Thanks Jean-Jacques, I'm not sure of the intent of that change though. Wouldn't it encourage dawdling at the start of a calendar year, and set unreasonable demands if the request goes to the Board right near the end of the year? Alan At 19/02/2011 03:36 AM, Jean-Jacques SUBRENAT wrote:

Dear Alan,

thanks for the contribution. I agree with your analysis and suggestion. My remark: - paragraph 6, your suggestion could be reinforced along the following lines (my suggested addition in BOLD), "... that the Board will review Constituency recognition issues within two meetings, whether Regular or Special, AND IN ANY CASE WITHIN THE RELEVANT CALENDAR YEAR".

Regards, Jean-Jacques.

On 18/02/11 18:25, "Alan Greenberg" <alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote:

...

I was asked to draft a statement on the Draft Process for Recognition of New GNSO Constituencies for the consideration of the ALAC. It is attached here.

The details of the process and the comment period can be found at http://icann.org/en/public-comment/#newco-process-recognition. Comments are due by 04 March 2011.

If there are any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Alan_______________________________________________ ALAC mailing list ALAC@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/alac

At-Large Online: http://www.atlarge.icann.org ALAC Working Wiki: http://st.icann.org/alac

Thank you, Alan, and thanks to Marc and Jean-Jacques for their very useful input. This is well drafted and I have given the green light to Staff for launching a vote. Kind regards, Olivier Le 28/02/2011 07:11, Alan Greenberg a écrit :

Thanks to Marc for his thoughtful and useful additions, most of which have been incorporated into the document. And thanks to Jean-Jacques for his suggestion which I have changed a bit but also incorporated.

Here in text as well as PDF.

============

ALAC Comment on the Draft Process for Recognition of New GNSO Constituencies dated 10 January 2011

The ALAC fully supports the intent of the draft process, specifically to give the Stakeholder Group the prime responsibility for reviewing and approving new Constituencies, while preserving the Board's right to act counter to the Stakeholder Group advice if it feels that this serves ICANN's greater needs.

However, the ALAC is concerned that the process proposed is overly cumbersome, inefficient, and will discourage participation. The first and third criteria for the new process (in part) specified:

1. Optimize the considerable time and effort required to form, organize, and propose a new GNSO Constituency by prescribing a streamlined sequence of steps.... 3. Manage the entire process to a flexible, but specific and limited timeframe

It is unclear how the process can be streamlined without removing its important checks and balances, but it is clear that as described, the process will take far longer than is necessary or is acceptable.

As proposed, in a best-case scenario, it will take at least 9-10 months from initial application to final recognition. This presumes that the Stakeholder Group acts expeditiously and that the Board considers the application at its first regularly scheduled meeting. If the Board addresses the issue at a subsequent meeting (as allowed in the process) for both the Applicant and Candidate Phase, the recognition time will be almost 1.5 years. Should reconsideration be required, the worst case scenario grows to over 2.5 years.

Few potential Constituencies are likely to have the fortitude to withstand such delay. Moreover, the investment in participating in several years of ICANN meetings would be considerable.

A significant part of this elongated procedure is attributed to the long gap between the specified "regularly scheduled Board meetings", which according to current schedules are held only during ICANN meetings. If ICANN were to have only 2 meetings per year as has been suggested at times, the approval process would be elongated even more.

The ALAC recommends that the Board treat this as requiring more urgent attention and that the procedure specify that the Board will review Constituency recognition issues within two meetings, whether Regular or Special. Moreover, as is the case with a number of other Board consideration issues, the norm should be to address Constituency recognition issues at its next meeting. The process already includes provisions if a decision within two meetings is not possible.

Lastly, at present only the Commercial and Non-Commercial Stakeholder Groups recognize the concept of Constituency. Both the Registry and Registrar Stakeholder Groups do not have such a concept. Presumably therefore, this draft process only applies to groups wishing to form Constituencies within the Commercial and Non-Commercial Stakeholder Groups and not within the contracted party Stakeholder Groups. The document should state this explicitly and unambiguously to ensure that expectations of potential applicants are set appropriately.

_______________________________________________ ALAC mailing list ALAC@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/alac

At-Large Online: http://www.atlarge.icann.org ALAC Working Wiki: http://st.icann.org/alac

-- Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

Thanks, Marc, this is actually of interest! Best, Wolf Marc Rotenberg wrote Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:52:

Perhaps of interest.

Marc.

------

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20037090-281.html?tag=topStories2

February 28, 2011 4:00 AM PST No support for U.S. proposal for domain name veto by Declan McCullagh

The Obama administration has failed in its bid to allow it and other governments to veto future top-level domain names, a proposal before ICANN that raised questions about balancing national sovereignty with the venerable Internet tradition of free expression.

A group of nations rejected (PDF) that part of the U.S. proposal last week, concluding instead that governments can offer nonbinding "advice" about controversial suffixes such as .gay but will not receive actual veto power.

Other portions of the U.S. proposal were adopted, including one specifying that individual governments may file objections to proposed suffixes without paying fees and another making it easier for trademark holders to object. The final document, called a "scorecard," will be discussed at a two-day meeting that starts today in Brussels.

At stake are the procedures to create the next wave of suffixes to supplement the time-tested .com, .org, and .net. Hundreds of proposals are expected this year, including .car, .health, .love, .movie, and .web, and the application process could be finalized at a meeting next month in San Francisco of ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Proposed domain suffixes like .gay are likely to prove contentious among more conservative nations, as are questions over whether foreign firms should be able to secure potentially lucrative rights to operate geographical suffixes such as .nyc, .paris, and .london. And nobody has forgotten the furor over .xxx, which has been in limbo for seven years after receiving an emphatic thumbs-down from the Bush administration.

"We are very pleased that this consensus-based process is moving forward," a spokeswoman for the U.S. Commerce Department said in a statement provided to CNET over the weekend. "The U.S., along with many other GAC members, submitted recommendations for consideration and as expected, these recommendations provided valuable input for the development of the new scorecard."

GAC is the Governmental Advisory Committee of ICANN and composed of representatives of scores of national governments from Afghanistan to Yemen. The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, serves as the committee's representative from the United States.

ICANN representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Milton Mueller, a professor of information studies at Syracuse University and author of a recently published book on Internet governance, says an effort he supported--complete with an online petition--"shamed" GAC representatives "into thinking about the free expression consequences" of a governmental veto.

"When I started this campaign, I knew that the Department of Commerce could never defend what they were doing publicly," Mueller said. "There are also potential constitutional issues."

Complicating the Obama administration's embrace of a governmental veto was its frequently expressed support for Internet freedoms including free speech, laid out in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech last January. Clinton reiterated the administration's commitment to "the freedom to connect" again in a speech in Washington, D.C. this month.

One argument for the veto over new-top level domains is that it could fend off the possibility of a more fragmented Internet, which would likely happen if less liberal governments adopt technical measures to prevent their citizens from connecting to .gay and .xxx Web sites. In addition, handing governments more influence inside ICANN could reduce the odds of a revolt that would vest more Internet authority with the United Nations, a proposal that China allies supported last year.

"I suspect that the U.S. government put (the veto power) in there to show that it wants to respect the wishes of governments," said Steve DelBianco, executive director of the NetChoice coalition. "I think the U.S. would prefer to see a string rejected rather than let it get into the root and have multiple nations block the top-level domain."

DelBianco, whose coalition's members include AOL, eBay, Oracle, VeriSign, and Yahoo, said "blocking creates stability and consistency problems with the Internet...The U.S. government was showing a preference for having one global root."

Today's meeting in Brussels between the ICANN board and national government, which appears to be unprecedented in the history of the organization, signals a deepening rift and an attempt to resolve disputes before ICANN's next public meeting beginning March 13 in San Francisco. (The language of the official announcement says the goal is "arrive at an agreed upon resolution of those differences.")

A seven-page statement (PDF) in December 2010 from the national governments participating in the ICANN process says they are "very concerned" that "public policy issues raised remain unresolved." In addition to concern over the review of "sensitive" top-level domains, the statement says, there are also issues about "use and protection of geographical names."

That statement followed years of escalating tensions between ICANN and representatives of national governments, including a letter (PDF) they sent in August 2010 suggesting that "the absence of any controversial [suffixes] in the current universe of top-level domains to date contributes directly to the security and stability of the domain name and addressing system." And the German government recently told (PDF) ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom that there are "outstanding issues"--involving protecting trademark holders--that must be resolved before introducing "new top-level domains."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20037090-281.html#ixzz1FGGpmT7l

_______________________________________________ ALAC mailing list ALAC@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/alac

At-Large Online: http://www.atlarge.icann.org ALAC Working Wiki: http://st.icann.org/alac

comunica-ch phone +41 79 204 83 87 Skype: Wolf-Ludwig Digitale Allmend http://blog.allmend.ch - EURALO - ICANN's Regional At-Large Organisation http://euralo.org Profile on LinkedIn http://ch.linkedin.com/in/wolfludwig