IIR:
Internet Impact Report
What
does an expansion project for the San Francisco Airport
have to do with ICANN?
Such
a project, extruding into the San Francisco Bay, must
wade through presentations by many stakeholders (e.g.,
Save the Bay, Sierra Club, Bay Planning Coalition, South
Bay homeowners, etc.) and pass muster from a number of
agencies and commissions (e.g., Regional Water Quality
Control Board, Metropolitan Transportation Commission,
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department, U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, and a bunch of acronyms I won't list
here).
The
airport expansion proposal will require an Environmental
Impact Report (EIR) which examines issues related to
hydrology, geology, habitat, water quality, air quality,
etc. This process suggests a model that might be applied
to the difficult Internet names and numbering issues
ahead. Why not require an IIR, Internet Impact Report,
for ICANN'S most contentious policies?
One
of the most worrisome features of ICANN's byzantine
structure is that the "consensus policies" do not
represent consensus so much as the perspective of a
handful of individuals and organizations who are plying
preferred interests under the guise of shared
responsibility.
Wouldn't
the Internet community be better served by a process for
technical management that fully investigates the issues
and formalizes a requirement for a credible alternative
analysis before adoption.
Any
policy that potentially affects the technical
coordination of more than 20% of the Internet
stakeholders should require an Internet Impact Report.
The first step would be a scoping session, which flushes
out whatever issues surround the proposal. This would
assure that policies are not driven by well-funded
stakeholders but are developed in a manner that analyzes
the technical, economic, legal, architectural and
logistical impacts. The IIR should also provide a
baseline for comparison and adaptive set of principles,
plus assess the cumulative impacts of the
proposal.
Maybe
that sounds too much like bureaucracy, but I feel the
existing fast-track, quick-to-adopt, slow-to-adapt
approach needs to be re-examined. Difficult, contentious
issues are informally discussed in small working groups
which submit recommendations that are considered at the
SO level with no baseline, adoptive or adaptive
underlying principles. Certainly a deep and broad
exploration of the hard issues, which an IIR could
provide, should be built into the process
The
Internet is an evolving system, and decisions made today
will reverberate worldwide and affect future generations
of users. If we don't have enough time to do all this
right, we certainly don't have enough time to do it all
over.
In
my humble opinion.
by
Ellen Rony
November 16, 1999
