Roberto Gaetano wrote:
My only point was that by design the Ombudsman has latitude in the use of his/her budget, once this budget is decided. In simple words, control by the Board of the way the Ombudsman spends money would be limiting the independence of the Ombudsman's Office.
Suppose, by way of hypothetical example, that the ombudsman were to publish a document that says that men are more deserving of top level domains than women. I believe that you would agree that such a publication would be far beyond the purview of the ombudsman, that it suggests an impermissible bias, and that the board would be be strongly motivated to apply corrective measures. What the ombudsman has done though his publication of an ICANN rule of political correctness is to indicate a bias in favor of those who speak with flowers over those who use hard words. That suggests a bias in his office against those who use direct terms and eschew diplomatic indirection. His document also suggests a bias against those who argue for their own interests or who miss meetings. The board has every reason to repudiate that kind of appearance of bias and to refuse to pay for the creation and publication of what amounts to a book of etiquette, particularly when that book is published by one who is likely to base decisions on whether that etiquette is followed. The current office of the ombudsman has done little to fill the gap that was created when ICANN erased elected directors, positions that are far better equipped and more solidly legally empowered to redress ICANN errors than any ombudsman. Over the last few years the number of ICANN errors that have been redressed through board member intervention has vastly outnumbered the instances of the ombudsman doing anything at all. Witness, for example the RegisterFly disaster. What I am getting at is this - we, the community of internet users, paid dearly when elected board seats were lost. We received scant compensating value in the emasculated office of the ombudsman. In the old US system of equity there was a maxim: "For every wrong there is a remedy." Under the ICANN ombudsman that maxim seems to have been corrupted into "For every wrong there is a verbose excuse." I would recommend the following as an apt and rather humorous text that describes a fictional English body that seems to have the same institutional goal as ICANN's ombudsman: http://www.cavebear.com/archive/cavebear/containing_the_whole_science_of_gov... --karl--