From: Robin Gross <robin@ipjustice.org> Date: April 7, 2009 8:55:46 AM PDT To: liaison6c <liaison6c@gnso.icann.org> Cc: liaison6c <liaison6c@gnso.icann.org>, Council GNSO <council@gnso.icann.org
, Denise Michel <denise.michel@icann.org> Subject: Re: Draft Revisions to the ICANN Bylaws Relating to GNSO Restructure
Dear Denise, We appreciate your attempt to elaborate on the position you've taken, but in doing so you reinforce the view that you are no longer operating as a facilitator of the GNSO reform process, but rather as a dedicated advocate of a particular position. I really don't understand why you are involved in this discussion at this level. It is not your job to make policy decisions for the Board and it is not our task to convince you personally of the desirability of a particular GNSO structure. It is rather an issue to be settled among the stakeholders themselves and by the Board. The Board has proposals before it. Let the Board decide whether it likes them or not. Despite the length of your response, its substance can be boiled down into two simple points: 1) The GNSO Improvements Report indicates that constituencies should remain an important part of the reformed GNSO; 2) The Board has not given you specific instructions to change the assignment of Council seats to constituencies. Both of those points are true, yet neither justifies the position you are taking. 1) Constituencies can be an important and even central part of the GNSO process without being guaranteed a specific number of Council seats. Please note that the NCSG charter we submitted actually makes it easier to form constituencies - precisely because it detaches them from Council seat assignments. So in that respect, our proposal is more in line with the GNSO Improvement Report's references to "expanding Constituency involvement" and to "evening the playing field" among constituencies. 2) The absence of specific instructions applies in both directions. We recognize that the Board has not told you to do what we are proposing. But we also know that the position we are advocating is not ruled out by the GNSO Improvements Report, either. This means is it is an open issue. We should debate it and discuss it among ourselves, on the merits. We have had many discussions with Board members and none of them have suggested that what we are proposing is inconsistent with the GNSO Improvements principles. It is interesting that your responses keep ignoring the many, obvious problems that are posed by hardwiring Council seats to Constituencies. These include: the difficulty of achieving balanced geographic representation; the problem that occurs when the number of constituencies exceeds the number of seats; the fact that forming new constituencies becomes a zero-sum game that obstructs consensus. That is not an exhaustive list. Also, you seem not to understand a critical part of the BGC's recommendations, which is that working groups - not the Council - will formulate policy. It is the development of consensus in WGs - not the representation of votes in a legislative process - that is the objective of the Board's reforms. We hope you will be able to recognize these problems, and allow the stakeholder groups and the board the opportunity to work through the issues in the "bottom up" process we read about in so many ICANN press releases.. Thank you. Sincerely, Robin Gross, NCUC Chair on behalf of NCUC Executive Committee and GNSO Council: Norbert Klein Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza Mary Wong William Drake Carlos Afonso Horacio Cadiz Georg Greve Robert Guerra Dave Kissoondoyal *********************************************************** William J. Drake Senior Associate Centre for International Governance Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva, Switzerland william.drake@graduateinstitute.ch New book: Governing Global Electronic Networks, http://tinyurl.com/5mh9jj ***********************************************************