ICANN/GAC quorum/funding questions

[Mark R Measday <measday@ibm.net>]

The following email was sent to you misleadingly carrying the title used
by the previous correspondent. Apologies.

One of the questions to which I didn't get an answer in Chile was what
constitutes a quorum of interest sufficient for ICANN to accept GAC's
advice. If GAC is the voice of thirty or forty governments, it is
presumably not
the voice of the other 160 plus. Is ICANN supposed to consult the others

privately?

Secondly, the governments have shown a great deal of forbearance in
allowing the ICANN to self-constitute under the terms of the White
Paper; with the
major commercial carriers governments appear happy to allow the
teleology of
interests involved to play out. After all there are many other existing
fora available to
them. This scenario demands that those who are asking for a voice
balance the
legitimate involvement of regulators, telcos, private trademark
interests with
their own contributions. If not, back to the time-honoured structures,
many of
which look comparatively attractive .

It must come down to funding sources which are not beholden to the above

groups. There is really no point if IBM, MCI, USG, AT&T, Telefonica,
ETSI, the NICs etc. are the major sources as ICANN becomes a trade
association or an
associate UN forum, not that those options are necessarily a bad thing,
just a repeat
performance of many others. If ICANN is to demonstrate some progress as
the experiment in governance it was supposed to be, it will have to go
further to make those who wish to maintain a stable internet demonstrate
the value
they find in that stability.

If ICANN is the source of that stability, it is in a position to fund
itself from those sources of offshore risk capital and putative
self-assigned
nationhood etc. which have come into being precisely because stable
international
communications networks have allowed them to become such.

Suggestions have been made to ICANN and the major players above as to
how it might uncontroversially do this, starting back in May when the
problem
first appeared. However it will demand some initial level of agreement
to
allow it to function.

MM

R.Gaetano@iaea.org wrote:

> Tony Rutkowski wrote:
>
>  Joe Sims wrote:
>