Charter drafts - and the related process so far

[Norbert Klein <nhklein@xxxxxxx>]

Though I have seen that many voices from different parts of the world have 
sent in their support for the original proposal, prepared within the 
Non-Commercial Users Constituency in an intensive process of online and 
international Internet communication, in which we received an overwhelming – 
an almost unanimous consensus – I thought it might not be important to state 
this again. 

But I write because I am utterly surprised that – in spite of this process of 
wide and open consultation – the result of this process was sidelined so far. 
The litany of “bottom-up consensus building,” which is in so many official 
ICANN statements, became  more and more hollow over the years.

I say so as a person who was involved in the pre-ICANN efforts – the 1998 
Singapore meeting - and since 1999 – Santiago de Chile – I fairly regularly 
did participate in ICANN affairs, the “ICANN fellowship” as I felt it was, in 
the early years – learning a lot for my efforts to start the first Internet 
connection in Cambodia, creating the country code .kh in 1996 and 
administering it until 1998, and continuing to be involved in the UNICODE 
codification of the Khmer script and then the localization of software etc.

Over the years, our situation seemed to get more and more into the background 
of the ICANN dynamics – but WSIS 1 and 2 were an encouragement, when the 
Declaration of Principles of WSIS 1  said:

“We, the representatives of the peoples of the world, assembled in Geneva from 
10-12 December 2003 for the first phase of the World Summit on the 
Information Society, declare our common desire and commitment to build a 
people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, 
where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and 
knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their 
full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their 
quality of life, premised on the purposes and principles of the Charter of 
the United Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights.”

Instead of a “people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information 
Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and 
knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their 
full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their 
quality of life,”  I do not see much of this vision in ICANN's efforts to 
secure the stability and security of the network.

This vision has been held up especially in the Non-Commercial Users 
Constituency and in the At-Large structures, where the people-centered, 
inclusive activities have their representation, and where they hope to be 
supported, so that the purposes and principles of the UN Declaration of Human 
Rights will be kept central in our operations.

The details for this are well stated in what the Non-Commercial Users 
Constituency has elaborated and presented before – as the result of a wide 
participatory process. I do not need to repeat it – I only hope that the 
members of the ICANN Board will really take note of this and not pass quickly 
to some “pragmatic” suggestions which are not based on the principles on 
which we started to cooperate.

I want, however, highlight one aspect where I see a grave failure in the 
process, where the Non-Commercial Users Constituency – on the basis of what 
the organizations and persons here cooperating – thought to be important. We 
raised it repeatedly, but we remained without an answer. When the discussions 
about new gTLD touched on the restrictions to be considered, the NCUC raised 
the question that such restrictions must be included against efforts to erode 
the fundamental rights (as stated above) - the protection of rights for this 
new developments. Many of us live in environments where this is crucial. 
Instead the problem of “generally accepted legal norms of morality and public 
order” became more prominent, and the repeated official requests by the NCUC 
Chair to the staff, how the staff identifies these principles, 
supposedly “recognized under international principles of law,” did never get 
an official response.

Many of those who are not part of the larger technical or economic bodies 
cooperating in ICANN, but who live somewhere “on the periphery,” need that 
ICANN finds again ways to live up to the “bottom-up principle” for our social 
development and – in some cases – for our survival. 

The Non-Commercial Users Constituency, built up from the bottom, is an 
important instrument for this. The new move I read a while ago, that a WIPO 
initiative is accepted as the basis for a revision of the UDRP – without 
considering immediately what this means in terms of a bottom-up process – is 
a sign that the fundamental orientation of ICANN – from the point of view of 
its world wide membership – not from those who control it – remains a most 
important task. The non-commercial and the at-large users are the most 
important basis for giving bottom-up orientation. 


Norbert Klein


Open Institute 
Phnom Penh/Cambodia
Member of the NCUC


-- 
Editing a review of the Cambodian press - in English translation.
I leave this standard note here. It shows the context from which I participate 
in ICANN.

If you want to know what is going on in Cambodia, please visit 
The Mirror, a regular review of the Cambodian language press in English.

This is the latest weekly editorial:

Struggling to Understand - Faced with Different Reports and Opinions - Sunday, 
19.7.2009
http://tinyurl.com/m2572j

(To read it, click on the line above.)

And here is something new every day:
http://cambodiamirror.wordpress.com