Danny, I would like to reply in regards to the whole "free ride" issue. I cannot speak for others. I just want to illustrate how it is for me. First of all, as I also wear a government hat, I had to take holiday time for the last two meetings I attended. This means that I cannot take much in the way of holidays with my husband when we would actually like to get some R&R together or I will have to take leave without pay. Prior to leaving for Delhi, my husband was away for the previous week so I wasn't even able to see him before leaving. Then I went to Delhi and must now travel to Vancouver where I am presenting at another conference on behalf of my ALS. When I return, my husband is again out on duty travel and I won't be able to see him for another week. That means a month before I see my husband again. During my "holidays" I was attending ICANN sessions and meeting from 7:30-8:30 am, clear through to 6:00-7:00 pm. Then I might grab something to eat then its up to my room to keep up with all of the work and e-mails generated by both my own work and the many ALAC messages et al. This means I have been up everynight until 12:00pm-3:00 am before I attempt to get some sleep. For the first few days I was so jet lagged (unable to get more than 3 hours of sleep per night) that I blew off the Gala so that I could get my work done and then take a sleeping pill so that I could try to get some sleep. FUN STUFF! I know that I'm not the one here with the heaviest workload, either, because many of ALAC, especially the liaisons had a lot more evening meetings to attend than I did and were not even able to attend any of the networking suppers. Party central, here! When I get back home I will be putting in all kinds of overtime just to get caught up on my work and I will not be paid to do that, either. So, I might be getting a "free trip" but, I'll tell you, its costing me in many ways. As for the latest of the consultation of the JPA - you're right. Unfortunately, I did not realize the scope of this problem until attending the sessions on it and then went "Holy Cow - this is IMPORTANT". I then asked for last minute feedback because I felt that this was better than no feedback at all. Unfortunately, I just hadn't seen any discussion on this previously and was unaware of it. This one slipped by me. I guess since I have to work up to 10 hours per day on my regular job and I don't have hours and hours to be surfing and educating myself on every last issue out there, thats what happened. I'm not using that as an excuse, however, as I still should have gotten this out sooner but when you have volunteers that are completely overworked because the are doing a juggling act without adequate resources, this is what happens. So, how do we fix this? Not sure. So, take this for what its worth. D ________________________________ From: alac-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org on behalf of Danny Younger Sent: Sun 2/17/2008 1:50 PM To: Michael Maranda Cc: At-Large Worldwide Subject: Re: [At-Large] [Gnso-liaison] Is Staff in bed with NetSol? Michael, Thanks for the feedback. I would be sympathetic with your position regarding weighted support for the end-user community if it could be demonstrated that ALAC reps in other regions have been busy formulating policy to deal with non-registrant end-user concerns that theoretically could take precedence over current registrant concerns... but this hasn't happened. What we have instead is a bunch of folk who by dint of their Civil Society involvement are now being paid to attend ICANN sessions, folk that seem to have no real interest in anything other than networking and getting together for the next IGF session. These aren't the representatives of "the people". They don't speak for the at-large as do the voices on Slashdot, the voices in the tech blogs, or the complainants in the public forums. At the ALAC helm we tend to find the ivory tower crowd that would rather spend their time theorizing about Internet Governance than actually dealing with immediate problems in the DNS. Just have a look through the Euralo discussion list and see if you can find a single policy initiative pursued in the last twelve months. You won't. That discussion list (and others) are a wasteland bereft of any real work or attention to either registrant or non-registrant concerns. Those that are getting a free ride are offering up no more than a token amount of work and our region suffers as a consequence. If you look at the track record of the SSAC, you can point to a number of significant achievements -- documents on timely issues emerge on a frequent basis. Since LA we have seen no less than five serious documents prepared: on WHOIS and spamming, on fast-flux, on front-running, on DNSSEC. Where is the ALAC equivalent? Where is the well-considered advice? Perhaps some consider waiting until the last day of the JPA comment period before soliciting advice from constituent orgs to be an appropriate way of handling things... I don't... but it demonstrates how the ALAC currently handles things -- irresponsibly and at the last minute. This is no longer acceptable. After six years of this BS so far, how much longer can we patiently sit back listening to the refrain that "these are new people and we have to give them time"? The structure is flawed and the current dynamic is failing to produce results. If our region is not to be protected in the midst of this morass, then we should scrap the ALAC in its entirety or arrive at a weighted formula that will serve to better protect our own interests. regards, Danny --- Michael Maranda <mm@michaelmaranda.net> wrote:
I am sympathetic to part of the argument here, but not the entirety. Namely, I dont see At Large as exclusively about those participating in domain registration market. The end-users (and potential end users) are the widest possible set (i.e. everybody) under at-large. How then does the math of apportionment break down then?
Nonetheless - organizing the concerns of those who do or might wish to register a domain - should be one of our goals. How best to achieve that? It's generally those who find themselves in an unfortunate situation that find themselves motivated to do something but with no obvious remedy. I assume some of the ALSs (perhaps a small few) may be documenting these complaints. I suggest that it would be a great service to have some sort of clearinghouse on complaints (if one is not in existence - and if one already does - make it globally useful) and use At-Large leverage to make it meaningful for end-users.
On Feb 17, 2008 10:58 AM, Danny Younger <dannyyounger@yahoo.com> wrote:
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.
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