Well, as I said yesterday during the GTLD-WG call, I was not surprised that the recommendation was not followed, but I did expect some half-way measure - perhaps an explicit increase of 1-2 million, funded by a deferred return-to-reserve and perhaps only in the event of insufficient additional fund-raising. But clearly that did not happen and that is indeed disappointing. However, the actual size of the pool does not need to be fixed until the SARP makes its awards, so there is nearly a year left to continue lobbying the Board (and in our call last week, that was acknowledged by Board members). I think we need to consider how best to do this, not only for ALAC, but by getting others involved as well. Bills note sounds like the start, but it would be good if we can get new voices into this, not just the usual players. Alan At 13/12/2011 03:12 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

Alan, you had my hopes up... for a few seconds. Until I read the whole resolution.

The Board may have approved the fee reduction to $47K, but it explicitly rejected the core JAS recommendation that the fee reduction be separated from the ICANN fund.

The implications of this are: * There is a hard limit on how many applications may receive cost reductions, meaning that worthy and eligible applications may have to compete among themselves for funding and that some (many? we don't know) eligible applicants will not receive the reduction. Based on the current fund size a maximum of only 14 TLD applications can receive the reduced rate. * The fund that ICANN "set aside" for applicant support is designed to all funnel back into ICANN (some charity!) ... no assistance is available to help with non-ICANN expenses or capacity building * The bottom up core JAS community recommendations -- supporting fee reductions independent of the fixed pool (as endorsed in the<http://www.icann.org/en/minutes/resolutions-08dec11-en.htm> joint statement by the ALAC and GAC, as well as endorsed by the NPOC and NCUC) were explicitly rejected without rationale. We have no idea who is pushing back against the public-interest community advice or why; what has been openly published about the JAS recommendations (of which I'm aware) has been in support or neutral.

So... the implicit rejection of a core component of the JAS recommendation is now explicit.

I know we should be happy for even getting this far -- that ANY assistance is offered -- but I am disgusted at the opaqueness of the debate. The bottom up process, done as designed, has either been enthusiastically endorsed (ALAC, GAC, NCUC, NPOC -- all the public-interest constituencies) or passed without comment (the rest of GNSO). There has been no active argument presented against the recommendations. We have tried to anticipate objections in the JAS documentation yet have never been able to openly confront and respond to the opposition. It's a small victory for At-Large getting anything, but a major fail for ICANN's claims of policy-by-consensus and transparency.

- Evan