Alan Greenberg wrote:
Wendy, could you share your logic with us? Although I support some of the changes recommended in the report (and am leery of some as well), I do not see how At-Large really benefits other than in a utopian vision of "if the GNSO and therefore the overall Internet functions better, all users will benefit".
I think the at-large public benefits if gTLD policy is made in an effective, relatively rapid process, in which members of the public have an opportunity to participate in working groups. We've clearly not benefited from stalemate in which status quo policies stick around because even majorities can't get "consensus" to improve or change them, and in which new problems can't be dealt with in a timely manner.
It is true that there has been a lot of talk about At-Large or individual users being part of the Non-commercial Stakeholders Group. But that is all it is - talk. The BGC report makes it very clear that the 4th Stakeholder Group is for non-commercial REGISTRANTS. Admittedly, individual user registrants are part of the At-Large community, and indeed an important part. But At-Large also includes the uncountable number of users who are not registrants. And in the proposed model, they are excluded from participating in the work of the GNSO.
No more excluded than now, as I understand it. Currently, no constituency represents the individual at-large user. Under the proposed restructuring, no constituency represents all the at-large users, but at least those who are domain registrants are represented. The ALAC isn't abolished (yet), so at-large has as much/little representation there as ever. I hope we're all communicating with the ALAC reviewers @wesltakenz.com to give them the full picture for the ALAC review.
Even at the working group level, the words in the report can be interpreted as excluding non-registrants in that the report talks about working groups being composed of a wide range of "stakeholders", a terms that is otherwise used in the report to categorize registrants.
I read "stakeholder" in the working groups to include anyone, as has been the case in WGs that have used this model in advance. If that's not how all are reading it, we can easily file a comment asking for that to be made clear. --Wendy -- Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@seltzer.org phone: +1.914.374.0613 // office: 617.373.7331 Visiting Professor, Northeastern University School of Law Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html http://www.chillingeffects.org/ https://www.torproject.org/