[ALAC] Analysis of WHOIS AoC RT Recommendations.

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hi all,

Apologies for having been generally away from ICANN issues for the last
week or so. I'm now catching up on my mail backlog.

I'm in broad agreement with Carlton and Rinalia in their assessments and
thank both them and Alan for helping to form this.

>From a different perspective I am annoyed -- bordering on taking offence --
that At-Large expression of the public interest is expected to consider
(and maybe even partially defer to!) the internal workings of ICANN's GNSO
when giving its advice to the ICANN Board. We are bound neither in scope
nor reporting process by the limitations of the GNSO, and we ought not to
be bound by its constraints or internal politics.

*The establishment and enforcement of a robust and accurate WHOIS
mechanism, as a tool of basic registrant and industry accountability, is an
ICANN public interest priority.* That is our core message. The rest is
detail.

By all means we have a duty to welcome (and indeed assert our)
participation in community-wide low-level policy development. However, IMO
it is not our task to slice and dice what solutions can be implemented by
staff and which get punted back to ICANN's industry-captured formal policy
making process. We must remind ourselves that this same "community" has
tolerated (and on the balance can be said to defend) the status quo of lax
regulations that are themselves ineptly enforced. This is the inertia
against which we must act.

We have a duty to tell the ICANN Board and community (and by that I mean a
community that is not just the industry and its partners in opaqueness):
a) That this issue is important, indeed critical
b) That we are willing to work with the internal community in good-faith
attempts to address the minutiae required to address deficiencies in
ICANN's public service

I believe that what Alan has presented, and that which Carlton and Rinalia
have comment upon, helps address the low level details of the problems. But
let us also not lose sight of the need to give a clear and simple
high-level message to the Board (and our public) that is unbound by the
limitations of such work.

Being an Advisory Committee and not a Supporting Organization gives us a
different role in ICANN, and a slightly different path. We are already
saddled with the deficiencies of the differences (ie, our advice is not
binding) so we might as well take capitalize on the advantages (less
constrained processes and a direct channel to the Baord).

- Evan