[arin-ppml] RIPE/ITU

[John Curran]

On Feb 27, 2010, at 4:40 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> 
> If what you have said in this thread is an indication of your strategy and tactics for the Geneva meeting, I'd respectfully suggest a trip back to the drawing board. Your plan, apparently, is to tell the ITU and its member states to come to _your_ meetings, to your home field, to participate in _your_ game. Good luck with that. Looks to me as if you're going to one of their meetings..... 

Milton - 
 
Actually, any open forum would be welcome as a location to have these 
discussions, so that the community impacted by them could actually 
participate.  I'll take ARIN, ICANN, IGF, ISOC, or a place to be named 
later, as long as the community at large can participate.

This is not a question of politics or strategy; it's a simple matter 
of openness and multi-stakeholderism which I thought you and the 
Internet Governance Project <internetgovernance.org> took to be an 
essential principle.

> ICANN, ARIN and the RIRs have all kinds of invitation-only meetings to discuss policy, and you know it. For example, RIPE holds invitation-only meetings wth governmental stakeholders and some with law enforcement agencies. 
> Real decisions at RIRs are made by dues-paying members, which is the case also at ITU.

I'm sorry regarding your understanding of ARIN processes, but I am happy 
to clarify them for you.  ARIN's policies are suggested and shaped by the 
community by discussion on this very mailing list. The recommendation to 
advance a draft policy comes from the ARIN Advisory Council, which is made 
up of folks elected at large and which do not even have to be dues-paying 
ARIN members.  The Internet number resource policy is the essential rules
by which ARIN does its mission, and no dues-paying members hold control
over their formation.

ARIN holds informational meetings with different groups, including the 
government & law enforcement community. This year, will add another pre-
meeting informational session with interested hosting organizations, see: 
<https://www.arin.net/participate/meetings/ARIN-XXV/premeeting.html#hosting>
for specifics. These are informational meetings setup to explain the way 
the ARIN policy process works & review the draft policies under discussion, 
so that these folks can feel comfortable that they're up to speed to join
in the same public policy process. Any suggestions of policy changes are 
directed to the same public policy process everyone else follows which is 
documented here: <https://www.arin.net/policy/pdp.html>  FYI - I'm happy 
to hold additional informational sessions, so that if you wanted to get
a group of academic policy advocates or economists together before ARIN's 
next meeting, please let me know.  Part of being open is making new parties 
feel welcome, including preparing tailored information as necessary.

> That being said, I do think the ITU processes are less open than ICANN's and RIRs, and (like dozens of other civil society participants) have openly and repeatedly said so all throughout WSIS up to the present day. I have supported a nongovernmental model for critical internet resource governance in reams and reams of my writing. If you see me as an enemy in this particular debate I feel really sorry for you, for I wonder who your friends are and how many of them there are (who are not on the payrolls of the RIRs). 

For clarity, your study stated that there's a role for the ITU, and given 
your involvement with the Internet Governance Project (IGP) and their 
underlying principles, it seemed necessary to ask exactly what role you're 
advocating for the ITU in this discussion.  If you think that they should
hold open, multi-stakeholder discussions of this issue, that didn't exactly
come through in your paper.  As it is, your paper is cited as support for
why the ITU needs to have a closed, invitation-only IPv6 working group on
this topic.  I am simply asking if that was your intention by recommending 
their involvement, since the recommendation seems so contrary both to the 
other IGP work as well your own astute comments on repercussions which 
started this discussion:

>   "If setting aside address block reservations were the ONLY price we had to pay to assuage these political concerns, I would say, "do it." But other prices could be extracted - as I explained above, linking ip address allocations to the nation state system so closely could have serious political and regulatory repercussions. That price is not worth paying. "

(hence, one's almost left wondering if the study advocating for an 
 "ITU role" was written by some other Milton Mueller...)

As this discussion is no longer directly on Internet numbering resource 
policy, I recommend that we take this to private email shortly so that 
folks may continue work on ARIN number resource policy development.

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN