This is what I said at the IGF
ROBIN GROSS: Thank you. Our next speaker is Chris LaHatte the ICANN Ombudsman.
CHRIS LAHATTE: Thank you Robin. I am really meant to be the first place you go to if you have a difficulty with the organisation. The role is structured within the ICANN organisation. So in terms of governance and accountability I’m here for the community making recommendations to the board and as Avri pointed out that can sometimes have the impact of a wet bus ticket. However, and the few times that I have had to make a recommendation they see ‑‑ the board has accepted what I have suggested.
The Ombudsman office has been looked at rather carefully and more recently in the ATRT, too, and it is proposed that the scope of the office be increased somewhat because of a need for further accountability structures. I’m not sure it is entirely appropriate for me is the present holder of the office to advocate for changes which could conceivably be seen as some form of empire building but I would be very interested to hear from the community as to specific ways in which the use of my office can enhance accountability.
Now there are a number of different aspects which have been suggested in ATRT, too. There have been some comments about it but not a great deal of debate. It is not the sort of issue where I really want to tell people what I think. I’m very interested in a bottom‑up movement for these are the sorts of things that I should be doing or doing in addition to what I’m already doing.
So while my principal role is expressed as dealing with issues of fairness and of delay, that is gradually come to encompass issues such as diversity, challenges, and that sort of thing as well. Increasingly issues such as privacy, the lack of it, or the protections around privacy have also started to be raised. Issues like access to documentation are also important and that’s a mechanism, of course, for ensuring transparency and accountability within ICANN itself. As it happens under my bylaw I have access to everything. My bylaw says that if I request a document from any member of the community they should give it to me.
If they say no, I’m not quite sure what I would do then, but I would certainly make something of a fuss if I regarded that as critical. So my role really depends on the ability to persuade people. It has been described as moral persuasion rather than the ability to say ICANN, you should be doing this or you must do this.
And that’s pretty typical for an Ombudsman. An Ombudsman has the power to tell people to do things. Even the national Ombudsman don’t actually have the power to do much except generally the same sort of power that I have which is to order that information be provided. The rest of it is all recommendations.
So the range of what I do in the new era is something that I’d like the community to think about is what I am doing a wide enough scope, should it be more narrow. And I’d like to hear from people because as Avri said accountability wasn’t really discussed terribly much when I first started doing this and it is really only in the last year and particularly more focused with the IANA contract issue that people have started to say well, how else do we ensure that there is somebody to answer to. So we are in a brave new world and with that I welcome contributions.