[ALAC] Follow-up on the ALAC Advice to the Board regarding PICs

[Alan Greenberg]

Note this will be a 5-day vote, not 4, but please vote as soon as the 
poll is opened.  Alan

At 13/11/2014 02:01 AM, Alan Greenberg wrote:
>You will recall that at ICANN51, the ALAC submitted a very 
>controversial piece of Advice to the ICANN Board, specifically that 
>the New gTLD applications and delegations for specific TLDs be 
>frozen until appropriate public interest safeguards can be put in 
>place. The TLDs in question were those referred to by the GAC as 
>Category 1 TLDs in the fields of health, education, finance, 
>charities and gambling, identified by the GAC as particularly 
>sensitive, requiring enhanced safeguards to build public trust.
>
>I understand that this advice is under review by the Board New gTLD 
>Process Committee (NGPC).
>
>Our statement has received a lot of notice, particularly by the 
>Registries. A letter from the Registry Stakeholder Group to the 
>ICANN Board is attached. They STRONGLY recommend that the Board 
>reject our advice.
>
>Accordingly, I believe that we must quickly reinforce our position. 
>I have asked Evan Leibovitch and the ALAC New gTLD WG to provide 
>further details on the short statement approved in LA, so that it 
>may be taken into consideration by the NGPC. The statement is attached.
>
>There is nothing in this statement that was not already implied in 
>the advice we have already given, but it sets out the details in 
>such a way as to (hopefully) make our advice harder for the Board to 
>dismiss completely. As the Registry Stakeholder Group points out, a 
>freeze would be problematic. We are not trying to cause problems, 
>but we do believe that the public interest MUST be served.
>
>I believe that this matter is of extreme urgency. Accordingly I am 
>taking the rather unusual step of requesting that staff immediately 
>initiate a 4-day vote to ratify this statement. The vote will start 
>as soon as staff can initiate it and will end on Tuesday, 18 
>November at 23:59 UTC.
>
>PLEASE VOTE AS SOON AS YOU CAN. Once the vote has received 
>sufficient support as to ensure that it passes, I will notify the Board.
>
>Alan
>
>