Daniel, All, Reviewing the slides provided by ICANN Legal (https://community.icann.org/display/CWGONGAP/Legal+and+Fiduciary+Constrai nts+Related+Materials?preview=/64073737/64073741/DT%20for%20Auction%20Proc eeds%20-%20CCWG%20Legal%20Presentation.pdf ) on slide 13, it seems that the statement that "lobbying is a forbidden activity for ICANN" is not entirely accurate. The slide recognizes that ICANN engages in some lobbying activities (more about it is disclosed here : https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/lobbying-disclosures-contributions-2 015-11-18-en) and mentions a requirement from our CCWG Charter against providing funds in support of attemps to influence legislation. The relevant section of our Charter is quoted below, from the "scope" section (https://community.icann.org/display/CWGONGAP/CCWG+Charter) : "To align with requirements imposed to maintain ICANNs U.S. tax exempt status, the CCWG must include a limitation that funds must not be used to support political activity/intervening in a political campaing public office[2] or attempts to influence legislation[3]. The definitions of the limitations that are imposed to meet U.S. tax requirements must be applied across all applicants, and not only those from or intending to use the funds within the U.S. These requirements will apply to comparable activities across any location where applicants are located or intend to use the funds." So my interpretation would be that organizations who engage in lobbying activities (such as the examples given by Daniel) would not be ruled out as a matter of principle, but should commit and ensure that any funds they would receive from the ICANN Auction Proceeds would not be used in lobbying or political funding activities. Would that be correct ? Best, Mathieu -----Message d'origine----- De : ccwg-auctionproceeds-bounces@icann.org [mailto:ccwg-auctionproceeds-bounces@icann.org] De la part de Daniel Dardailler Envoyé : jeudi 23 mars 2017 18:54 À : ccwg-auctionproceeds@icann.org Objet : [Ccwg-auctionproceeds] Wrt (not) lobbying Hello all In the legal slides, lobbying is pointed out as a forbidden activity for ICANN and is loosely defined as "attempts to influence legislation". I'd like to understand exactly what that means. For instance, both IETF and W3C have been active in various European official fora (parliament, commission, national governments) to change the old EU legislation wrt public procurement so that procurers be allowed to reference our standards directly (e.g. IPV6 or HTML). This is clearly about legislation, and it's more than an attempt, since we eventually succeeded (look for the EU Multistakeholder Platform for details). Is this sort of policy oriented work to make the Internet and the Web technologies more "official", and therefore better deployed, without fragmentation, considered lobbying ? Let's take another example. Suppose that some governments want to pass a brain-damaged legislation related to IP routing. Shouldn't ICANN be allowed to inform the public authority about the risks of doing just that ? If ICANN doesn't do it, who will ? This is not a rhetorical case, every year or so, I get alerted by some advocacy groups that "deep linking" is about to become illegal somewhere on the planet (a deep link is just a link to a page "inside" another site, bypassing their "home" page) in order to protect some publisher business. Such an approach would undermine a fundamental piece of the Web architecture: freedom to link anywhere, and if we, the technical community, don't explain that point to policy makers, who will ? There are dozens of public policy topics that are directly related to the Internet and the Web. They are all technical in nature of course and they only exist because of the net, because of us. As it happens, these topics are not very "hot" in the technical community, mostly because of their "policy/legal" flavor (not geek enough), so it's already difficult to find resources to represent our point-of-view. My point is: at this point in time in Internet history, with lots of legislators trying to control the net without much of a clue of how things work, I think it would be a strategic mistake from the Internet technical community to self-censored itself in these debates. _______________________________________________ Ccwg-auctionproceeds mailing list Ccwg-auctionproceeds@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/ccwg-auctionproceeds