A Lust for Power: Is PIMCO Like Some CCWG-Accountability Members?

Video above: Bill Gross Sues PIMCO Over Forced Exit - Bill Gross has sued PIMCO (pimco.com) and its parent Allianz SE (allianz.com - ETR: ALV) for “hundreds of millions of dollars,” claiming he was wrongfully pushed out as the bond giant’s chief investment officer by a “cabal” of executives seeking a bigger slice of the bonus pool, in other words "greed." Bloomberg's Mary Childs reports on "Bloomberg Markets." Published on Oct 8, 2015

“Driven by a lust for power, greed, and a desire to improve their own financial position and reputation at the expense of investors ..." --Bill Gross Lawsuit Claims

Greed? In the financial industry? "I'm shocked."

Of course, the financial industry is not unique in this regard--it is now clearly evident, that there are a few members of the CCWG-Accountability (Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability) who have been, from the beginning, working on their own lustful power grab, or "greed," for control over ICANN, and apparently intend to impair or destroy ICANN's (and its Board of Directors') fiduciary duties to the global multistakeholder community and the global public interest. See: Domain Mondo: China (CAICT) Objects to ICANN CCWG Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal. For them, "Accountability" is a mere euphemism for "Power"--NOT enhancing ICANN accountability BUT enhancing their own Power--they intend to be "in control" of their proposed Single Member which would rule over the post-IANA transition ICANN and its Board of Directors. Remember, it is the "ICANN stakeholders" who currently select, directly or indirectly, 15 of the 16 voting members of the ICANN Board of Directors! But even that's not enough power (Carl Icahn would be flabbergasted by their chutzpah!)--they want to be able to overrule the ICANN Board even when to do so violates ICANN's (and the Board's) fiduciary duties to the global multistakeholder community and the global public interest:

"Sole Member given reserved power under Bylaws to override Board decision directly, regardless of Board fiduciary duties." - Legal counsel for CCWG-Accountability (pdf) opinion on CCWG 2nd draft Report (emphasis added)

But not all CCWG members are in agreement--and certainly ICANN community members do not all agree with the "power grab"--

"... Let¹s not suggest that the community is in full agreement on the 2nd draft CCWG proposal, it is not. Let¹s not suggest that the board is (nothing but) working against us, it is not. We have agreement on the most important ingredients of the proposal: specific powers for the community that can be enforced. We do not have agreement on the mechanism to implement these..."-- Roelof Meijer (CCWG mail list, October 8, 2015)(emphasis added)

Even one of the original supporters of the CCWG's 2nd Draft Report's Single Member Model now concedes:

"None of us know what will or won’t be approved by the [ICANN] stakeholder groups because at the moment there’s nothing for them to approve. At the moment no one in their right mind would approve our second draft proposal because of the feedback that it has."-- Jordan Carter, ICANN CCWG member, Oct 6, 2015 meeting transcript, emphasis added)

Apparently, from reading the CCWG mail list, we have some members of the CCWG who are not "in their right mind" since they have taken the hardline position to proceed with the Single Member Model (SMM or CMSM) in defiance of the feedback from the Public Comments, including that from the ICANN Board of Directors.  We may find out in Dublin, at the ICANN 54 meeting, if those who 'lust for power' will be successful in impairing or destroying ICANN's fiduciary duties to the global multistakeholder community and the global public interest. Some of these hardliners appear willing to destroy ICANN and the IANA transition in the process. Let's be clear what these CCWG-Accountability hardliners really want:

Complete power over ICANN to be in the hands of a few powerful ICANN "stakeholders," to the complete exclusion of the global internet community--

“... Having been a member or observer of many of these entities [ICANN stakeholder groups] I have found that they are often disorganized, ruled by a few strong personalities in a sea of apathy, and given to making up rules on the fly when needed. They do not even necessarily follow the rules they have agreed to in the charters, though some do, not all of them.  And for the most part, though they are supposed to [be] transparent, most aren't. So what I fear is that they are accountable to none except the few strong personalities..." -- Avri Doria, CCWG mail list, (emphasis added)

"... I agree that we have not (in this [CCWG] group) explored the accountability of stakeholder entities to their members, or the accountability of stakeholder entities (singly and collectively) to the larger community, or for that matter, the accountability of stakeholder entities to their non-member (and non-participating) stakeholders. If this is truly a deep concern, then it could be seen as a fundamental flaw in our entire plan, which is based on the existing stakeholder entities -- no matter how you design it (members, designators, delegates, etc.)…”-- Greg Shatan, CCWG mail list (emphasis added)

This "power grab" has nothing to do with ICANN Board accountability nor "enforceability"--that is a straw man argument completely refuted in a memo (pdf) from the Jones Day law firm distributed on the CCWG mail list October 8, 2015.

Caveat Emptor!

See also on Domain Mondo:

• IANA Transition: ICANN Board Also Rules Out CCWG Designator Model Oct 6, 2015
• Why the ICANN Board Does NOT Support the Single Member Model Oct 2, 2015
• IANA Transition, ICANN Accountability, "Has Always Been About POWER" Oct 1, 2015
• ICANN Board Does NOT Support CCWG Proposed Membership Model Sep 27, 2015
• China (CAICT) Objects to ICANN CCWG Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal Sep 24, 2015
• Only 19 of 90 Comments Support ICANN Accountability [CCWG 2nd draft] Proposal Overall Sep 22, 2015
• ICANN CCWG-Accountability Co-Chair Comments on the Public Comments Sep 15, 2015

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China (CAICT) Objects to ICANN CCWG Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal

Fiduciary Duty: "Definition: A fiduciary duty is a legal duty to act solely in another party's interests. Parties owing this duty are called fiduciaries. The individuals to whom they owe a duty are called principals. Fiduciaries may not profit from their relationship with their principals unless they have the principals' express informed consent. They also have a duty to avoid any conflicts of interest between themselves and their principals or between their principals and the fiduciaries' other clients. A fiduciary duty is the strictest duty of care recognized by the US legal system. Examples of fiduciary relationships include those between a lawyer and her client, a guardian and her ward, and a director and her shareholders." -- Legal Information Institute (link above) (emphasis added)

CCWG's CMSM to #ICANN Board: "Forget Your Fiduciary Duties, Do As We Say OR You Are Fired!" http://t.co/cg0ecAUiHR @realDonaldTrump

— DrivingTheDay (@DrivingTheDay) September 24, 2015

UPDATE September 24, 2015: CCWG-Accountability "On the Way to LA" to hijack the Global DNS from the Global Multistakeholder Community through their deceptively named CMSM or "Community Mechanism as Sole Member" Model which allows select groups of ICANN "stakeholders" to override ICANN Board decisions and disregard the ICANN Board's fiduciary duties to the global multistakeholder community including the Board's fiduciary duty to act in the global public interest at all times.

"... At least the USG (US government) offers some accountability. ICANN's primary active stakeholders are businesses making money off the DNS; most users are too busy elsewhere to pay much attention..."--comment of Esther Dyson, ICANN's founding Chairman, in The Guardian, Sept 22, 2015

"Sole Member given reserved power under Bylaws to override Board decision directly, regardless of Board fiduciary duties." - Legal counsel for CCWG-Accountability (pdf) opinion on CCWG 2nd draft

China's CAICT has joined others in objecting to the power grab by the "ICANN community stakeholders" a/k/a ICANN insiders to the exclusion of the "global Internet community" in the most recent CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Report (pdf) which proposed a Single or "Sole Member" Model (comprised by only select ICANN stakeholder groups) to be "on top" over the ICANN Board of Directors and control ICANN, said Sole Member having no accountability to the global Internet community nor fiduciary duty to act in the global public interest--in fact one leading member of the CCWG has responded to an ICANN Board Member on the CCWG mail list and noted that with the "Sole Member Model" the ICANN Board will no longer have to worry about breaching "fiduciary duties" (to the global multistakeholder community a/k/a global internet community, e.g., or to act in the global public interest)--

"Members don't owe fiduciary duties generally speaking, just as the organisations that would comprise the member (the SOs and ACs) don't today. The [ICANN] Board's members do. The existence of a membership system modifies those duties for Board members - they do not breach fiduciary duties in implementing a decision a member has made. This could be a rabbit hole but the point is that the member option has more flexibility in determining matters and does not create impossibilities for the Board where it does so. That's a design feature of the choice of membership." -- Jordan Carter, CCWG-Accountability member (emphasis added)

Rabbit hole? "Down the rabbit hole" - a metaphor for an entry into the unknown, the disorientating or the mentally deranging, from its use in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. source: Rabbit hole - Wikipedia

Meanwhile, China's CAICT has joined with others and objects to the CCWG's 2nd Draft Report--

"... We believe, in designing a voting system, the most important element that need to be considered is the representation of the global Internet community, instead of the representation of the ICANN community. Therefore, geographical balance should be an important element in terms of allocating the votes in the community; users' representation and the interests of developing countries should be properly considered too. For instance, Internet users in Asia exceed 1.4 billion, accounting for 45% of the world users. If there's no votes or extremely limited votes for Asian representatives, then this voting system is not appropriate..." -- Comment (pdf) submitted by China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT), September, 2015, Beijing, China, in response to CCWG-Accountability's 2nd Draft Report (emphasis added)

The above echoes other comments made, including the following submitted to the ICG mail list by Richard Hill on September 20, 2015:
Dear ICG,
A portion of the work of CCWG-Accountability is directly related to the transition proposal that you are coordinating. CWG-Accountability does not have, as far as I know, a public comments forum
such as the this one, and it does not accept comments from the general public, so I'm posting this message here and requesting that it be forwarded to CWG-Accountability. I refer to the draft summary of comments on the CWG-Accountability proposal published at: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/accountability-cross-community/attachments/20150915/8167a9d5/2nd-draft-CCWGtrends-v4-0001.pdf
I detail below my concerns.
1. Who are the stakeholders? [in other words, the Global Multistakeholder Community or just certain "ICANN stakeholders"?]

Slide 2 of the PDR referenced above presents a "Stakeholder Distribution of Comments Received". The identified categories of stakeholders are:
* Governments
* ccTLDs
* Advisors to the CCWG-Accountability
* Chartering Organizations
* CWG-Stewardship
* Technical Community
Does this imply that individuals and civil society organizations are not stakeholders? Does this imply that comments from individuals and civil society organizations were not considered?
2. Misleading statistics
Slides 8 ff. of the PDF present breakdowns of responses. For example, it is stated that 27 responses agreed that the CCWG-Accountability proposal enhances ICANN's accountability while 61 did not provide an answer. It may be correct that 61comments did not explicitly answer that question, but at least six responses did answer it negatively, albeit implicitly ... The statistics presented are misleading because they imply that "did not provide answer" implies support for the proposal, which is not necessarily the case ..."

Domain Mondo has previously noted the CCWG-Accountability publishing misleading representations of the public comments received to the 2nd Draft Report. The CCWG-Accountability is scheduled to meet with members of the ICANN Board this Friday and Saturday. Maybe the ICANN Board of Directors can at least do something about the CCWG leadership publishing "misleading statistics." The CCWG-Accountability is looking more and more like an "insider deal" favoring the vested self-interested special interests ("ICANN stakeholders" or "lobbyists") who have always wanted to totally control and financially benefit from ICANN policy-making, to the exclusion of "outsiders" (a/k/a global multistakeholder community or "global Internet community") and to the detriment of the "global public interest." With US (NTIA) stewardship in place, the lobbyists could never totally control ICANN--now is their chance.

See also on Domain Mondo:

• Only 19 of 90 Comments Support ICANN Accountability Proposal Overall (Sept 22, 2015) 
• ICANN CCWG-Accountability Co-Chair Comments on the Public Comments (Sept 15, 2015) 
• FIFA Corruption Scandal, Lessons For ICANN and IANA Transition (May 27, 2015)

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DISCLAIMER

Separating IANA Functions From ICANN, My Question To ICG

Ethics Fight Over Domain Names Intensifies - NYTimes.com: March 18, 2012 ".... the United States government is also dissatisfied with ICANN. The Commerce Department said it had canceled a request for proposals to run the so-called Internet Assigned Numbers Authority [IANA] because none of the bids met its requirements: “the need for structural separation of policy-making from implementation, a robust companywide conflict of interest policy, provisions reflecting heightened respect for local country laws and a series of consultation and reporting requirements to increase transparency and accountability to the international community.”..."

Jordan Carter, Chief Executive, InternetNZ, October 15, 2014, at ICANN 51:
"A thought that has been bubbling away here at ICANN LA this week for me: If we are going to have a successful [IANA functions] transition, it's really important for the numbers and protocols folks to understand that:
a) they have superior accountability situations to the names people today
b) the names people cannot copy number/protocol accountability mechanisms because they aren't organised outside ICANN
c) it isn't possible for names to organise outside ICANN in the way numbers/protocol people do
d) there may need to be structural changes or new bodies to provide a workable settlement for names
e) without a workable settlement for names, there isn't going to be a transition.

I raise this now because both for numbers and protocols there's a clear direction to try and rule out any institutional changes. I strongly caution against any part of the community being dogmatic about any of these, because it will a) attract some attention that'll risk the whole transition process failing (esp. from governments), and b) means that a negotiated outcome is harder to achieve, also risking failure...." (emphasis added)

GAC Discussion with IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group [ICG], 15 October 2014 from 10:30-11:30 PDT at ICANN51 | Los Angeles in the Santa Monica room:

Question to ICG from John Poole, Domain Mondo (via chat window): "Your process assumes that ICANN continues to exist as it is presently structured—a California corporation with no membership, etc. Yesterday [Tuesday, Oct 14], ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade told GAC that in regard to the Accountability Process, “everything is in Scope” and “nothing is out of Scope” which by implication includes the possibility that ICANN may be replaced or restructured. Without knowing the future organizational structure and accountability structure/controls of ICANN or its successor, how can the IANA transition planning proceed and be expected to produce a competent and relevant proposal for Stewardship of the IANA Functions unless your Proposal provides for the complete structural separation of IANA functions from ICANN?"

Response: Thank you for your question.  Only the questions from GAC members will be read out. 

UPDATE: Question asked at Community Discussion with the IANA Stewardship (ICG) and answered by ICG member Milton Mueller below:

MILTON MUELLER: "NOTHING IN OUR PROCESS PRESUMES THAT YOU CANNOT MAKE STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN ANY OF THE OPERATIONAL COMMUNITIES RELATIONSHIP TO ICANN OR TO IANA. I THINK IT'S JUST A MATTER OF WHAT THESE COMMUNITIES WILL AGREE TO DO OR WHAT THEY WANT TO DO. SO I THINK THE DOOR IS OPEN TO ANY CHANGE THAT LOOKS LIKE IT PROVIDES A CONSENSUAL IMPROVEMENT IN THE RELATIONSHIP THAT RESPONDS IN A WAY TO THE ABSENCE OF THE NTIA THAT MAKES THINGS ACCOUNTABLE AND SECURE AND OPERATIONAL. OR WHICHEVER BODY THAT MAY TAKE OVER. DOES ICG NEGOTIATING THAT PROPOSAL WITH ICANN BEFORE SUBMITTING TO NTIA OR DURING THE NTIA PROCESS." (emphasis added)


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