Alan and all, I agree with your thoughts here Alan, but doesn't really this get back to the proper viability of the GA? I believe it does. -----Original Message-----

From: Alan Greenberg <alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> Sent: Mar 22, 2008 11:22 AM To: 'At-Large' <alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [At-Large] PAST DEADLINE: GNSO Review

At 22/03/2008 12:52 PM, Roberto Gaetano wrote:

...

Alan,

...

No question that an opportunity for individual registrant to participate is a good thing (although one wonders how they could organize mobilize support, or afford ICANN participation, but that is not the question at hand).

The concern is that the proposal does not allow for representatives of the other trillion people who are not registrants to participate. I understand that there *may* be an opportunity to participate in working groups ("may" because it will depend on how the term stakeholders is interpreted). But if there is any value in participating in Council activities (and all of the other constituencies certainly seem to think that there is), then non-registrant users should as well.

Although I do agree in principle with you, I also believe that the "better" is the enemy of the "good". ICANN is 10 years old. Since the beginning there has been an attempt (failed so far) for individual registrants to build a constituency. We now have the choice: do we use this (tiny) window, or do we drop the opportunity waiting another 10 years for the situation to be ready for extending participation also to the non-registrant individuals? Nothing prevents in the future to create a non-registrant constituency, considering that one of the principles we have adopted in the GNSO Review was the flexibility, but to delay the first step in order to make a bigger step later might be a mistake, and might be missing an opportunity.

Just my 2c.

Cheers, Roberto

Roberto, I have highlighted one of your sentences that makes my point exactly. I want the ability to at some later time, when we perhaps have gotten our act better together, to form a non-registrant constituency.

To ALLOW this to happen, you need to define (in the proposed plan) the Non-commercial Registrant Stakeholders Group as simple the Non-commercial Stakeholders Group. By removing the "Registrant" from its definition, you allow, at some future time, for a user-type constituency to form as one of the sub-groups of this stakeholder group. By defining it as a "Registrant" stakeholders group, you are implicitly saying that its component constituencies are all registrant groups of some form. By removing it, you allow potentially all sorts of interested parties (not only users) to participate. In my mind, this increases flexibility (which you confirm was a target outcome) and I don't see what is lost.

No thing I said was meant to imply a delay.

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