Bill: I wanted to share with you and the GNSO Council List Barbara Clay's note on this article. Regards, David ========================================================================= Barbara Ann Clay - VP Marketing & Communications The Reuters story, based on an interview with Rod which I attended, doesn¹t capture what he actually said and we have protested to the journalist and to his editor. The journalist asked what changes could come in the context of the Affirmation of Commitments, and Rod said he would not speculate. He then asked if ICANN would ever cede authority to a UN body or a G12 type group. Rod responded that this would be hard to imagine, but that ³it would be up to the [ICANN] community to decide². He then said that his role is to run the staff and lead the organization, and not to say what ICANN¹s stakeholder groups will decide in the future. That part of his answer is not in the story and without it, the article leaves the incorrect impression that Rod stated active opposition to a UN ³takeover², a subject on which he remained studiously neutral in the interview. He did not ³caution² or ³warn² anyone on this or any other subject. In my protest, I stated that the problem is not just that any decision on this would not be in Rod¹s hands. It is that ICANN has a bottom-up decision-making structure that Rod respects; that is why he stressed that ³it¹s up to the community to decide² and laid out his exact and limited role as leader of the organization. So while the quotes that appear in the article are - strictly speaking - accurate, the headline and the terms ³warns² and ³cautioned² considerably overstate his comments and the article does not correctly reflect what he said. ========================================================================== On 5/27/10 11:56 AM, "William Drake" <william.drake@graduateinstitute.ch> wrote:
Hi,
This is relevant to the thread about whether to discuss ICANN's strategic response to global Internet governance debates at the Council-Board dinner. In light of all that that has gone on over the past few years and the continuing discontent of a majority of governments with ICANN's constitutional structure, is it enough to simply argue that any departure from the status quo would make ICANN less "nimble"?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/icann-head-warns-against-putt... g-internet-addresses-under-un-control/article1579820/
David A. Olive Vice President, Policy Development ICANN Office: 310.578.8617 Cell: 202.341.3611