Evan, I'm more than happy to discuss why the ALAC isn't working and what can be done to correct the situation. Let's start by having a look at the worldwide distribution of registrants in top gTLDs (over which ICANN exerts policy control). com/net/org/biz/info account for 97,000,000 registrations. Our region holds 65,000,000 of those registrations (fully two-thirds) yet our region has only 3 reps out of fifteen sitting on the ALAC -- a situation which does little to protect our interests. So when rogue registrars impact the DNS our region feels the brunt of it while the bulk of the ALAC members could care less as they tend to live mostly in the ccTLD world. Why are we at this point? Why is it that our region doesn't occupy the vast bulk of the seats on the ALAC? This is purely based on a distribution that reflects "political correctness" moreso than the realities of the marketplace. That may be acceptable to civil society types that only comment on the lists as the time approaches for another IGF session; it's not acceptable to most North Americans that continue to be affected by damaging gTLD registrar behaviors, and who are counting upon those in ICANN to deliver results. The ALAC has had countless opportunities to defend the user interest; instead, they have chosen to tacitly discriminate against North Americans by ignoring their immediate and ongoing concerns. It doesn't matter how many times someone like Kurt Pritz puts up slides indicating that issues with transfers are a top community concern; the ALAC will continue to stumble along and produce statements on ancillary matters such as IPv4 depletion instead of dealing with the serious problems at hand. It's time for not only an operational overhaul of the ALAC, but more importantly, we need to see a structural overhaul that "weighs" each region and assigns representation that reflects actual current worldwide participation in the DNS. Weighted voting is a reality in the GNSO; it should become the new reality in the ALAC. If that means that North America will be assigned 66 percent of reps on the ALAC at this point in time -- so be it. At some point soon the balance will switch to Asia, and when that happens I would expect the weighting to be changed to relect the new mix. The politically correct distribution that we suffer under has not worked out. A change is most certainly in order. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping