The ICANN board issued a fairly large number of resolutions, at the conclusion of its Nairobi meeting. Give it an A for effort. But on substance? Give them an F. On the .xxx issue, the Board chose to ignore its independent review panel and refused to rectify what was officially determined to be unfair and discriminatory treatment. On the vertical integration issue, it issued a needlessly biased and poorly worded resolution that was an attempt to clarify things but probably did the opposite. There are other gems. We have done the painful work of reading them for you.   more »

From Avri Doria's blog: "While in a meeting with Board members, a member of my Stakeholder group had an opportunity to read part of one page of the Policy Staff’s briefing report to the Board from across the table (some of us read documents upside down better the we read right side up.) In this case it was all they could do to refrain themself from standing up and yelling “the staff lies.” Doria goes on to point out how inaccurate and biased these secret board briefings can be and how unfair it is that these critical messages are kept secret.

There is a vital structural issue here: ICANN's board faces too many issues and relies heavily on the policy staff to tell it what is going on. Unfortunately, during the past 5-6 years, the staff has chosen to take sides on policy issues and to favor some constituency groups over others. Often, this is caused by heavy lobbying of the staff by some of the professional, full-time lobbyists who can invest in constantly following and communicating with them. In other cases it is the staff's way of punishing those who were critical of ICANN, especially its policy staff. New CEO Rod Beckstrom has already made an important move to rectify this situation by replacing his policy vice chair with David Olive; it would seem, however, that lower level staff are still mired in the organizational culture established by his predecessor. There is a simple solution to this: make the board briefings public, with the usual exceptions for information considered confidential for legal, personal or personnel reasons.

His behavior last fall during a dispute over the formation of the NCSG confirmed that Frank Fowlie, ICANN’s Ombudsman, is both unhelpful and biased. If the value-add of the Ombudsman’s office is unclear, the negatives are now very clear indeed. About a week ago the Ottawa Citizen published a story about Fowlie’s angry confrontation with a flight attendant after they failed to serve him a meal on a Paris – Montreal flight.

What makes the Air Canada incident important is the way it relates to Fowlie’s campaign for imposing standards of “civil discourse” on ICANN participants. Fowlie’s decision to pursue a dispute resolution process showed that he believed that his behavior, which was neither respectful nor civil according to the people on that airplane, was justifiable under the circumstances. Fowlie lost his temper – and a dispute – over bad airline service. We wonder if he now has a bit more sympathy for the sometimes intemperate language used by people in the ICANN community who think that fundamental rights of free expression or privacy or consumer interests are being lost. The stakes are a bit higher than a missed meal. Unfortunately, Fowlie’s speech at the Nairobi meeting shows that he seems to have learned nothing from this incident.   more »

There is so much going on this week and next week in Internet governance and IGP is so involved that we barely have time to blog about it. Here is a quick summary and some links to more information; it includes tales of ITU and the RIRs, the Council of Europe, ICANN Nairobi, and Google-Italy.   more »

The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) invites you to participate in its third scholarly workshop to be held in Montreal (QC), Canada, on 30-31 May 2010. This workshop is organized in cooperation with the Canadian Communication Association and Media@McGill, during the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS) 2010 Congress week in Montreal. Building on the success of its first two editions, respectively in Paris, France in June 2008 and in Brussels, Belgium in May 2009, the purpose of this third GigaNet workshop is twofold.   more »

H.R. 4061, the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2009, passed the House of Representatives February 4, 2010. The bill requires the Director of NIST "to ensure coordination of United States Government representation in the international development of technical standards related to cybersecurity." NIST and DoD have long been active, directly or indirectly, in development of Internet standards. If this advances, it will be interesting to see if/how it impacts the IETF process.   more »