While Adam seems to be comfortable with one or two pages describing an issue, I am not. The ALAC is an Advisory Committee to the ICANN Board. It has a primary responsibility: to engage in fact-finding, and to deliver recommendations based upon those findings to the Board. Review the record of the SSAC, an Advisory Committee that takes its responsibilities seriously. Twenty papers produced in the last five years with up to 85 pages of commentary on a single topic. Look at the GNSO. If the GNSO can produce 100+ page tomes articulating and documenting the scope of policy discussions on any given area, be it WHOIS or new gTLDs, and if they can devote years in pursuit of finding consensus on policy matters, then I find it inexcusable that this Advisory Committee should think in terms of unsupported Statements that are a few paragraphs or pages in length. This is not what a massive budget extending into the hundreds of thousands of dollars is supposed to be producing. It is not sufficient to merely accept your free passage to ICANN sessions three times a year and then offer up nothing more than banalities. Do you realize how many full-time professional policy consultants could have been hired with the funds that have gone into this rathole? At the very least consultants produce work-product that can properly inform and guide the community. What will the ALAC produce? Where is the return on investment? Where is ALAC member participation in policy initiatives? ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better Globetrotter. Get better travel answers from someone who knows. Yahoo! Answers - Check it out. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545469