[ALAC] Possible joint ALAC-NCSG statement at Open Forum

[Alan Greenberg]

At the ALAC-NCSG meeting on Monday, a decision was taken to attempt 
to draft a statement on the proposed new rights protection mechanisms 
(originally the "strawman" proposal) and more specific all the 
allowing into the TMCH variations of trademarks that had been found 
to be abusive by a UDRP or Court.

A number of drafts were circulated and the statement below was the result:

>We are deeply concerned about the flawed process that led to the 
>creation and adoption of the so-called strawman proposal for new 
>gTLD    rights protection mechanisms.  Despite assurances that staff 
>would not create or alter community-developed Policy, some aspects 
>of this proposal were adopted outside of the appropriate policy 
>development processes.
>
>While we appreciate staff's admission that this particular proposal 
>was a policy issue and not an implementation detail, the 
>explanations provided for the adoption of the policy that the GNSO 
>Council did not support and that the ALAC deemed to require GNSO 
>development have been woefully inadequate.  Circumvention of the 
>bottom-up model is a serious issue that deserves attention and 
>redress.  We call upon ICANN to reverse this trend and respect the 
>community-led bottom-up multi-stakeholder policy development process 
>that ICANN claims to champion.

Following this, an extensive discussion was held during the open GNSO 
meeting. One of the issues that came out of this was that many (but 
certainly not all) GNSO Council (and presumably GNSO) members feel 
that the salient issue is not that the Board has chosen to override 
the majority position of the GNSO that some of the strawman issues 
were definitely policy, but rather that it was done without at least 
the courtesy of telling the GNSO that they were planning to do so, 
explaining the rationale in detail, and giving the GNSO an 
opportunity to interact with the Board and staff before the 
definitive decision was taken.

I would suggest that this is closer to the message that we want to 
deliver to the Board.

I have told Robin Gross, that we would let her know prior to the Open 
Forum whether we support the above joint statement or not.

Alan