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

[Evan Leibovitch]

Danny Younger wrote:
> 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.
>   
That depends upon what you consider to be "us".

While registrants certainly include members of the public, they also
contain within their ranks all of the phishers, spammers, tasters and
kiters who prey on the public (not to mention -- though I care about
this far less -- trademark holders). It would be interesting to see how
many of those 65M registrations are personal and how many -- to use
ICANN lingo -- are "monetized". If you succeed in creating a registrants
advisory council you will probably find its membership resembles in
character the business constituency far more than ALAC.

Indeed, one could easily make the case that the BC is effectively a
registrants' constituency and is affected as much by issues such as
rogue DNS as individual registrants. It thus is no surprise that the
BC's position on domain tasting turned out to be closer to ALAC's than
the position of NCUC.

By most of the definitions I've seen the "us" in ALAC constitutes not
just registrants but the 'consumers' of the Internet. In those numbers
the US is hardly a majority anymore.

> 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.
While I don't agree with the premise (see above), I agree even less that
your fight is with or within ALAC. Most of up who signed on understood,
and generally accepted, the ground rules in advance.

> 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.
That's not totally accurate. I don' think it's a stretch to suggest that
NA played a major role in pushing for an aggressive ALAC stand on domain
tasting; its position would have been far weaker without our pressing
the issue.

The JPA was another example. Dissatisfied with the ALAC's
consensus-driven statement that said little in order to please everyone,
NARALO endorsed the stronger and specific stance taken by Consumers
Union and made separate representation as a region.

We're barely a year old and still finding our feet. But we are also
finding our voice. If the view of NA does not match the view of the
global ALAC -- or finds the need for global consensus-building to create
positions that are so weak to be useless -- NARALO will happily advance
its own stances. At that point it's a mainly matter of having the
internal initiative and volunteer time to do it. In you and Beau we have
two excellent resources for this kind of thing.

> 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.
>   
>From what I've heard IPV4 depletion is happening faster in some areas
than others, so it' s quite possible this is a higher priority elsewhere
than in the US. Also... at the top of many public priority lists are the
advancement of IDNs -- not only do Americans care little about this
issue, arguably they have an interest in stalling it.

> 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.
>   
That's your opinion and you're welcome to it.

- Evan