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.