Domain Mondo – ICANN Open Forum at IGF 2015: IANA, Globalization, Accountability, Trust
Question from Steve DelBianco with NetChoice and the ICANN Business Constituency: Fadi, even if we were on a boat in the middle of the ocean, I realize that it isolates the employees from those regimes; but we do create policies and enforce contracts that affect registrants and users all over the world, and therefore those activities are subject to the laws of the countries where those registrants and users live. So the speaker who asked the question might have thought that putting employees into country means that ICANN has to ensure that the laws of that country are respected, but that’s the case anyway, whether the employees are there or not. There are special concerns about employees, but they don’t suddenly increase the need to pay attention to laws. And, Fadi, your answer to Peter about ICANN’s evolution used the word “trust” many, many times and I’m not even sure how that would translate into all the languages we work with. But in the accountability transition track, I don’t really know that trust was at the nub of coming up with the community accountability mechanisms. It’s more about the community if it disagrees with the management and Board’s interpretation of some very fluid concepts like fiduciary duty, global public interest. These are concepts that are difficult to nail down. And there may be instances where the community as a consensus comes together and says” respectfully, Board, we don’t agree with how you’ve interpreted your fiduciary duty on this. “And that is why the community powers are designed. And that disagreement has nothing to do with trust, right? It has to do with a different perspective. When you’re on the board, when the people move from this side of the table to the Board they are now have more of a duty to the corporation than they did before and it’s a broad duty to the public interest of the community. So it’s not about trust as much as it is about disagreement of interpretation and I think that helps to take the temperature down because we didn’t really have a trust problem as much as a disagreement issue.