[CCWG-ACCT] NTIA 2nd quarterly report to Congress

[Bruce Tonkin]

Hello All,

Attached is a report from NTIA to Congress, it includes the following text  related to the CCWG's work on accountability:

B. Enhancing ICANN Accountability

In addition to the IANA Stewardship Transition efforts, ICANN also launched a parallel process to enhance its accountability to the global Internet community and to strengthen its accountability mechanisms in the absence of a contractual relationship with NTIA.  The CCWG on Accountability, composed of appointed representatives from ICANN's Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs) and open to all interested parties as participants, is examining accountability mechanisms regarding the entirety of ICANN operations.   The CCWG charter identifies two work streams.   The first is to identify accountability measures that need to be in place before the IANA transition, and the second is to address accountability measures that should be adopted and implemented by ICANN in the longer term.   The CCWG identified four
distinct work areas: 

(1) overview of existing accountability mechanisms; 

(2) review of public comments filed in response to ICANN's proposed accountability process to categorize them as either Work Stream 1 or Work Stream 2 items; 

(3) review of accountability issues identified by the CWG; and 

(4) identification of contingencies or threat scenarios

On March 23 and 24, the CCWG on Accountability also conducted a face-to-face meeting in Istanbul. The CCWG focused primarily on the mechanisms for community empowerment and amendments to ICANN's Bylaws that will be required to implement those mechanisms.  Some of
these mechanisms could include barring the ICANN Board from unilaterally expanding ICANN's limited mission, opening ICANN-proposed budgets to amendment or disapproval from the ICANN community, and implementing a way to replace individual ICANN board members or the entire Board as a whole.   The CCWG agreed that further work is necessary to more clearly define the ICANN "community," as well as "community consensus" and how that can be reached.    

Agreement was reached that core elements of the current Affirmation of Commitments (AOC) between ICANN and NTIA should be incorporated into ICANN's Bylaws, as an appropriate means of ensuring that ICANN will be held to the commitments agreed to in the original AOC.   The CCWG also advanced its work on improving ICANN's review, redress, and reconsideration mechanisms, focusing primarily on changes needed in the current Independent Review Process (IRP).   Finally, the CCWG reviewed work to date on the specific "stress tests" that need to be agreed and implemented in conjunction with the IANA transition.   The CCWG is working towards publishing a draft
recommendation for public comment sometime in late April 2015.

These two multi-stakeholder processes - the IANA stewardship transition and enhancing ICANN accountability - are directly linked, and NTIA has repeatedly said that both sets of issues must be addressed before any transition takes place.  ICANN has indicated that it expects to receive both the ICG transition and CCWG accountability proposals at roughly the same time and that it will forward them promptly and without modification to NTIA.
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