[bc-gnso] Nominating Committee election

[Rick Anderson]

Thanks for the election reminder, Gary, and thanks Ron Andruff and Marilyn Cade for nominating and seconding me.

I am delighted that we have two good candidates for the large business BC seat on the Nominating Committee, and encourage members to be sure exercise their vote for one or the other of us.

For my part I have been involved with ICANN for about five years, and have attended about a dozen Board meetings. I also serve as an elected director of CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registry Authority, the not-for-profit organization mandated by the Canadian Government to operate the .ca ccTLD. Beyond ICANN, I am Executive Vice President of Interborder Holdings, a multibillion-dollar private enterprise in financial services, mutual funds and real estate, with headquarters in Canada and operations in the USA, Germany, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong and Malaysia. 

I have also been quite involved in politics for over 30 years, including as a national campaign manager for the party currently in power in Canada, and have provided regular commentary on political affairs to major broadcast and print media outlets.

This is an important time for ICANN, and for the Business Constituency. The NomCom's role in recruiting the right people for the ICANN Board, and for other key ICANN bodies, is crucial. If you permit, I will touch on just three key topics for which I think reaching to recruit the right talent is particularly salient.

First, the post-JPA era is fraught with challenges. Most probably, none of the three ICANN "government accountability" options most commonly identified (continuing mandate from US DoC, no mandate from any government(s) at all, the unhappy morass of the ITU) completely fit the bill. As always with ICANN, what we are doing is unique. Evolving our multi-stakeholder consensus-based approach will be a major challenge over the next few years for the Board, and for the rest of the ICANN community, requiring the best minds we can find.

Second, the portfolio of IP issues have created an unhealthy dichotomy between IP rights and entrepreneurship, a Hobson's choice most of us in business do not wish to choose between. My firm operates dozens of websites in support of our various businesses in different parts of the world, and therefore has been pressed into hundreds of defensive registrations which are (as we all know) a major hassle to mange without error. It is tempting to say stop, already, and to try to freeze things as they are and save ourselves extra hassle. Yet, we value the Internet as a wide open place where creativity and entrepreneurship are moulding the most exciting developments in commerce and communications, reshaping the way we do business, inform and educate ourselves, interact socially, govern our countries, and be entertained. We in the business community cannot let the understandable and necessary urge to protect our rights strangle the entrepreneurship driving the evolution of the web; finding the right balance is very important.

Third, our own Business Constituency, in my view, is long overdue to change our ways. This group should be blossoming, with hundreds or thousands - not dozens - of business participants contributing to and learning about ICANN's important governance of the domain name world. Instead, we have let our constituency deteriorate into a comfortably-small clique, in which too few enterprises participate, and even fewer are genuinely engaged, or listened to. Some of our internal arguments border on the petty. 

More crucially, we have lost our distinctiveness. ICANN does not particularly need two IP constituencies, nor two registrar constituencies. Our external positioning has drifted from having constructive common cause with others of like mind into being a bit too replicative of other constituencies. Consequently the broader global business community does not yet have the engagement and voice and impact it should have with ICANN. Changing our own BC model of ICANN participation is pretty important to fixing that, yet for two years we have dragged our feet, stretching out a status quo which may be comfortable in certain ways but is not terribly effective.

The Nom Com has important work to do. Its Charter includes recruiting and appointing representatives not only to the ICANN Board - a major challenge - but also to ALAC, the GNSO Policy Council, and the ccNSO.
All of these bodies must be well-equipped with senior, experienced and able people. 

If you entrust me with your vote, I assure you I will do my best to see that this is the case.

Best wishes.

cheers/Rick 

Rick Anderson 
EVP, InterBorder Holdings Ltd 
email: randerson at interborder.ca 
cell: (403) 830-1798 


________________________________

From: owner-bc-gnso at icann.org 
To: BC gnso 
Sent: Thu Sep 17 07:45:17 2009
Subject: [bc-gnso] Nominating Committee election reminder 


Dear Members
 
Nominating Committee Large Business
 
A reminder that the voting period for this election closes at midnight in your time zone tomorrow, Friday 18 September. Principle contacts of membership organisations should return ballots to me before that time at the secretariat address.
 
Please let me know if you would like me to send you another ballot form.
 
Thank you to those members who have already voted.
 
Best wishes
Gary

 
 
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