[At-Large] [Gnso-liaison] Is Staff in bed with NetSol?

[Danny Younger]

Evan,

I'm more than happy to discuss why the ALAC isn't
working and what can be done to correct the situation.

Let's start by having a look at the worldwide
distribution of registrants in top gTLDs (over which
ICANN exerts policy control).

com/net/org/biz/info account for 97,000,000
registrations.  Our region holds 65,000,000 of those
registrations (fully two-thirds) yet our region has
only 3 reps out of fifteen sitting on the ALAC -- a
situation which does little to protect our interests.

So when rogue registrars impact the DNS our region
feels the brunt of it while the bulk of the ALAC
members could care less as they tend to live mostly in
the ccTLD world.

Why are we at this point?  Why is it that our region
doesn't occupy the vast bulk of the seats on the ALAC?
 This is purely based on a distribution that reflects
"political correctness" moreso than the realities of
the marketplace.  That may be acceptable to civil
society types that only comment on the lists as the
time approaches for another IGF session; it's not
acceptable to most North Americans that continue to be
affected by damaging gTLD registrar behaviors, and who
are counting upon those in ICANN to deliver results.

The ALAC has had countless opportunities to defend the
user interest; instead, they have chosen to tacitly
discriminate against North Americans by ignoring their
immediate and ongoing concerns.  

It doesn't matter how many times someone like Kurt
Pritz puts up slides indicating that issues with
transfers are a top community concern; the ALAC will
continue to stumble along and produce statements on
ancillary matters such as IPv4 depletion instead of
dealing with the serious problems at hand.

It's time for not only an operational overhaul of the
ALAC, but more importantly, we need to see a
structural overhaul that "weighs" each region and
assigns representation that reflects actual current
worldwide participation in the DNS.  Weighted voting
is a reality in the GNSO; it should become the new
reality in the ALAC.

If that means that North America will be assigned 66
percent of reps on the ALAC at this point in time --
so be it.  At some point soon the balance will switch
to Asia, and when that happens I would expect the
weighting to be changed to relect the new mix.

The politically correct distribution that we suffer
under has not worked out.  A change is most certainly
in order.




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