[At-Large] X marks the spot - a small spot

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2023 at 6:42 PM Karl Auerbach via At-Large <
at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:

trademarks and branding ought not to be part of ICANN's job of assuring the
> technical stability, reliability, and accuracy of the top two tiers of
> the domain name system.
>

Your review and analysis is correct, but ... OK, then what?

The gap between what ICANN ought to have done (or not done) and what it did
is real. The challenge that faces ALAC -- the one body feebly empowered to
assert the interest of end-users not represented by ICANN's self-interested
constituencies -- is what to do about it? The industry accidentally created
by ICANN's actions is loathe to narrow, let alone close, that gap after the
fact. This appears to render ALAC's role to one of damage mitigation. Or,
do we abdicate consumer-protection responsibility to the California
Attorney General, only to then complain about its overreach?

This is a very different conversation than the original one intended, but
it is very much still needed. Given its current constitution and the way it
burns through both volunteer and paid-staff person-hours, what is ALAC
doing to inform and protect? How does it even know what the public-at-large
needs? These are not questions that should require an outside consultant to
ask and then provide industry-friendly analysis to the Board. This is
something that we should be asking ourselves, yet can't (or refuse to). I
have my own reasons why but that's not the point.

Indeed, it's vital to know how we got to this point. That history should be
informing ALAC's role in the present, but it doesn't. Instead it's become a
part of the furniture, happily engaging within ICANN's various fraternal
squabbles, guessing without evidence of the position of the global public
-- rather than simply (a) finding out what the public needs from ICANN and
(b) advocating forcefully and unapologetically in advancement of those
needs, and nothing else.

- Evan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/at-large/attachments/20230729/40e45e23/attachment.html>