[ALAC] [ALAC-Announce] ALAC Vote on the Rec6 CWG Report

Evan Leibovitch evan at telly.org
Wed Sep 22 02:01:49 UTC 2010


Hi there.

As the Chair of ALAC's gTLD Working Group and the ALAC liaision to the
cross-community group that created this report, I am generally OK with
its conclusions and support its endorsement. However, I note that
there has been no discussion of this in advance of the vote being
called.

Further, I am advising creation of a Minority Report in which At-Large
is able to state our clear intentions in the many areas of the report
that indicated divergence or incomplete consensus amongst the
participants. There are a few issues that were important to us -- and
endorsed by all ALAC participants -- that were opposed by other
interests.

I ask that any correspondence to the Board of ICANN staff that conveys
the the endorsement of the report (providing, of course, that this
vote succeeds) to be accompanied by an indication that ALAC is
considering production of a minority report. I would further invite
anyone interested in this to participate in the new-gTLD Working Group
where I hope the drafting of such a report will take place for ALAC
consideration, and  any questions or concerns by ALAC members to be
expressed openly.

Having said that, I believe that this report is a very important step
forward. It has successfully revisited a component of the new gTLD
application process which At-Large generally found repugnant, and our
views have been well represented within the new policy
recommendations. It proposes to eliminate objections on Morality and
Public Order to would be adjudicated by a subcontracted "Dispute
Resolution Service Provider". It does allow for communities and
governments to submit objections on strings that would be widely
objectionable; however, such objections would have to be contrary to
international law and treaties. And, instead of a third-party
contracted process of morality judgement, all decisions on
acceptability must be made directly by the Board which can only deny
applications (based on string objections) with a super-majority vote.

It also -- as first recommended long ago in the gTLD statement of the
At-Large Summit -- calls for slight modifications of the Community
Objection process and the role of the Independent Objector, to
compensate for the elimination of elimination of "Morality and Public
Order" objections while still enabling opposition to (very)
widely-objected strings.

This was quite the task, bringing together ALAC, GAC and GNSO in what
I believe to be a first-ever-of-its-kind consultation. Its
productivity and results exceeded my expectations, especially given an
extremely compressed timeframe that required four hours per week of
conference calls and sometimes more. ALAC was well represented and
appears to be treated as a respected and nearly-equal partner at the
table. It's a good precedent that, I hope, may encourage such forums
to be used to bring sanity to ICANN's policy-making process going
forward.

- Evan





On 21 September 2010 18:06, ICANN At-Large Staff
<staff at atlarge.icann.org> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> The Chair of the ALAC requested the Staff to start an online vote on the Rec6 CWG report. Please note that the vote will only remain open until Thursday, September 23rd at 2359 UTC.
> [...]



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