Draft: Revision 3

WHEREAS

• The At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) supports the introduction of new genertic Top-level Domains (gTLDs);
• Most of the problems identified by the At-Large Community in its Mexico City Summit declaration of February 2009 related to the new-gTLD program remain to be addressed;
• Insistent concerns expressed both by ICANN stakeholders and outside organizations indicate that law enforcement and public-protection measures in the current design of the gTLD program remain to be satisfactorally addressed;
• The ICANN Board has rejected the Joint Applicant Support Working Group (JAS) recommendations to reduce costs of new gTLD in developing economies independent of any fixed fund;
• The rejected JAS recommendation was actively supported by ICANN's three main public-interest communities (GAC, ALAC and NCSG) and had no active opposition from any single defined component of the ICANN multi-stakeholder community
• The absence of a staggered release schedule or a fixed timetable for future rounds severely inhibits ICANN's ability to correct errors and assess unintended consequences in the proposed application round;
• ICANN has still not convincingly demonstrated the end-user need or benefit of a simultaneous launch of hundreds of new TLDs;
• The history of ICANN's compliance regime gives serious doubt regarding its capacity to protect the interests of Internet end-users as it scales to cope with a massive expansion in the namespace;

RESOLVED THAT

• The ALAC conveys to the ICANN Board and community a deep concern about the possible harmful effect on Internet end-users of a single massive expansion of gTLDs;
• In the affirmation of the multi-stakeholder model and the community-driven process, the ALAC urges the ICANN Board to
  • Adopt the recommendations expressed in the ALAC Statement on the Preliminary Support Implementation Program published December 21 2011
  • Phase-in the introduction of new gTLDs gradually, releasing no more than 25 every three months and that each such release be comprised of at least 30% community, support-eligible, "geo-region" or IDN TLDs
  • Enable development of a community-devised process to monitor the progress of the releases;
  • Commit publicly to contain with due haste any and all elements of the application process demonstrated to cause or allow harm or confusion to registrants, Internet end-users or content/service providers
  • that the Board discuss with the ALAC any of the advice
    Engage with ALAC to discuss of the above advice considered unacceptable, and to produce a formal reply on the outcome of any such engagementwhich it finds it can't accept and requests a formal  reply from the Board on the outcome of any such 
    discussions.

Notes:

• Items marked in bold may be considered arbitrary values which are subject to review and consensus.
• The Summit declaration is available at http://www.atlarge.icann.org/files/atlarge/correspondence-05mar09-en.pdf
• The Preliminary Support Implementation Program published December 21 2011 is not yet listed on the ICANN correspondence page; a link will be provided as soon as it is available. Until then the document is available here

History:

A draft version of the first motion was submitted by Evan Leibovitch to the ALAC and NARALO email lists December 18.
In response to early comments, a slightly modified version of the motion was posted to this Wiki 

A second revision was created Dec 20 in reaction to community members who, while disagreeing strongly with elements of the gTLD program, believed that an actual halt or suspension of the program was ill-advised and that At-Large's main concerns about the scalability and possible end-user harms could be addressed by a combination of a staggered gTLD rollout combined with active community monitoring and ongoing program refinement.

A third revision was created Dec 21 in response to further comments, and the awareness that the ALAC had endorsed its gTLD working group's statement on ICANN's preliminary Support Implementation Program. This statement includes, among others, a recommendation to reconsider rejection of the fund-independent fee reduction proposed by the JAS.