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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> > _______________________________________________
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> > ALAC@atlarge-lists.icann.org
> >
> >
>
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> >
> > At-Large Official Site: http://www.alac.icann.org
> > ALAC Independent: http://www.icannalac.org
> >
>
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