Meeting of the ALAC/GAC leaderships, 6 October 2017
The agenda, as proposed by the GAC:
- IGO Protections
- Country and Territory Names/New gTLDs Subsequent Procedures – Work Team 5
- GDPR
- Lowering Barriers to Participation Between Communities
- SO/AC Chairs Meeting Prep and Insights for ICANN60
- IGO Protections
Discussion about whether there had been an attempt to put IGO names on the same footing as trademarks, or rather just use the same type of mechanims, as appropriate, to both. - Country and terrirory Names/New gTLDs Subsequent Procedures – Work Team 5
ALAC intends to participate in WS5, not bound by the result. GAC has the same intention. The result has to be accepted by all, otherwise things will remain the same. If voting is needed, it should be balanced among constituencies, ie. it should not matter whether these are represented by different numbers of individuals. But since there are different opinions among ALAC and GAC, these have to be balanced first inside the constituence. Since representatives into WS5 are not formally appointed, there are concerns about how actively they will participate. These concerns can probably be addressed within both communties, even without a formal appointments process from the outside.
There was a discussion on closed generics, where there are opinions for solving conflicts either ex ante or ex post. The latter is clearly disadvantageous for smaller players that can't afford fighting legal battles. On the other hand, these is a difference between granting .books t a global bookseller and .disaster to the Red Cross. In recent discussions on the topic, Alan had seen a little bit of hope that in some of these questions might be solved in a way acceptable to all. According to Thomas, ALAC and GAC have a shared interest regardig closed generics, so that they will be treated with the Global Public Interest in mind. This aspect will be included in the GAC deliberations. Alan welcomed this, noting that the engagement of GAC members in these discussion will increase the change of achieving an acceptable result. The challenge now is to put words in the Application Guidebook to give guidence on what GPI is and how it can be measured.
Further on the topic of new gTLD's, Yrjö noted that the UK GAC representative Mark Carwell will participate in the next ALAC meeting for a discussion of Community Based Applications, which is of common interest to the GAC and ALAC. - GDPR
Discussion on how to solve, even on an interim basis, the situation where the present Whois will be in breach of the European General Data Protection Regulation from May 2018. If nothing happens, Contracted Parties will probably strip Whois of all contact information, which is bad news for those trying to fight malicious activities. According to Thomas, the solution envisaged by the GAC and its Public Safety Working Group is that the data will be there, with tiered access. Alan pointed out that the present Whois doesn't allow tiered access, and RDS will not be ready on time. The obvious interim solution would be a waiver, but the Data Commissioners are not willing to promise it ahead of time. - Lowering Barriers to Participation Between Communities
Thomas explained that the intention was to make issues better understood and information about them found more easily, which is an old problem, but GAC has now resolved to do something about it, together with other constituencies. ALAC representatives couldn't agree more, an in the ensuing discussion, they agreed to try to reach agreement on a joint statement, at ICANN60 or after it. Yrjö volunteered to make the first draft (below), which summarizes the discussion, presents the problems at different levels and proposes solutions.Draft statement on informed participation
One of ICANN’s core values is to seek and support “broad, informed participation reflecting the functional, geographic, and cultural diversity of the Internet at all levels of policy development and decision-making to ensure that the bottom-up, multistakeholder policy development process is used to ascertain the global public interest and that those processes are accountable and transparent” (Bylaws Section 1.2.c.ii)
Informed participation is, first of all, conditioned on the existence on and access to relevant information. ICANN today is an open and transparent organization that produces and publishes massive amounts of information about all aspects of its activities. But paradoxically, the sheer volume of the information has turned into a problem. The more information is available, the greater the need for a logical and user-friendly document management system. And the more complex the substance matter, the greater effort is needed to make issues understandable for interested non-experts.
The prevailing situation is especially challenging for stakeholders who are not employed to deal exclusively with ICANN-related issues, typically for end-user volunteers and government representatives. That is why the GAC and the ALAC are taking up the issue. Of course, improving the premises for informed participation would benefit all stakeholders of the ICANN community.
To redeem the problem, a multi-pronged approach is necessary. Bringing order to the document management system so that, eg., every document has a title and a reference number, identifies the author and indicates intended recipients, should be easy and could be considered “low-hanging fruit”.
More effort and strategic thinking will be needed in order re-focus ICANN’s communications on enabling informed participation of all stakeholders in the true sense of the core value cited above. At present, there is a wide gap between informing the general public via the website and newsletters, and feeding experts with extensive and complicated documents understandable only by them. For a non-expert stakeholder who wants be an informed participant, the former material is not very useful and the latter takes too much time and effort to be of use. If ICANN really wants to maximize informed participation, there should be an effort to arouse the interest from all stakeholder groups – almost a marketing approach, and to provide relevant information in understandable and concise form.
What are needed are summaries and synopses, infographs, videos and other innovative ways of presenting information - as were to some extent already used in preparing for the transition - so that a stakeholder will be able (a) to quickly determine if a particular issues is of concern to him/her and (b) if yes, to participate in the policy process easily and effectively, on equal footing with other stakeholders.
ICANN should now make a concerted effort to implement the promise of informed participation of all stakeholders that it has committed to as one of its core value
SO/AC Chairs Meeting Prep and Insights for ICANN60
Alan and Thomas agreed that the present system of selecting people to review teams by SO/AC Chairs is not working very well. There is also, at least as far as At Large is concerned, lack of well qualified volunteers. For ALAC, the problem is that every time we select old reliable people who know what they are talking about, we are heavily criticized for only selecting "ftriends" and not giving other a chance...
