Good article. Exposes ICANN for what it is. regards joe baptista On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote:
Longtime advocate and NARALO member John Levine has written a concise and elequent piece< http://www.circleid.com/posts/20100508_the_real_issue_about_icann_and_xxx/
on the real problems behind ICANN's handling of .XXX. I don't think I've read anything that I could more recommend to someone working within ICANN's policy process.
In the context of this I must express my utter disgust at the way ALAC has let down its community on this issue. Its position on .XXX was "we don't care how you resolve it, but please do it quickly". Such a position agonises about the speed of the process, not how it was done nor in what direction to take it moving forward.
NARALO took a strong position in favour of accepting the application for .XXX, but ALAC rejected that for its own and left the NARALO statement dangling as an appendix rather than putting forth the divergent approaches within its own position. This is not only sad, but it is the first complete direliction of duty by ALAC that I've witnessed since I've become involved in ICANN.
I was told that ALAC members jumped on the part of the NARALO statement that many considered this to be a freedom of speech issue, and it seemed that this was a convenient excuse to ignore all of the other valid reasons why ALAC should have demanded ICANN follow its own rules and allow the domain. I understand that the term "freedom of speech" is a non-starter in many places around the world, and ALAC is a global body. But striking that element, there are the fundamental points that: 1) The role of governing content lies with the registry, not ICANN 2) Porn will exist on the Internet, in much the same amount, with or without .XXX 3) XXX is a euphemism anyway (amongst other things it's the name of beers in Canada and Australia, a 2002 non-porn action movie, and an American brand of soda) 4) (MOST IMPORTANTLY) ICM did everything that ICANN asked it to and played by the rules
By not taking ICANN to task for its treatment of ICM, ALAC has shirked its responsibility to hold ICANN accountable for not following its own painfully-crafted rules, in one of the few really important things it's mandated to do.
The new Accountability and Transparency working group -- of which Cheryl is the lone voice for the billions of Internet users -- met this past week amidst much hype. The ALAC Skype chat vacuumed in anyone with a skype account whose name anyone knew, willing or not, even many who'd never spend a nanosecond working with At-Large before. (I received private Skype messages from people asking "why the hell am I here"). Everyone was being asked to hang on every word of the meeting audio stream as if ICANN's very existence depended upon it. This was a lurking blitz of unprecedented proportion -- if only such engagement happened for ALAC processes!
Yet I have serious concerns that it's all for show.
We have many, many examples in our own experiences of how ICANN just tends to go its own way -- it finds a constituency that agrees with what it wanted to do and latches on to that. How many of the clear and specific requests coming out of the At-Large Summit have been responded to at all, let alone in a manner that satisfies the needs of ICANN's global community of users? Who has followed up? Is there any reason to believe that ICANN will do anything besides look at the list of recommendations of this over-hyped A&T committee, loudly enable the ones that don't really affect operations, while briefly acknowledging -- and then mangling or deferring or silently forgetting about -- the others?
There have been accusations that ICANN staff drives the show and generally does what it wants regardless of public good. Many of these accusations have merit. But the ICANN Board has the ability to reign this in and has never had the courage to do so. So I don't fully blame staff for just doing what it can get away with.
ALAC had, for one brief moment here, the chance to stand up and beg the ICANN Board to show such courage for once -- instead it offered a(nother) free pass, a bland motion that begs to be ignored. It's a tacit statement that not only does ICANN have nothing to to atone for in breaking its own rules, but that it did nothing wrong. One comment on the wiki even admonished against "rushing into a pro-.XXX stance". All ALAC seems to care about is that the mess -- regardless of how it got there or how it's resolved -- is cleaned up quickly.
It's one thing for ICANN to ignore its community -- sometimes I just think of that as "ICANN being ICANN". But it's truly distressing when ALAC mimics the ICANN Board by itself showing cowardice in the face of challenge.
We're better than that, I like to think.
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