[NA-Discuss] Requesting Your Input...

[Evan Leibovitch]

Danny Younger wrote:
> Do the registries get to determine how much money is spent on registry support services?
>   
No, they have a financial interest in moving forward their agendas and
see travel expenses as the cost of doing business. Same for trademark
lawyers.  NGOs and governments have their own needs, which are not
financial but self-motivated just the same. And they're paid to do this
kind of thing.

> Do the registrars get to determine how much money gets spent on contract enforcement?
>   
So how much transparency and input _is_ there into how much is spent on
enforcement?

Arguably the community SHOULD have a greater say in this; are you really
defending the current -- and very opaque -- process of prioritization?

> Do ICANN Fellowship recipients get to determine how many fellowships will be offered?
>   
No, because that's treated as charity. Arguably, the Fellowship
recipients should have a say in the criteria of who goes, rather than
leave the whole process to staff.

> Budgeted funds are not yours to control.  There is no ICANN constituent unit that is granted the power to
> determine how an allocation is spent.
There is no other constituent unit that exists at ICANN's own request
and actively solicited to be there.

There is no other constituent unit that is demanded -- as a condition of
its participation -- to promote ICANN to its members.

There is no other constituent unit that is deliberately not comprised of
ICANN policy experts.

There is no other constituent body whose members have an explicit
mandate -- agreed to by contract -- to serve the greater interests of
ICANN rather than their own agendas.

Personally, I have no interest in getting involved in budget issues
myself, and it is easy to argue that ALAC in its current form is not
competent to handle this kind of task. I am more interested in a
transparent, well understood process than I am in actual control. I
don't _have_ to have a say in money spent in my name, but doesn't it
help all if this is a consultative process rather than an arbitrary one?

> ICANN is not a membership organization, and as such you have no rights with regard to the distribution of funds.
>   
I am here because ICANN asked me to be here, I did not seek it out. CLUE
had zero interest in ICANN issues before I was actively solicited by
Jacob. Even now, our policy efforts are far more deeply aimed towards
non-ICANN issues such as fair dealing in copyright, openness in IT
standards, and the anti-citizen effects of Canada trying to clone the DMCA.

Yet it was exactly because of this -- because we had the capacity to
understand ICANN issues, even though they were not a concern of ours at
the time -- that we were solicited and asked to apply. This is an
inherent and significant difference between At-Large and ICANN's other
constituencies. By design we are responders rather than advocates;
responding to our membership interests (which largely have nothing to do
with ICANN) while responding to ICANN's need to see and be seen by an
otherwise-disinterested public.

The ICANN Board, in its wisdom, understood that it needed to reach out
beyond the noisemakers, special interest groups, and career policy
addicts for its public input. It took the difficult steps towards
seeking out a public that was otherwise indifferent, and convince that
public to care. It allocated a significant budgetary sum, in the
awareness that soliciting qiality advice from this community would
require resources not needed by others. The result of that is an entity
that is correctly very different from any other in ICANN; it is
disappointing -- though not surprising -- that both staff and existing
ICANN insiders have such an extremely hard time understanding this, and
appear incapable of seeing past the money.

In my traditional CLUE work in advocating the use of open source in
Canada I am fully aware of the difficulties in fighting inertia and
closed-mindedness. I had hoped that I wouldn't have to do that here.
Wishful thinking, I guess.

- Evan