Hello All, I would like to remind all the stakeholder groups to please complete their assignments by this Thursday’s call. As Chair I have tried to be sensitive to the Zoom burnout that is impacting most of the ICANN community. However, we are falling behind and that is a concern, especially after reading Kevin Murphy’s recent article <https://domainincite.com/27434-icann-hasnt-implemented-a-policy-since-2016> on the lack of policy implementation within ICANN over the past 6 years. In fact, I produced the following image below which I mocked up and now have as my desktop background. While I am not opposed to taking time to get to where we need to be, I am concerned that some groups have not been pulling their full weight. As noted above, I know that the two plus years with no face to face meetings is taking its toll, but we need to plow forward with our work. If we continue to fall behind in our work, I think we need to access whether we make the recommendation to Council to suspend/terminate this working group until a later time. This is not my preference as I personally believe that there is a problem that needs to be addressed based on my own professional and personal experience. I also believe that the numerous references to “accuracy” in the recent EU’s DNS Abuse Report is further evidence that there is work to be done in this area. I appreciate the time restrains that this Working Group and the broader ICANN multi-stakeholder model (MSM) places on everyone’s professional and personal lives. I am especially sensitive to those volunteers that are not employees of an ICANN contracting party. For these volunteers, the responsibilities of this Working Group go well above and beyond your other professional responsibilities. My concern, however, is that there has been a steady and continuing decline in the number of volunteers within the ICANN community willing to do the heavy MSM lifting. Unfortunately the likely outcome of this trajectory is an ICANN that looks more like a trade association, or worse a cartel. This is not a potential outcome that I find acceptable based upon the last twenty three years of trying to make this ICANN MSM experiment work. Looking forward to a productive call on Thursday. Best regards, Michael
