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    Более глубокая проблема, о которой не говорит Линн, заключается в том, что легальный статус ICANN на сегодня не ясен. Это небольшая инкорпорированная в США некоммерческая организация, которая выполняет некоторые технические функции, часть из которых важна для сетей во всем мире, исключительно на том основании, что никто особо против этого не возражает.

    Я надеюсь, что могу запостить сюда очень понравившийся мне комментарий Фрумкина по этому поводу (прошу только учесть, что Ф. комментировал не столько формальное предложение, сколько неформальную "объяснительную", написанную Линном после ряда недоуменных вопросов. Саму "объяснительную" постить не буду, т.к. она а) длинная и б) предсказуемая для всех, кто в курсе).

    From: "Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <[email protected]>
    Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 08:09:51 -0500 (EST)
    To: Dave Farber <[email protected]>

    Dave. Thanks for the chance to reply to Dr. Lynn's latest.

    Dr. Lynn's message typifies why ICANN is in trouble.

    The founding agreements that led to ICANN are anything but a red herring.
    Of course the White Paper is not sacred, but there was near consensus
    around it, a near consensus which was the result of a great deal of
    discussion in very varied communities. The Lynn paper seeks to throw it
    all out, pretty much single handedly, and does so in a way that does
    violence to the substance and spirit of the original deal -- and without
    much thought for what motivated it either. ICANN's new grab at more power
    and more money is in any case the attempted culmination of an ongoing
    process--see, for example the many changes in ICANN's bylaws in just three
    years, documented by Ellen Rony at
    http://www.domainhandbook.com/archives/comp-icannbylaws.html .

    ICANN was created to be private--and very limited, and there were really
    good reasons people wanted it that way. It was supposed to coordinate the
    tasks that need centralization (keeping a master list of the unique TLD's
    in the root, doing the various ministerial IANA tasks to keep data current
    and to assign protocol numbers). Instead of doing this fairly simple job
    well, it decided to use its power to withhold changes requested by ccTLD
    until they agreed to its "pay and obey" contracts. And it was supposed to
    take on the very difficult task of finding a way to get agreement on the
    issue of what new TLDs should be created and how we should decide who
    would enjoy the spoils. At this, very difficult, task, it largely failed.

    Contrary to Dr. Lynn's vision, ICANN does not manage the Internet, and
    given its track record that's a good thing. It doesn't have
    responsibilities for security. It is not a manager at all. It is not a
    policy maker. Its job is to make standards and engage in technical
    coordination. Standards have power primarily by their merit. If people
    make a choice to use a different standard, that's the market telling us
    something, and we should listen. Technical coordination is a limited
    role, largely clerical, keeping lists of unique names for example. I
    admit, however, that ICANN probably needs to do a little more than that --
    setting very basic baseline rules for what it takes to run a registry,
    maybe, and baseline norms for them, such as rules for backups. In
    addition, ICANN should framing the conversation we need to have about how
    many TLDs can safely be added to the root, and the discussion about what
    fraction of that total we should add per year and to whom we'll delegate
    the jobs of picking and running the new TLDs to be added. But that's
    about it. ICANN isn't supposed to run the root servers. The fact that
    other people run the root servers is one of the fail-safe checks on ICANN.

    One of the most notable features of Dr. Lynn's plan is that it would
    systematically remove every single external check on ICANN, be it
    technical (root servers), political (ccTLD autonomy), internal (the
    Independent Review Panel that Dr. Lynn has had a year to implement and yet
    not managed to get done), legal (the Dept. of Commerce veto), judicial (no
    pesky members who might claim they have rights), electoral, or financial.
    The plan also discards as unworkable the idea that ICANN should be
    consensus-based. Rather, once governments have pressured the major actors
    (ccTLDs, root server operators, RIRs, etc.) to sign ICANN's "pay and obey"
    contracts, the new, muscular, ICANN is to be a coercive top-down
    regulator. The new ICANN will impose the rules it thinks best in its own
    discretion, yet be self-perpetuating and without any accountability to
    external forces save that provided (?) by having five of fifteen directors
    named, not by the Internet community, but by world governments through
    some regional mechanism to be announced.

    No. The more powerful ICANN is to be, the more important it is to have
    both internal and external checks, balances and accountability devices.
    Thus, for example, because ICANN is a single point of failure astride an
    Internet chokepoint, it is esse ntial that its funds be low. That's a
    feature, not a bug. It limits mission creep -- or, if the Lynn roadmap
    were adopted, mission gallop. The Lynn roadmap calls for an additional 10
    or more staff members, bringing the headcount up to 30 or so. What are
    all those people supposed to do?

    Motivating the Lynn `roadmap' paper -- although you have to collect up
    all the bits to see how central it is -- is a vision of a new, bigger,
    much stronger ICANN with myriad regulatory duties. ICANN exists not
    because there was a felt need for a huge new bureaucracy to make new
    rules unaccountable to anyone but itself, but because the consensus on
    which IANA had run was breaking down and Jon Postel needed legal cover
    at least, and a way to try to more quickly forge consensus or
    near-consensus in a way that existing structures didn't allow. The
    needs have not changed (and appeals to 9/11 in this context are both
    irrelevant and demeaning).

    The trend in the EU and elsewhere is towards trying to cure democratic
    deficits, not create new ones. ICANN cannot have it both ways --
    either it embraces the public voice, unmediated by the input of despotic
    governments (recall that the governments of the world just elected Syria
    to the UN Security Council), and tries to make the case for why it
    should have a policymaking role on matters that cut to the core of
    communication and citizen participation (think "e-government") in modern
    democracies. Or, if we are to accept Dr. Lynn's focus on the process of
    elections rather than their outcomes (for the outcome of the last
    elections seems pretty good, for all that Dr. Lynn's critique of the
    procedural theory has merit) then the inescapable conclusion is that
    ICANN must be limited to the narrow technical mission Dr. Lynn rejects.
    It will be less fun for the staff, less profitable for ICANN's insiders
    and other beneficiaries, but far better for everyone else. (It also
    avoids lots of messy legal issues, reducing threat of litigation and
    thus lawyer costs.) This note from Dr. Lynn, and the "roadmap" that
    preceded it, show that ICANN doesn't get it. I fear the current
    management may never get it.

    I do agree with one thing, though: the next step is to initiate a
    positive dialog -- but the terms of the discussion should center on what
    are the minimal set of tasks we need ICANN to perform, and what is the
    minimal organization that could carry them out in a professional manner.
    I tried to start that discussion in my testimony to the Senate almost
    exactly a year ago,
    http://personal.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/senate-feb14-2001.htm.
    Today, Susan Crawford and David Johnson sketched out their vision of an
    ICANN 2.0 at
    http://www.icannwatch.org/essays/022602-johnson-crawford-icann2.htm.
    I'm sure others have much to add to this discussion, and now's the time.

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