This may sound strange coming from me but: What about developing stronger joint agendas with the NCSG. There are more than a hundred people in there now, a lot of new blood -- it's not just the handful of usual suspects. Some of the intellectual divides are starting to fall as well regards the anonymity-uber-alles ideology. And there is the new NPOC, which is what the consumer constituency could have been, if it had been given real board support and its board-appointed overseer had been given a mandate like Debbie Hughes was, rather than noodling for three years about what a consumer is. I mean, check out their freakin' web site: http://www.npoc.org/ It's a thing of beauty! And they have some substantial membership. I would recommend for Dakar getting Debbie Hughes, their chair, or someone from their leadership over to talk about issues [and NOT GNSO structure]. What the NPOC as an ally can offer us, at least at the GNSO level, is a vector into consumer issues where they intersect with non-profits and business. Allow me to explain: in my view, there is some commonality of issues between consumers, i.e. regular human beings who we are supposed to represent, and business, and non-profit operations. That commonality is: concern about domain name abuse; concern about cybersquatting and fraud (a major issue for the Red Cross is trademark protection, to prevent people being defrauded in developing countries by phony Red Cross sites), fast-flux and other things we are commonly told by the contracted parties are "outside ICANN's scope" [you should all understand by now that's code for: threatens to mess with someone's revenue stream]. The more we could get at-large aligned with the GAC and the NCSG or NPOC on certain issues, the more chance at-large has to be taken more seriously and not viewed as some appendage created by ICANN to conjure the illusion of multi-stakeholder participation. By the way, given my history, the person to do that is not me. At least not from the front. -----Original Message-----
From: "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> Sent: Sep 8, 2011 9:09 AM To: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <ocl@gih.com> Cc: NA Discuss <na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] FW: The European Commission Papers on ICANN
The question I therefore ask you and all of the cynics is, "how do we change that"?
From within the ALAC? We can't. We have no influence other than at the margins.
You'll notice the ALAC recently released a joint statement with the GAC.
Yup, the GAC has actual influence. To the extent we can nudge them, that would be useful.
I remain convinced that we have more resources than any other constituency in ICANN due to our extraordinary membership. We are the world.
Not to be unduly crass, but we have no budget. In all the consituencies that matter, people get paid to lobby ICANN.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly ------ NA-Discuss mailing list NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss
Visit the NARALO online at http://www.naralo.org ------