The door is always open and I still hope that they will join At-Large someday. But they will have to play by the rules of consensus, like all of us. Sometimes we want something but the majority does not. It's frustrating sometimes, but that's the name of the game. Warm regards,
In other words: "Please don't practice armchair quarterbacking, if you do not like the way the ICANN policies are going, join your respective community and participate in the consensus building process!" I agree that this is what the critics should do, however, it costs hours upon hours of unpaid voluntary work to participate in the process, but only a few minutes to publicly criticize the result. Due to this simple arithmetic of cost vs. benefit, ICANN will always have to deal with uninformed detractors on any decision that is made, no matter how well thought-out and well debated the decision is.
That was my point exactly when I spoke with Farber; and yet, there is total ignorance of the bottom-up model outside of ICANN, there is a general accusation that At-Large just pays lip service to ICANN and that ICANN is just controlled entirely by contracted parties wishing to make a quick buck through a "domain protection racket", a term I personally find offensive. Real life "protection rackets" are a completely different ballgame involving physical threats.
Picturing the "domain protection racket and borrowing from Monty Python: "You have a nice brand there, we wouldn't want anything to happen to it, do we? You ought to be careful, 'cos things break, don't they? Domain names, eh? Be a shame if someone was to set fire to them..." -- Best regards, Volker A. Greimann