First of all, I can't emphasize enough my disappointment in the ALAC for allowing this to go out, in the ALAC's name, without any consultation. I feel like I'm dealing with one of my children: if you can't play with that internal mailing list correctly, I'm going to have to take it away from you. We've been talking about this internal list problem for years. It's time to shut it down. On the substance though, the proposal isn't as bad as I feared. As I read it, ALS structures are part of a group that gets 1/3 of the seats on the GNSO. That would be an incremental improvement over the status quo. It certainly doesn't go far enough in giving users and registrants a real voice, but it's hard to know whether it is a reasonable and pragmatic compromise without knowing the history of the discussions that produced this draft. (see point 1). What I haven't seen in the last 24 hours since this issue hit the lists is a defense of this paper by anyone in the ALAC. If the ALAC signed onto this, please tell us why. Personally, I'm open to this, but need to see someone defend it. I also strongly dislike the phrase "contractual interest group," which ignores the fact that registrants are required to sign standard form contracts with registrars, each of which contains provisioned mandated by ICANN and passed down to the registrants through the registrars. The reality is that a registrant's rights in a domain name are limited in important ways by the ICANN-mandated terms of their registration contracts. These contracts also impose ICANN-mandated fees that registrants in gTLDs must pay annually. A better name for the current group is "registration interests." This isn't just a matter of language. The "contracted parties" lingo is used by the registries and registrars to get positions of budget approval and financial leverage within the ICANN process, completely ignoring the fact that it is the users who ultimately pay ICANN's bills. The increasing ICANN budget and the price increases of gTLD registries take a larger and larger bite out of registrants pockets each year, and we should no longer allow ourselves to be marginalized by false labels. Still waiting to read some official defense of this proposal from the ALAC. -- Bret