Considering the Transition Proposal
Recent stewardship transition proposal consolidation summarizes opportunity that warrants global multi-stakeholder community attention to issues impacting the state of structures capacitated for future Internet governance. The proposal suggests subordinate affiliation in assigned IANA functional obligations in order to contain possible conflicts of interest. Through language that effectuates similarity to the current IANA contract, new organizational oversight subjects Internet functions to arms length policy and revenue efficiencies.
Contractually, historical basis to IANA functions oversight has been derived from noble principles that disassociate financial incentive from remedial oversight. The pervasive nature to modern communications that undermines application of this principle beyond vertical oversight necessitates independence through systemic checks, balances, and jurisdictions.
The explicit contract in equitable IANA functions oversight, regardless of central accountability posture to various international interests, is technically susceptible to the minority at its frontier. Thus the implicit promise in decentralized oversight must mitigate intrinsic tendencies that create conflicts of interest in international scope.
To compromise between the minority in technical democracy and potential that demonstrates global diversity is to balance that frontier with locally representative interests that reduce uncertainty. That balance between the frontier and the greater diversity in ICANN and PTI organization is facilitated through distinct legal personalities, independently instated, reciprocally empowered, proportionate to issue, and respective to their region.
Organizations that together govern against asymmetry, limit potential to gain from policy making, adjudicative, or executive powers. Concurrently governing organizations with requisite executive functions, imply counterbalance through adjudication and policy, such that policy does not interfere with adjudication and IRP, and new adjudication is not construed as policy. Post transition IANA next to the multi-stakeholder community that represents global diversity may enable each nation to map regional consensus through their platform for neighborhoods to participate in adjudication with respect to relevant local frameworks and national laws.
Yet the challenge remains for governments that conventionally represent regional interests to cultivate local participation, free from external influence, facing the backdrop of vocal stakeholders. If social media collaboration throughout the world was any indicator of potential, then that challenge translates to the opportunity of self-hosted, transparent applications nations may network to facilitate international community participation by any ITU or IGF associate. International participation by non-IANA technical staff within the PTI community enables experiential, cultural, and geographic diversity, which distributes the burden of IRP and adjudication across jurisdictions.
Beyond the organizational structure, community platform, and its processes that converge local communities to balance ICANN driven policy, redundant agreements between entities such as RZM, IETF, and NRO, and operational separation including that between Root key and L-ROOT management by either organization respectively assures mutual dependency. Independent practice to deter activity outside national acceptability, through resource record specific, country level geolocated split zone capabilities, key to global freedom in tandem, may be destigmatized in the global community by both local support backed by national legal opinion and in respectfully representative arbitration.
Consensus in global diversity is a function of acceptability due to local norms. Global consensus is represented through regional consensus without impediment to that local right of others. True freedom is that instilled knowledge for effort to maximize value to others, with respect to their values, that may then diversify into ideas that interact. That mutually empowered exploration builds economic value for its pursuit through prosperity. Opportunity to maximize individual contribution integral to the progress of humanity results from diversity in access to equitably enabling technologies. Those equitable enable means through technology by building mutual consideration in transition to the future foundation to support global Internet governance.