergovernmental 
management.

B/ Those who want this sentence remaining in the document - members or 
not of the governance working group but certainly not having any 
responsibility within ICANN process - argue that the current status is 
that ICANN has been and still is in the hands of the corporate 
interests, and that ICANN final decisions are in the hands of the US 
Department of Commerce, to which ICANN reports and without which it 
doesn't make any important decision.

In other words, this sentence is here to say that :
1/ The whole issue should be reexamined, not to put ITU in place of 
ICANN, but to have everything reexamined and discussed on new bases
2/ Any discussion should inlude the full participation of all 
stakeholders
3/ Any discussion or decision should serve the public interests and 
should be compatible with human rights standards
4/ When governements are in, we favour multilateralism among 
unilateralism (i.e. in this case the sole US governement decision), 
specially in order to give equitable voices to the South

It is also amazing to see how a general sentence intended for the whole 
ICT/Internet governance issues to ask for the promotion of public 
interests, human rights and the sustainable democratic development of 
the information and communication society seems to be understood by 
some as solely directed to ICANN.

To my knowledge, this is the only specific issue in the document where 
there is such a strong disagreement, while at the same time other parts 
of the CS document also promotes the public interest, human rights and 
the sustainable democratic development, and even multilateralism over 
unilateralism.

One can then reasonably wonder what is exactly at stake here.

Best regards,
Meryem Marzouki