Archive | General

Following the takeover of the business of another financial institution, I found that I now have an account and card with Barclays Bank. I needed some information from them fairly urgently, so I contacted them a week or two ago.

In reply, I received a letter dated 28th November signed by a certain Christine W……

The telephone number on her letterhead was a UK 0844 number. As I had a query about the contents of her letter, not unreasonably (in my opinion) the obvious course of action was to telephone her at the number on her letter.

The person who answered the telephone said he’d never heard of her. He also told me he was unable to transfer my call to her.

When I asked why I could not speak to the person who had written me the letter, on the telephone number she had on her letterhead, he was somewhat at a loss as to how to answer. He eventually tried to tell me was “because we are globally certified”.

Whatever that means.

Eventually, after a long wait of 20 mins it was patiently explained to me by his supervisor that as they were in India, they couldn’t transfer me to the person who had written me the letter.

Nigel’s First Rule of Customer Satisfaction: Any employee who does something for a customer should have task ownership and take responsibility for the contents of their answer and should be ready to deal with any followup.

I’m now getting a nagging feeling that maybe “Christine W.” doesn’t actually exist. Perhaps they’ve taken a leaf out of the Prime Minister’s book? I intend to find out whether that’s the case or not.

If she does exist, I look forward to speaking with her eventually about my original (and routine) inquiry.

But how do you think should I react if it turns out that she doesn’t exist? (It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve come across letters signed by non-existent people).

After all, in these more security conscious days, Barclays Bank would certainly get more than a little upset if we were to use a fictitious name when we deal with them …

Christine, are you out there? Talk to me please!

PS: if anyone from Barclays Bank management is reading this, particularly if you are the Christine who wrote to me yesterday, please use the email form to contact me.

“Clearly an organization like ICANN, which has been conferred with important responsibilities with clear public policy impacts should meet the highest standards of transparency, accountability, and independence.”

These are the words of Jonathan Todd, a public spokesman for the European Union, reported by Kieren McCarthy.

It is undeniable and unarguable that ICANN Board decisions have public policy implications and impacts around the world.

So that is why bodies with responsbility for public policy, such as national and territorial governments, the European Union, the Council of Europe and even the Olympic Committee must be important voices in the ICANN process.

And so are the figures we love to hate, the intellectual property lawyers.

And civil society and human rights advocates as well.

It has been said to me, by way of negotiation theory, that sometimes the indicator of the best deal is that each party is equally UN-happy.

The words of Mr Todd are a statement of the obvious. But we need to be reminded of them.

I am sure that neither TLD Holdings plc nor Peter Dengate Thrush envisaged the furore that the announcement of the former ICANN Chairman’s new job would provoke.

That omelette can’t be turned back into eggs, but ICANN’s role must now be to produce even-handed, workable guidelines for the future that pass the balancing act test of being fair on the employee or former officeholder, as well as upholding not only the absence, but the appearance of absence of conflict of interest.

I wonder, is everyone equally unhappy with ICANN yet?

According to information received from Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) I’m not doing enough to build an audience for my writings or my Twitter account (@nigelrbrts).

With that in mind, I’d be happy to get suggestions on how to fix this.

nigel.je was really intended as a place for random jottings, mostly about life in the Channel Islands, and a few technical articles. Michele Neylon (@mneylon) kind of encouraged me, and is hosting it on one of his personal machines.

In recent weeks its kind of been taken over by work-related articles to do with ICANN, privacy, human rights and so on.

So one question I that is on my mind is whether to keep this as this rather catholic mix, or to (for example) spin off the ICANN stuff.

There’s a Contact Me link above. You don’t need instructions on how to use it — drop me a line with your thoughts. The best suggestions will get an Alderney t-shirt. (If you don’t know what or where Alderney is, click on the See the Small Island link, above, and watch the movie).

Of all the six papers, this one appears to be the most significant.

It says “ICANN’s role …. is a central issue for competition authorities such as the European CommissionI”.

You bet it is!

ThisPaper is an indication that the sleeping giant of DG Competition has finally woken up to the fact that rather than replace a single gTLD registry (Network Solutions as was) with liberalised market, the creation of ICANN has resulted in a structure which has many of the characteristics of a cartel.

There is absolutely no question about the Commission’s competence here.

As noted earlier, competition matters affecting the Single Market are an exclusive competence of the Union. In other words, the Union is the sovereign power here not the Member States.

The most fundamental thing about European law in the competition sphere is that it is right at the heart of the Union, stretching almost right back to its roots when six countries signed the Treaty of Rome.

And the fundamental point when considering any question of Single Market Competition enforcement is this :-

“Arrangements between undertakings” are illegal when they involve “prevention, restriction or distortion of competition within the common market”. (Article 81 ex 85 TEU)

As this is part of the Treaty, it is ‘directly applicable’ in the Member States. This means it IS already the law of all 27 countries who are part of the Union without their Parliaments needing pass additional legislation. It is a major, major, part of the acquis communitaire.

It makes intentional cartels are illegal. No surprise there. But unintentional “arrangements between undertakings” are illegal too. The effective word in the law is “or” not “and“.

Now, there’s no doubt that ICANN is at the heart of a number of ‘arrangements between undertakings’, particularly in the gTLD space.

Does any of them have the intention of distorting competition. Well, no. In fact as noted in the Paper ICANN’s constitution seems to require it to promote competition.

But do any of these ‘arrangements’ in ICANN have the effect of ‘prevention, restriction or distortion of competition’ in the Single Market?

The answer to this question is left as an exercise for the reader, but it seems that author of the paper seems to think that they very likely might do, and I would agree.

It would be interesting to see how European competition law can be integrated into a contract with no consideration between the US government and a California corporation!

I don’t think the USG would necessarily have the political will to defend such a move before Congressional or Senatorial interest where there may still be a residual view of ‘why are people outside the US trying to tell us how to run our Internet?’.

But that’s not necessary.

gTLDs by definition are designed to be operated in all 27 Member States. And therefore the EU can take any enforcement action it wishes to, if it feels ICANN is in breach of competition law.

It’s particularly handy that ICANN’s Brussels office is right next door to the Commission.

Really handy, and not far to walk when they decide to launch a raid, like they did to the mobile phone companies

Ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times!

There’s actually not much to comment on here, apart from to note that Finance and Staff matters have been causing concern in the ICANN Community, including from senior members of it and therefore the Commission is right to question matters. (One need only look at Lesley Cowley’s quizzing of soon to be ex-CEO Beckstrom to realise there is a bit of piscine odour about the staff situation!)

Developments in this area should be watched carefully.

The Commission‘s first paper is posted here at dot-nxt.com.

In section 1, the general description of the issue, the complaint appears to reduce to the fact that involvement in ICANN is complex, time-consuming and difficult to keep up with. Well . . . .EXACTLY! This is the exact same issue we have been wrestling with in the other constituiences. When the paper’s author says “efficient work flow process and dedicated support from a professional and adequately resourced [GAC] secretariat” is required, how can we possibly disagree?

Incidentally, that’s not to say that we don’t get such support in our own constituencies — I’ve been particularly impressed by the support given to the Delegation and Redelegation and Framework of Interpretation Working Groups of the ccNSO in recent months.

A note of caution though. It does not seem obvious to me that GAC consensus must necessarily always represent ‘the global public interest’.

Indeed, I am not sure that it’s easy to identify the global public interest in many areas. Compare and contrast China’s public policy on freedom of expression with that if the USA, for example.  A consensus within GAC on freedom of expression issues which including China, must necessarily be a compromise and thereby inevitably water down the strong protections of the First Amendment or Article 11 of the European Union Charter. Syria, and up until a few weeks ago Libya will have had other opinions about ‘the public interest’ too!

But these are not new issues. The Foreign Ministers of the Member States and other countries square such circles daily.

The crucial issue arises when it is said that:

“There needs to be agreement at the political level that GAC members will commit sufficient resources to GAC processes and be represented at a sufficiently high level to ensure the political legitimacy of GAC advice”.

Here I couldn’t agree more.

Such an agreement, at the political level, would appear to be in everyone’s interest, whether you are looking at this from the public or private sector.

Regrettably ICANN (the corporation) has neither the power, the jurisdiction, nor the competence to achieve that goal.

I hope that agreement and those resources can indeed be found at the political level.