[alac] ALAC position on VRSN settlement?

["John R Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxx>]

We need to figure out what the issues of most importance to the at large
community are.

To me, the most important is the loss of accountability and oversight.
There's no more external oversight of ICANN's budget, nor any meaningful
checks on Verisign.  (As the registrars pointed out, the "consensus
process" is new and untested.)

The second is the loss of control of personal data, with Verisign being
allowed to do whatever data mining they want.  As I read it, VRSN can sell
DNS traffic data about any .com domains it wants, e.g., traffic data on
pepsi.com to Coca Cola, or about democrats.com and other political sites
to the RNC or the CIA.

I dislike other parts of the agreement such as the price increase, but
these two strike me as the most important to at large.

I also have grave process concerns.  Most importantly, the ICANN staff has
a huge conflict of interest in this deal.  I don't think anyone is being
crooked, but since this deal would guarantee everyone's paychecks at ICANN
from now until forever, paid for by registrants, the interest of the staff
is opposed to that of registrants and rest of the community outside ICANN
itself. The board really needs to take advice from parties other than the
staff to represent the community's interest.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.