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Proposed text for an ALAC statement on the CWG Report

First Second draft by Evan Leibovitch, Oct 21 17:30 UTC, modified during the community consultation conference call (Oct 21, 18:00 UTC)

The At-Large Community urges the Board to fully implement the consensus recommendations of the Cross-Constituency Working Group on issues of Morality and Public Order (MAPO) related to the creation of new To-Level Domains. This Working Group, nicknamed "Rec6" after the GNSO recommendation upon which MAPO objections were formed, has accomplished an unprecedented level of consensus across representatives of all of ICANN's primary stakeholder groups. The work of this committee was the very example of the bottom-up policy process that ICANN Rec 6 CWG. The work of this committee was the very example of the bottom-up process that ICANN claims to be its foundation.  We urge the Board to encourage the ongoing work of the Rec 6 CWG; we are confident that, given some reasonable extra time, outstanding issues that have not yet reached consensus may be resolved.   

At-Large has always been in general generally against the very principle of gTLD string objections based on content, though "morality and public order". However, we see the Rec 6 CWG recommendations as an effective compromise that addresses most of our worst concerns about abuse of MAPO-based objections. way to attend to the most pressing needs while addressing our  concerns about the existing implementation. We wholeheartedly concur with the recommendations in the report that achieved Full Consensus or Consensus.  Specifically, we wish to emphasize, as strongly as possible, our support for the CWG's consensus calls to:

• Completely eliminate the term "morality and public order"
• Replace the role and function of the Dispute Resolution Service Provider through the processes defined by recommendations 4 and 3 from the CWG Report (review to correlate to Report)
• Limit objection criteria to Limit objection criteria to specific principles of international law and treaty
• Eliminate Deny national law as a sole criteria for objection
• Resolve disputes of this nature early in the application process
• Require a super-majority of the Board to reject string applications based on these criteriaChannel government objections through a slightly modified version of the existing community objection processindividual government objections to be made either through the Community Objections Process or through one of the   ALAC and the GAC
• Enable the GAC and ALAC to submit objections through the Independent Objector
• Uphold a gTLD creation process that encourages "the true diversity of ideas, cultures and views on the Internet"

We are also committed to achieving consensus on those issues in which no resolution has yet been made, and encourage the continuation of the the CWG in these efforts. We believe that additional time in cross-community discussions would resolve them.  We strongly urge support of recommendation of 14.1, to create a "Rec6 6 Community Implementation Support Team" (Rec6 CIST) to provide input to ICANN Implementation Staff as they further refine implementation details  .

It is rewarding and noteworthy that these recommendations, in the main, closely resemble statements on the gTLD application process that were part of the declaration of the At-Large Summit held during the ICANN meeting of March 2009, which stated:
We emphatically call for the complete abolition of the class of objections based on morality and public order. We assert that ICANN has no business being in (or delegating) the role of comparing relative morality and conflicting human rights.
Abolishing the morality and public order class of objection will eliminate the risk to ICANN of bearing responsibility for delegating morality judgment to an inadequate DSRP.
Certain extreme forms of objectionable strings may be addressed through minormodifications to the ''Community'' class of objection. While we fully appreciate the motivation behind this class of objection, we cannot envision any application of itthat will result in fewer problems than its abolitionThese recommendations, in fact, closely resemble the MAPO-related comments on the gTLD application process that were presented to the Board and senior staff at the conclusion of the At-Large Summit.
In addition, we wish to explicitly call attention to an issue that received substantail substantial support but not consensus: that a super-majority of the Board should be required to reject string gTLD applications based on these criteria.

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