[NA-Discuss] Changing the status quo (was: The European Commission Papers on ICANN)

[Beau Brendler]

This may sound strange coming from me but: What about developing stronger joint agendas with the NCSG. There are more than a hundred people in there now, a lot of new blood -- it's not just the handful of usual suspects. Some of the intellectual divides are starting to fall as well regards the anonymity-uber-alles ideology. And there is the new NPOC, which is what the consumer constituency could have been, if it had been given real board support and its board-appointed overseer had been given a mandate like Debbie Hughes was, rather than noodling for three years about what a consumer is. I mean, check out their freakin' web site: http://www.npoc.org/ It's a thing of beauty! And they have some substantial membership.

I would recommend for Dakar getting Debbie Hughes, their chair, or someone from their leadership over to talk about issues [and NOT GNSO structure]. What the NPOC as an ally can offer us, at least at the GNSO level, is a vector into consumer issues where they intersect with non-profits and business. Allow me to explain: in my view, there is some commonality of issues between consumers, i.e. regular human beings who we are supposed to represent, and business, and non-profit operations. That commonality is: concern about domain name abuse; concern about cybersquatting and fraud (a major issue for the Red Cross is trademark protection, to prevent people being defrauded in developing countries by phony Red Cross sites), fast-flux and other things we are commonly told by the contracted parties are "outside ICANN's scope" [you should all understand by now that's code for: threatens to mess with someone's revenue stream].

The more we could get at-large aligned with the GAC and the NCSG or NPOC on certain issues, the more chance at-large has to be taken more seriously and not viewed as some appendage created by ICANN to conjure the illusion of multi-stakeholder participation.

By the way, given my history, the person to do that is not me. At least not from the front.


-----Original Message-----
>From: "John R. Levine" <johnl at iecc.com>
>Sent: Sep 8, 2011 9:09 AM
>To: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <ocl at gih.com>
>Cc: NA Discuss <na-discuss at atlarge-lists.icann.org>
>Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] FW: The European Commission Papers on ICANN
>
>> The question I therefore ask you and all of the cynics is, "how do we
>> change that"?
>
>>From within the ALAC?  We can't.  We have no influence other than at the 
>margins.
>
>> You'll notice the ALAC recently released a joint statement with the GAC.
>
>Yup, the GAC has actual influence.  To the extent we can nudge them, that 
>would be useful.
>
>> I remain convinced that we have more resources than any other 
>> constituency in ICANN due to our extraordinary membership. We are the 
>> world.
>
>Not to be unduly crass, but we have no budget.  In all the consituencies 
>that matter, people get paid to lobby ICANN.
>
>Regards, John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet 
>for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. 
>http://jl.ly
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