Comments on Non-Commercial SG charter

["S. Subbiah" <subbiah@xxxxxxxxx>]

The world of Internet users is counting on entities like ICANN to 
counterbalance the weight and might of commercial entities that run the 
Internet and keep it going. Important as these may be, the voices of the 
end-users and the non-commercial community must be heard and seen to be 
heard.
I state the following in my own personal capacity as a co-inventor of 
modern IDN a decade ago. In that capacity, I suspect I also speak for 
many if not most of those in the IDN community (commercial or 
non-commercial) from the actual regional locales (as opposed to 
primarily Western/ASCII corporations that have a commercial interest in 
IDN names). 

In the past few years the non-commercial constituency in its current 
form as the NCUC, has been the only champion within GNSO (and perhaps 
even broadly ICANN) for those whose voices cannot be heard at ICANN via 
the various narrowly focused other GNSO constituencies mostly populated 
by Western corporations with vested interests. While such narrow-topic 
constituencies may well and rightly serve their constituents corporate 
purposes, the NCUC has been left with speaking for everyone else as an 
umbrella. This has indeed been the case with many disenfranchised - 
financially or linguistically or culturally - from the IDN community 
from many parts of the world. Over the years, in the absence of any 
interest from the other GNSO constituencies in serving the interests of 
those from the IDN-needy regions, it has been NCUC that has consistently 
spoken up and pointed out the many injustices in the ICANN process to 
deploy/delay IDNs on behalf of the people it will affect most. This is 
unequivocally on record - check ICANN archives and minutes.
By the IDN example alone, a strong NCSG is a necessary bulwark against 
the natural tendencies of an otherwise unfettered commercial agenda. 
particularly within an organization like ICANN that is non-profit and 
whose mission is stated to be for the public good.
Every thing I have read thus far while following the whole bottom-up 
year-long,  non-commercial charter development process with full 
email-archived debate  (a far cry from the last-minute 2-pager charter 
probably written over a beer that the Commercial Group seems to have 
come up with) and the current quick and fairly unceremonious "gutting 
and dismantling" of their work suggests that such overturning/gutting of 
their main elements will necessarily make the non-commercial group
unable to serve the public in the capacity so badly needed. One could 
have legitimately argued that corporate interests/lawyers  have taken 
over ICANN for quite some time (just follow the money as many would say) 
even with the current NCUC in place to push back. With the gutting of 
the proposed NC charter the situation will undoubtedly strengthen the 
hand of the corporate group further within ICANN.
I strongly suggest that ICANN, if needs be tinker at the edges of the 
proposed draft but in the main approve the charter more or less as is.
S. Subbiah
i-DNS.net