Re: [ga] Nomination Procedures for the Chair of the General Assembly (GA)

["Ben Edelman" <edelman@law.harvard.edu>]

As I reviewed the Nomination Procedures for the GA Chair, I was struck by
the section I've excerpted at the bottom of this message.

I think we've all come to understand the difficulty of "bootstrapping" --
that even the act of setting procedures for a process has effects on the
results, making it difficult or impossible for at least the first iteration
of a process to be legitimate since its procedure was determined, in a
sense, arbitrarily.  I'd like to think I'm sensitive to that problem -- and
correspondingly lenient towards the first round of elections, nominations,
review committees, etc.  But the nomination watchdog committee described
below caught my eye, for it seems to suffer from a "who will watch the
watchers" problem.

I've met certain of the watchdog committee members -- I believe I've met or
at least seen Jonathan, Kent, Javier, and Roberto at various of the ICANN
meetings of the past year, though it's certainly possible that my memory
fails me.  But I don't recall meeting Bradley at any such occasion, nor do I
see him in quick perusal of the LA remote participant lists (see
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/la/archive>).  Not to single him out
unduly, but is some additional level of authentication perhaps in order for
at least the members of the watchdog committee?

I recall from MAC deliberations one means of authentication considered for
the Membership at large: The transmission by fax of government-issued
photographic identification to some central trusted facility that would
cross check IDs with registration lists.  As I recall, the MAC worried that
this would be overly burdensome for a Membership ultimately hoped to be
quite large, and the process was thought to be unmanageable when faced with
thousands of kinds of identification from hundreds of different countries.

I understand and agree with the MAC's concerns in their context, but, here,
might it be appropriate to ask the watchdog committee members to
authenticate themselves in this way -- to each prove that a sovereign state
certifies their existence by issuing appropriate documents?  Might we then
post their photo IDs online, of course protecting key information about each
(social security number and, conceivably, street address, I suggest, for US
IDs)?

Again, my concern is not so much with the particular individuals under
consideration here but with the overall process.  It seems unwise, to me, to
nominate to a position of power even a single individual who perhaps no
member of the Names Council or ICANN Board has ever met, without at least
requiring some reasonable baseline level of authentication.

I'm certainly open to alternative methods of authentication -- a "network of
trust" (where, if I trust, say, Jonathan Zittrain and he says he knows Kent
Crispin, then I accept Kent's legitimacy even if I've never met him) comes
to mind, for example, and I'm sure there are numerous other suitable methods
too.


In general, I think we need to take appropriate precautions to assure that
this and other ICANN-related processes aren't tainted by fraud.  I support
the role of the Watchdog Committee, and I think the procedures for choosing
the GA Chair by and large do an adequate job of preventing fraud.  But I
nonetheless remain concerned by the prospect of arbitrarily-chosen, unknown
participants on the Committee or in any other office.  Thoughts from others?


Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Harvard Law School




The DNSO Listadmin wrote:

>       Nomination Procedures for the Chair of the General Assembly (GA)
...
>   9. A nomination watchdog committee shall be formed to police the
>      nomination process to help detect and cure any instances of
fraudulent
>      activity in connection with the nomination process.
...
>
>           The committee shall consists of the authors of the
>           nominations procedures proposals submitted to the GA, which
>           includes Jonathan Weinberg, Kent Crispin, Javier Rodriguez,
>           Roberto Gaetano and Bradley Thorton.