On 2/7/07, John L <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

> If face to face meetings are not of use or import in these situations, by
> that logic I dont see why any ICANN or ICANN related meeting should be face
> to face.

ICANN, more than any other organization I have ever tried to deal with,
works primarily via informal contacts with the people who are in a
position of authority, the ICANN board and the permanent staff.  The point
of having a meeting is to schmooze with those people, and to a lesser
extent with the government officials to whom the board has to pay
attention, and with the paid formal or informal lobbyists who are better
at schmoozing them than we are.  The only time the ALAC meets is in
conjunction with an ICANN meeting, because there'd be no point otherwise.

There is doubly no point in a standalone NARALO meeting.  If people are
going to spend all that time and money, the only sensible time and place
to do so is when ICANN is meeting in Puerto Rico later this year, when you
can have a chance to get to know the people who matter.

> Face to Face meeting is critical at this juncture.

To do what?  As several people including me have said more than once, a
RALO isn't going to make anything happen that isn't going to happen
anyway.  If you think it's important to tell people about ICANN, you
should do so now, and not use the lack of a RALO as an excuse.  But see
the rest of this message first.

> I really dont think that ICANN/ICANN-ALAC mechanism or tools not being in
> place excuses the lack of such  activity.  Any number of the existing
> parties could have reached out for us (or the group here before some of our
> arrival) to start working together sooner towards our common mssion, let
> alone the actual formation of the RALO.

Right.  Why do you think that hasn't happened?  Except for Nick and Jacob,
both of whom only started working at ICANN recently, we're all unpaid
volunteers with day jobs doing something else.  Who do you think should
have been doing this work?  Why?

The reality is that most of what ICANN does is irrelevant to the vast
majority of Internet users.  My .aero domain is swell, but I don't think
the 99% of Internet users who have never heard of .aero are any worse off
for it.  There's a few things that matter, personal privacy issues like
WHOIS policy (for better or worse, as previously argued here), and perhaps
.XXX if you think it will make porn more or less available and you think
that's important.

Other than that, it's just arcana.  I happen to think that the new
ICANN-Verisign agreement that lets them raise the price of .COM domains
every year is bad policy due to the effect it has on other Internet
businesses, but for at-large users, it's a non-event.  The vast majority
will never register a domain; for the small minority that do, it'll mean
they pay $11/yr rather than $10/yr.  BFD.

There are all sorts of other issues related to the Internet, from spam and
phishing to broadband network neutrality to access for people in poor
countries (of which the NA region has none, only relatively poor parts of
rich countries.)  But you know what?  That's not what ICANN does, nor what
a RALO does.  Please, go read the first section of the ICANN bylaws, the
part that starts MISSION, and then tell us how relevant that mission is to
your members and other Internet users.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.