Furthermore, these procedures may risk subordinating the global public interest if the GAC position on an issue (which conceivably it could also have initiated) were to be outvoted by other constituencies for example. In that scenario, I would expect that the view of governments would be that such community decisions would be rendered fundamentally unsafe.

Such constraints on participation present challenges to how government representatives fulfil their obligations in the new architecture of ICANN accountability and community empowerment but they should not be insurmountable: we will have to be inventive with regard to the precise modalities for governments to opt into these community-wide processes to ensure that the public interest is served when high level decisions are taken by the community that will impact on the Internet's critical infrastructure. 

Kind regards

Mark

Mark Carvell

United Kingdom Representative on the GAC