[At-Large] [NA-Discuss] Community Input Requested on Two Draft Statements from ALAC to the ICANN Board

[Wendy Seltzer]

At-Large Staff wrote:
> Dear Community members:
> 
> [ENGLISH TEXT]
> 
> We have been asked to notify you that two draft statements to the ICANN
> Board from the At-Large Advisory Committee are now open for comments from
> all members of the At-Large community. Comments will be accepted until 16th
> April 2008, at 1200 UTC, after which time comments will be reviewed by the
> ALAC Finance and Budget committee before transmitting the final text to the
> Board of Directors as an Advisory Committee statement.
> 
> Draft Statement to the ICANN Board on the Budget and Operational Plan
> Framework for 2008/2009:
> https://st.icann.org/alac/index.cgi?al_alac_bud_sc_0308_1_2

The statement, appended below, is completely anodyne. My comments:

Drop the "compliments" bs.
Trade WHOIS accuracy for WHOIS privacy. When inaccuracy is the way to
preserve privacy, it's better than forced accuracy.
Drop the crap about increased working capacity on ALAC - there's no
evidence the community is working any better, when these statements come
out with little evidence of community input.

How about focusing on some things important to end-users?
* Getting new gTLDs introduced already to foster market competition;
* reforming an intellectual-property-centric UDRP;
* introducing DNSSEC so users can verify the accuracy of domain lookup;
* protection of Internet users and registrants against abuse of data
they send through DNS lookups or registration inquiries.
for just a few.

---

AL.ALAC/BUD.SC/0308/1/2

STATUS OF THIS DOCUMENT: Draft
COMMITTE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE TEXT: ALAC Finance and Budget Subommittee
DOCUMENT BEGAN COMMUNITY REVIEW ON: 6th April 2008
COMMUNITY REVIEW CONCLUDES ON: 16th April 2008

NEXT STEP AFTER COMMUNITY REVIEW: Committee responsible reviews
comments, produces final draft which is transmitted to the Board of
Directors of ICANN

Community members are invited to use the 'Comment' button to provide
their views on the text here until 16th April 2008 at 1200 UTC.
At-Large Advisory Committee Statement to the ICANN Board on the Draft
Operating Plan for FY 2008/2009

We present our compliments to the Board of Directors of ICANN and
welcome the opportunity to make our comments on the Draft Operating Plan
and Budget Framework for FY 2008/2009.

Firstly, please note our endorsement of the change to the budgeting and
operational planning process introduced this year. It seems to us that
the combination of the consultation on these obviously closely-related
issues is eminently sensible. We also welcome the longer public
consultation timelines that this allows.

As this is the first stage of this process, these comments are
introductory. We provide this document so that these preliminary
reactions and comments may be taken into account as the Staff prepare
the Budget and Operating Plan for its first iteration consultation.

Our comments, therefore, are primarily related to the various
“Activities/Outcomes by Initiative”. We do not propose to comment on
each of these, but on those most important to the At-Large Community.

IDN Activities

This is a very important area of work for At-Large – and also for all of
ICANN. The extra funding and greatly increased ICANN activity in this
area is therefore welcomed. We would like to emphasise the element of
communications related to IDNs.

Fundamental choices that will affect the many communities that do not
rely upon the Latin character set will be made in the next few years.
For that reason, we believe ICANN, in partnership with other
stakeholders of course, needs to make a substantial, sustained, greatly
increased effort to communicate with these communities –to ensure that
the message about the forthcoming choices to be made related to IDNs
reaches a far larger pool of potential contributors to the process than
is currently aware and participating. This should not simply take the
form of translated press releases but really a well-thought-out media
campaign which ‘reaches out’ to the public. We know that efforts to do
this work exist – we wish to emphasise that this is extremely important.
We note that we have asked the At-Large staff to propose funding in the
forthcoming FY to revise and expand the available materials related to
outreach to the individual Internet user community and this is just one
aspect that such an effort must address.

Compliance Activities

We note the increase in staffing and staff work related to compliance.
We are pleased to see that the budget framework proposes further
considerable investment in this area. However we wish to note what we
see as two crucial missing major activities in this area related to
compliance:

    * WHOIS Accuracy and Reporting. We all know that WHOIS is very
inaccurate. This is a very serious problem and considerable effort needs
to be made to improve this situation. Multiplying the number of gTLDs as
is proposed when the existing database is inaccurate is just asking to
make a big problem worse – and the existing reporting system is already
not fit for purpose. ICANN is not living up to its obligations with
respect to WHOIS – fixing this should be a headline compliance activity
in the Operational Plan for 2008/2009. Whilst we are limiting our
comments here to compliance activities related to the operational
planning cycle, this should not be understood to mean that our concerns
related to WHOIS are limited to data accuracy. Our previous statements
on the policy aspects of WHOIS remain valid.

    * Complaints Processing. We note that there is now some information
on how registrants can complain on the ICANN website, which is a welcome
improvement. We also note that there is a provision as a headline
activity in the Operational Plan Framework to “Implement Complaints
Process System to address complaints and forward them to correct parties
as approved”. This is a start but is not nearly enough – such a system
needs to also verify whether or not the forwarded complaints were
addressed, and provide options so that the complainant can easily report
whether or not they are satisfied with the result. The underlying
philosophy should be that, as the contractor, ICANN should ensure that
the contractees are living up to their side of the ‘deal’ and completely
offloading complaints to the contractee – or anyone else – is in our
opinion not satisfactory.

Global Outreach

This is a particularly important area to us. The various communities in
ICANN are not representative of the worldwide Internet-using community.
Whilst we appreciate the initial provision of a substantial increase in
funds allocated to Global Outreach – we will look forward to seeing more
detail about precisely what this consists of when the draft budget is
posted. However, we note that on page 23 of the Draft Framework, under
Global Outreach, there is a major area of work listed as ‘Implement
business engagement outreach’. If this is intended to be outreach only
to business communities, this is, in our opinion, clearly far too narrow
– outreach efforts and recruitment efforts must be be even-handed,
global – and to all communities and potential participant communities,
not just ‘business’. We draw the attention of the board to the many
comments about the importance of dramatically increasing the outreach
and recruitment of ALL stakeholders that was a common theme of the
respondents to the JPA review recently; From this we propose that there
is broad support for greatly increased work by ICANN in these respects.

We welcome the continued support for participation by our community from
ICANN. Without it the Internet end-user’s voice will simply not be
adequately represented. Facilitation of community participation (and
specifically that of volunteers) in ICANN is an extremely important
issue and one important aspect of this is covered in greater depth in
our statement to you in relation to the development of a volunteer
travel and expense support policy, in document AL.ALAC/BUD.SC/0308/2
which is accessible at <insert url here>.

Policy Development Support

We welcome the major theme associated with this area of work on page 25,
that ICANN will “provide additional secretariat support to SOs,
constituencies and ACs to make volunteer efforts more effective.” We are
direct beneficiaries of this, with the addition of two members of staff
on the At-Large team. It should be noted that the recent filling of
these long-open positions is already beginning to increase our capacity
for working with greater efficiency (particularly in the RALO’s), and we
hope that the support our community receives of this kind will become
generally available across the constituencies and communities and look
forward to seeing the detailed plans for how the objective listed in
this area is to be achieved.

Registrant Protections

We welcome the increased activity in this area – however, the board
needs to be aware that from our perspecitve, the RAA review process
appears to have ceased operation. We hear anecdotally that there is
current work in this area inside ICANN, but it is not visible to us (or
anyone else from what we can tell). This is a very important area of
work for ICANN and to our community. It should not suffer, for example,
due to work on new gTLDs taking priority –the priority must be given to
the protection of existing registrants and only then worrying about
adding many more through new gTLDs. We believe there should be
meaningful deadlines set for the concluding of work on the RAA – in a
completely open and transparent manner.

Transcription and Translation

Our community has been calling for ICANN to become a truly multilingual
organisation for years now. We appreciate and appplaud the increased
budget commitment, draft translation framework, and other moves in this
direction but we wish to remind you that ICANN has a very, very long way
to go to reach the mission that the translation programme proposes.
In our opinion, this area of work is of absolutely central importance to
the organisation’s credibility, as we do not believe that any
consultation or policy development process conducted entirely in English
is globally legitimate. This is especially true with subjects like IDNs
that – incredibly –continue to be largely English-only, with
multilingual documents provided only in some cases, often far later than
the original English versions, and only as an afterthought.

Ensuring that the work of ICANN becomes truly multilingual is a core,
critical objective. It must not be sidelined, or de-emphasised by other
objectives like new gTLDs.

Broaden Participation

This area is of great importance – not just to our community but to all
communities. In particular, whilst the provisions for teleconferences
for our community have improved by changing vendors, we do not believe
that it makes sense to continue to outsource this core communications
function and so we welcome the news that ICANN proposes to purchase a
truly fit-for-purpose system to facilitate telephonic interactions. We
hope that in doing so choices will be made which truly facilitate equal
access and quality for all participants, regardless of where they might be.
In particular, the new system must provide for the technical operation
of simultaneous interpretation on teleconferences. This is an absolutely
essential function, not something that is “nice to have”. Our experience
with this has clearly shown that the ability to work, interact and
correspond (both face to face and remotely) in the language that is most
comfortable and easy to work with greatly increases and enhances
effective participation.

We would also like to emphasise how important it is to broadening
participation of effective remote participation in meetings, of which
telephonic two-way participation is only one element. We believe that
the current remote participation modalities for ICANN meetings are not
fit for purpose. Our statement in relation to the development of a
volunteer travel and expense support policy, in document
AL.ALAC/BUD.SC/0308/2 accessible at <insert url here> also has the
elaboration on our views on the subject of remote participation, and
meetings.

In addition to these points, we wish to emphasise that one of the most
important elements of participation is ICANN producing documents in
standardised formats which are accessible, written in plain language,
with excellent summaries, indices, glossaries, and the like. This is a
real shortcoming of present document production at ICANN and it is a
real barrier to participation.
We also believe that fostering participation actually requires a
regionally sensitive approach and often regionally differentiated
materials. In developing countries, radio and audiovisual materials, to
mention just two formats, are the best way to reach non-traditional
ICANN stakeholders. It is understood that this kind of outreach would
not be in the nature of general Internet education but should be related
to the mission of ICANN and its mandate.

In closing, we thank the board in advance for its consideration of our
views, and look forward to a response to our concerns and
recommendations in due course.