Well, the vote has closed with no ALAC members voting against. Ten in favour and one abstention (and the abstainer agreed with the report's conclusions), representing support from all of ICANN's five regions. So as of now the Response to the GAC Scorecard -- which is now in the hands of both the Board and the GAC -- is an official ALAC statement. Thanks to everyone who contributed input; the document reflects quite a mix of both recent comment and historical policy development. Now, having said all the, the statement is still a living document that -- as its disclaimer states -- is subject to ongoing updating as more feedback came in. Some recent discussion on the NARALO list regarding DNSSEC has potential implications for the Scorecard response so I am following that closely. Indeed, the "debate" over the release of the statement itself has been interesting to watch. The first indication of entertainment was the sudden arrival in the NARALO email list of vested interests who had previously appeared to write ALAC off as irrelevant. That response was predictable, ultimately a message of "how dare we try to slow -- let alone stop -- the train to gTLD-land". The response that followed, though, was even more interesting. It seems that there is an increasing comfort within ALAC with the position that a glut of dozens -- let alone hundreds -- of unrestricted new gTLDs does not necessarily serve the public interest, increase public trust in the DNS, or encourage the use of domain names to find content (as opposed to search engines or referral sites). Indeed, there are some foreseeable Internet stability risks possible in the case of over-supply of TLDs leading to large-scale financial failure of new registries, or the widespread repetition of the reliability and enforcement problems that exist in current TLDs. Long after the startup consultants have been paid and the service contracts signed, end users may be required to clean up the mess. Advocating restraint, throttling and/or categorization as part of the gTLD rollout may be indeed going against the grain of the rest of ICANN, but we're not here (well, I'm not) just to tell the industry what it want to hear. The debate is far from over. Since the creation of a RALO- and ALS-based infrastructure ALAC hasn't really been part of the claimed consensus about gTLDs. At least it's gratifying to know that this fact has finally received some needed attention. - Evan