[At-Large] The SSAC has published SAC123 and SAC122

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 1:45 AM Alejandro Pisanty via At-Large <
at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:

The summaries alone should be considered as strong alarm signs. The foci of
> attention of ALAC and At-Large seem way out of phase, lagging years behind
> these developments. This is not uniform; some RALOs are in even worse
> shape, considering recent publicly available evidence.
>

I went back and found email in which I and others first raised most of
these issues within At-Large in 2011. And repeatedly since.
So it's not as if anything here should be a revelation. Back then these
were alarm signs. At this point they are well past the point of no return.

ALAC is, and has always been, unable to assert the necessary end-user
influence within ICANN *by design*. The failure to serve its mandate has
now been documented in a way third-party consultant reviews could never do.
Meanwhile, little has evolved to enable At-Large to be any more fit for the
next 20 years than it has been for the last 20.

As just one example: nobody seems to notice that marketing campaigns like
Universal Acceptance have been rendered largely pointless. Most of the
public that might once have benefited from IDNs has moved on, but ALAC is
fine with advancing the needs of domain-sellers over the realities of
Internet users. Also consider that the disruption of domain names by search
engines is already stale information, as search engines themselves are
being disrupted by AI which would be quite fine with the whole world's
address space resting under a single TLD.

To those who see the SSAC commentary as an alarm: Are the radical core
changes necessary -- to enable ALAC to succeed in its mandate going forward
-- even possible anymore? Or is the future just more of the same....

- Evan
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