Evan, we are certainly not bound by the politics or practices of the GNSO, and pointedly, that is why I suggested that a PDP might not always be necessary in the GNSO giving policy advice to the Board. But we are bound by the ICANN Bylaws, unless we are explicitly suggesting that they be changed. And currently the Bylaws do specify that the GNSO is the body that formulates and recommends GNSO Policy to the Board. The catch in this case is determining what is upper-case-P gTLD policy, and what is not. And we are making the case that with one exception, the initial implementation of the recommendations are NOT upper-case-P gTLD policy. Alan At 04/09/2012 03:57 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

Hi all,

Apologies for having been generally away from ICANN issues for the last week or so. I'm now catching up on my mail backlog.

I'm in broad agreement with Carlton and Rinalia in their assessments and thank both them and Alan for helping to form this.

From a different perspective I am annoyed -- bordering on taking offence -- that At-Large expression of the public interest is expected to consider (and maybe even partially defer to!) the internal workings of ICANN's GNSO when giving its advice to the ICANN Board. We are bound neither in scope nor reporting process by the limitations of the GNSO, and we ought not to be bound by its constraints or internal politics.

The establishment and enforcement of a robust and accurate WHOIS mechanism, as a tool of basic registrant and industry accountability, is an ICANN public interest priority. That is our core message. The rest is detail.

By all means we have a duty to welcome (and indeed assert our) participation in community-wide low-level policy development. However, IMO it is not our task to slice and dice what solutions can be implemented by staff and which get punted back to ICANN's industry-captured formal policy making process. We must remind ourselves that this same "community" has tolerated (and on the balance can be said to defend) the status quo of lax regulations that are themselves ineptly enforced. This is the inertia against which we must act.

We have a duty to tell the ICANN Board and community (and by that I mean a community that is not just the industry and its partners in opaqueness): a) That this issue is important, indeed critical b) That we are willing to work with the internal community in good-faith attempts to address the minutiae required to address deficiencies in ICANN's public service

I believe that what Alan has presented, and that which Carlton and Rinalia have comment upon, helps address the low level details of the problems. But let us also not lose sight of the need to give a clear and simple high-level message to the Board (and our public) that is unbound by the limitations of such work.

Being an Advisory Committee and not a Supporting Organization gives us a different role in ICANN, and a slightly different path. We are already saddled with the deficiencies of the differences (ie, our advice is not binding) so we might as well take capitalize on the advantages (less constrained processes and a direct channel to the Baord).

- Evan