On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 1:45 AM Alejandro Pisanty via At-Large < at-large@atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote: The summaries alone should be considered as strong alarm signs. The foci of
attention of ALAC and At-Large seem way out of phase, lagging years behind these developments. This is not uniform; some RALOs are in even worse shape, considering recent publicly available evidence.
I went back and found email in which I and others first raised most of these issues within At-Large in 2011. And repeatedly since. So it's not as if anything here should be a revelation. Back then these were alarm signs. At this point they are well past the point of no return. ALAC is, and has always been, unable to assert the necessary end-user influence within ICANN *by design*. The failure to serve its mandate has now been documented in a way third-party consultant reviews could never do. Meanwhile, little has evolved to enable At-Large to be any more fit for the next 20 years than it has been for the last 20. As just one example: nobody seems to notice that marketing campaigns like Universal Acceptance have been rendered largely pointless. Most of the public that might once have benefited from IDNs has moved on, but ALAC is fine with advancing the needs of domain-sellers over the realities of Internet users. Also consider that the disruption of domain names by search engines is already stale information, as search engines themselves are being disrupted by AI which would be quite fine with the whole world's address space resting under a single TLD. To those who see the SSAC commentary as an alarm: Are the radical core changes necessary -- to enable ALAC to succeed in its mandate going forward -- even possible anymore? Or is the future just more of the same.... - Evan