Hello All,
Agreed, it is an old, important issue that is still unresolved and must be resolved before the GNSO restructure can take place.
It is certainly worth considering further. Membership of the registry and registrar constituency has generally been very clear - based on the legal entity being a contracted party with ICANN as either a TLD manager or a gTLD registrar. This information is publicly available on the ICANN website. There are other parties involved in the process of the domain name value chain. E.g (1) Consultants - there are many consultants and lawyers that provide services to the members of the registry and registrar constituency or members of other constituencies - these consultants and lawyers can be split across the business constituency and the IP constituency. (2) Internet Service Providers - while some purely provide connectivity - many of these companies have moved into value added services - and many are significant suppliers of domain names (either as accredited registrars, or as resellers of accredited registrars). (3) Other domain name resellers - e.g portals (e.g Yahoo), software companies (e.g Microsoft), search engines (e.g Google), web hosting companies - there are wide range of domain name resellers. Some of thee are very large companies and supply large volumes (e.g over 100,000 names) of domain names to their customers. At different times staff or consultants/external lawyers of these companies have been members of registrar, business constituency or IP constituency. (4) Domainers - these companies operate a portfolio of domain names - they often do not supply domain name registration services to other parties - but may sell some of their domain name licences from time-to-time. They may be accredited registrars (usually to get the lowest possible wholesale price for domains), or may simply be resellers. Where they are not registrars - it is not clear what constituency that should be members of. They would probably consider themselves to be members of the business constituency - as they are "business users" of domain names (earn revenue from advertising, or from the future sale of the domain name licence), and not involved in supplying domain name registration services to third parties. For consultants or lawyers it is often complex as they may have some customers/clients that are associated with the domain name supply industry and some customers/clients that are not. In many cases large companies have different departments (or legal subsidiaries) - e.g a legal department, network connectivity department, domains/hosting department - and it can be convenient to have staff members of different departments/subsidiaries to join different constituencies (e.g Registrar, ISP constituency, IP constituency). So do you make the decision on the basis of the corporate entity (could be operating across multiple area of interest in the GNSO), or on the basis of the individual (may work for a particular department of a corporate, or may work for many clients). Ultimately this will probably be hard to resolve. Perhaps the best to hope for is that members of constituencies clearly define their potential conflicts of interest. This could be at a corporate level and at an individual level (e.g identify clients involved in different constituencies if a consultant). It would also be useful to require this to happen at the beginning of establishing working groups (not as a method of exclusion - but to clearly state potential conflicts). The reality is that many members of the GNSO community can potentially participate in multiple roles. Trying to create very tight exclusion rules (e.g you can be a member of constituency x - provided you have no other relationship with any member of another constituency) may unnecessarily restrict participation. Regards, Bruce Tonkin