In my many years of being involved in ICANN, I have rarely seen my point of view so mischaracterised. The very subject line of this thread indicates IMO a significant lack of grasp of my core point and indeed a substantial mis-framing of the debate I had hoped to initiate.
Let me be clear: I am neither for improvement of nor scrapping Applicant Support.
My challenge is whether a non-registrant end-user interest exists in this either way, and whether ALAC has credibility to pass judgement on the program at all as part of its bylaw mandate. IMO, this is an issue of interest to other ICANN constituencies but the end-user constituency has no stake in how it is resolved. My response to "improve or scrap?" is "it doesn't matter".
That is the point I was making on last week's call, not that we change our opinion but that we simply withdraw and assert no opinion. The question at hand is not "is Applicant support worthwhile" but "do end users care if there is applicant support or not". Never once in the recent debate have I advocated that AS was inherently wrong. I just question our continued focus on a question that -- given the new facts and evidence at hand since the rollout of that gTLD round -- has demonstrated no positive or negative consequences for end users.
My advocacy here is for ALAC to be selective in addressing only issues in which end-users have a genuine stake in the outcomes. I assert that this issue (Applicant support) is only the first identified ALAC issue in which end users have no justification to claim interest. I have commented elsewhere on a second issue of this type, geoname TLDs, as chapter 2 of the theme of "not my circus, not my monkeys". They're not our fights, and we demean our credibility elsewhere when we assert otherwise.