Question: It has been said, in varying forms, that the government that governs best governs least. Agree or disagree? Does this apply to ICANN?

Nominee Replies

Karl Auerbach - posted on 2000-10-09 09:26:40 With regard to DNS and protocol parameters ICANN should get itself out of the government business. With regard to IP address allocation - there are serious and complex policy issues - issues that are deeply mixed with technical matters. And we need a well formed ICANN to deal with those. Unfortunately ICANN as it exists today is woefully ill-formed to deal with IP address issues. Fortunately the RIRs have been reasonable as is the recent IAB/IETF statement on IPv6 allocations. Barbara Simons - posted on 2000-10-05 14:57:08 ICANN does not have any authority to govern. While it's not possible to totally divorce technical decisions from policy, ICANN should deal only with technical issues. In particular, ICANN should not be making intellectual property or trademark law for the Internet, either directly or indirectly by requiring specific policies of all registrars. Lyman Chapin - posted on 2000-10-04 09:21:00 Yes. I think it's dangerous and misleading to call ICANN a government, but neither is it the strictly technical standards coordination body described in its original charter (see, for example, section 3 of http://www.icann.org/general/articles.htm). Its decisions are inherently policy decisions, and in this sense it should govern least - no more than necessary, but no less than necessary. Harris Miller - posted on 2000-10-02 09:43:07 ICANN is a private technical standards setting organization. It is not, in my view, any sort of government for the Internet. Nor should it seek to be. As I have said elsewhere, I believe that ICANN should stay strictly focused on its limited mission of setting technical standards and avoid mission creep. Emerson Tiller, J.D., Ph.D. - posted on 2000-10-01 21:05:20 It applies to ICANN in a couple of ways. First, ICANN needs to be careful not to be a policy activist. But that does not mean we close up shop and hand everything over to technical decisionmaking. On the Internet, the technical decisions are the policy decisions. Those technical decisions have implications for economic, social, and political relationships. We need to be open about what is going on. If we call it *technical decision making,* then policy will be made in the dark, because, after all, it will be *just a technical decision*. There will be less transparency, fewer calls for broad participation, and less concern for the procedural requirements that protect against capture by special interests. I believe it is important to call ICANN decisions *policy* decisions, even if they appear mostly technical in nature. Second, I think national governments are likely to encumber the Internet less with regulation if they feel ICANN is making its technical choices with the procedures one would expect from policymaking. International representation and transparency will be key. ICANN may be the best way to achieve less regulation overall. Lawrence Lessig - posted on 2000-10-01 20:00:56 In this context, absolutely. I don't think ICANN is a government, and it should avoid choices that turn it into a government. Donald Langenberg - posted on 2000-10-01 19:32:53 No, because in the limit least means nothing, zero, anarchy. Ultimately, anarchy is as dysfunctional as autarchy. Several millenia of human experience suggests that well designed participatory democracy (e.g., what we in academe call shared governance) is the best course.