Advice to the Board on the GAC Avice from Beijing on the new gTLD program

["Andrew A. Adams" <aaa@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The GAC had ample time between 2005-2011 to raise these issues. The fact that 
they were not raised during the very long multistakeholder process of 
carefully crafting a consensus on the new gTLD program approach shows that 
these issues are insufficiently important to a broad range of countries to be 
taken seriously by the board. In particular the inclusion of words such as 
wine, islam and patagonia in a single list reflects simply the capture of the 
GAC by small groups of special interests with no coherent principles on which 
to object, merely a set of individual concerns which should not be given 
significant weight when set against the long negotiation and discussion 
process which resulted in the current process. That current process includes 
significant mechanisms for individual objections to be filed and the groups 
with specific objections should use those pre-defined mechanisms to file 
objections to particular strings. THe board should resist attempt to undermin 
the multistakeholder model of ICANN governance by allowing one group to make 
radical last-minute demands on specific issues, having been captured by a 
bevy of special interests. While the Board is required to give due 
consideration to GAC advice my suggestion is that when that advice represents 
nothing more than an attempt to bypass ICANN's regular governance processes 
on behalf of special interests, then the consideration should lead to a clear 
and unambiguous rejection of both the grounds and the content of this advice.



-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa@xxxxxxxxxxx
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/