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Rejecting the staff/SIC-imposed charter
- To: "gnso-stakeholder-charters@xxxxxxxxx" <gnso-stakeholder-charters@xxxxxxxxx>
- Subject: Rejecting the staff/SIC-imposed charter
- From: Milton L Mueller <mueller@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:49:31 -0400
The staff/SIC-prepared NCSG charter is clearly the product of a one-way, top
down process. It was drafted by the staff and does not reflect any of the
discussions or comments provided by noncommercial organizations on the best way
to structure their new stakeholder group. Rather, it is a disgraceful attempt
to manipulate the GNSO politically. The apparent purpose of the staff/SIC
decisions about the NCSG charter is to weaken noncommercial stakeholders
generally and to punish NCUC specifically, as a way of pandering to the
Commercial Stakeholder groups that are upset about the balanced representation
the new GNSO is supposed to provide. We have been told directly by Board
members that this is the case.
Thus the so-called "NCSG charter" up for comment now has no legitimacy and
should be rejected completely. ICANN should allow the noncommercial entities
themselves to work out an acceptable draft on their own.
To understand what a breach of procedure this is, we need to retrace the
process that led to it.
In the initial public comment period, there were two competing NCSG charters:
the one proposed by NCUC and the other proposed by CP80, the pro-censorship
organization. The CP80 model was designed to give constituency leaders, and
especially its own proposed Cybersafety Constituency, the power to allocate
council seats. CP80 (and apparently, staff) wanted to take the power to select
GNSO Council representatives away from the membership and instead encourage
small factions to form and narrow points of view to be represented. The NCUC
proposal, gave all the organizations and individuals in the NCSG an equal vote
and made sure that Council representatives had broad support across the entire
Stakeholder Group. It did, however, allow smaller interest groups to form and
be represented on the Policy Committee.
Noncommercial representatives in NCUC spent hours on the phone with staff
discussing the issues surrounding the NCSG charter. It became evident that the
staff had instructions to push the outcome in a certain way, toward a model
that assigned council seats based on constituencies. Nevertheless, we patiently
and repeatedly explained why the constituency-based model will not work. The
staff was unable to answer our arguments, even conceding, privately, that we
had very strong points which needed to be taken into consideration. Staff was
specifically asked whether the model we proposed was inconsistent with the
Board Governance Committee recommendations and was told that it was not.
In the first round of public comments, dozens of noncommercial organizations
commented in favor of the NCUC draft. The outpouring of support for the NCSG
charter proposed by NCUC was truly impressive in its scope, involving nearly 80
organizations and individuals from all world regions. By way of contrast, the
competing NCSG draft from CP80 received a grand total of two comments in its
favor; both were sent by individuals from...CP80. Moreover, during the same
period the membership of NCUC increased by 60%, in conformity with the Board
Governance Committee's mandate to increase the size and scope of noncommercial
representation in ICANN.
The results of the first public comment round proves how vibrant the
noncommercial stakeholder group can be, and how strongly the relevant community
of noncommercial stakeholders supports an integrated NCSG and rejects the
fragmented, constituency-based and easily-captured executive committee
structure the staff has proposed now. However, that obviously had no effect on
the staff-drafted NCSG charter.
Public comment periods are supposed to be about listening and adapting. After
not only ignoring but actively defying the public will in the first round, the
idea that ICANN is now asking for public comment on this bastardized product of
executive fiat only adds insult to injury. ICANN has made it clear that it does
not care what the public says, that it has hidden agendas and is only going
through the motions in order to conform to some procedural requirements. Why
should noncommercial organizations and individuals produce comments on your
draft when it is obvious that such comments make absolutely no difference to
what will be done?
I comment here simply to expose this process for the farce that it is.
Dr. Milton Mueller
Professor, Syracuse University
XS4All Professor, Technology University of Delft
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