On 1/28/15 8:50 AM, Drazek, Keith wrote:

If a ccTLD manager is not a member of the ccNSO, is paying no fees to ICANN and is not bound by ccNSO policy, please help me understand how they are impacted and why they would care about the ICANN Board's accountability mechanisms to its community. I fully understand why every TLD registry cares about the IANA functions and changes to the root zone file, but our issue of greater ICANN Accountability is a broader discussion than the IANA-specific concerns and accountability mechanisms currently being addressed via the CWG Transition.


It is not so very long ago that a (previous) Executive and (previous) Board made changes requested by delegees of iso3166 code points conditional upon a form of agreement. The policy pursued by that Executive and that Board were not subject to substantive community review (notice and comment) prior to being implemented, with the accountability issue I hope many, not just the directly concerned, still recall.

Additionally, the interests of parties (of any type) need not encompass the union of all interests of all parties in the mechanisms and policies relating to accountability.

The pursuit of the narrow self-interest of a hypothetical ccTLD, or gTLD, delegee or contractual party, through its operator, should not, by itself, remove a party pursuing its narrow self-interest from what ever may eventually be a body of "members". Were it so, the removed would be at least some of those the USG observed in the AOC which constitute " a group of participants that engage in ICANN's processes to a greater extent than Internet users generally."

However, given the general awareness that the continued function of the Root Zone Management (RZM) partners is of fundamental importance, and the limited interest _as_delegees_or_contractees_ in issues other than the continued function of the Root Zone Management (RZM) partners, it seems unnecessary to encumber the problem of accountability-via-membership (already quite difficult if not intractable, in my opinion) with notions that delegees and contractees, as delegees or contractees, contribute an interest absent but for their status as "members", whether represented en toto, or as self-organized aggregates, or by lottery.

In simple terms, why registries-as-members at all? Does anyone believe only registries can provide the necessary oversight of the Board as it relates to the continued function of the Root Zone Management?

I think that the function of the Board is general oversight of the registries, arising from its technical coordination of unique endpoint identifiers delegated authority, and contractual oversight arising from its delegated contracting authority, so the assumption that registries have a necessary place in a hypothetical membership model is one that should be examined carefully for self-interest and self-dealing, as well as for necessity and utility.

Eric Brunner-Williams
Eugene, Oregon