[CPWG] Calif. AG mentions ALAC advice in note to ICANN re: PIR

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Fri, 8 May 2020 at 10:50, Roberto Gaetano <roberto_gaetano at hotmail.com>
wrote:


> The second point is that I was a strong supporter - actually, I think that
> I was even the proposer, but I may be wrong - of the option of not opposing
> the sale but asking for some safeguards. The reason why I took this
> position is explained at length in the archives, but can be summarised in
> the belief that we would not have the strength to force the ICANN Board to
> deny the transaction, also in consideration of the fact that I was assuming
> that such denial would have brought a huge lawsuit to ICANN. I remain still
> convinced that, without the intervention of the CA-AG, who basically has
> shielded ICANN against a lawsuit, the Board would have decided differently.


You may well be correct. By I find the rationale truly puzzling. To propose
an inferior solution because you don't think the superior one would be
adopted? Is our role to tell ICANN what end-users want/need, or to tell
ICANN what we think it wants to hear?

But how do you know what ICANN wants to hear? I have heard otherwise, that
the Board may well have rejected the sale even without the California AG;
having ALAC supporting rejection might have pushed it over the top. We'll
never know.

What we DO know is the the CA AG stepped in to assert the public interest,
at least in part because ALAC would not. More detail in a followup email

- Evan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/cpwg/attachments/20200508/32794f07/attachment.html>