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

Fri May 8 19:26:05 UTC 2020

Evan,
I’m certainly trying to take this all on and, if the consensus we reached was somehow a product of my mismanagement, I’m certainly sorry. Part of the issue was that it seemed rushed with short deadlines for comments while information was still coming out. At the time, only one, or perhaps two, ISOC chapters had come out against the sale and all that about loans and such was not yet out either.

As for due diligence, you know quite well that I DID contact several commenters/organizers to see how we might work together to achieve consensus and the vitriol began very early. I ALSO know, as you do, that the whole movement was begun by the domainers and carried their imprimatur for quite some time. There was a HUGE campaign to get non-profits involved but it didn’t start there. It began with Chicken Little emails about the end of the world, coming from the only community that REALLY has price sensitivity. In fact, you were one of the proponents of lifting the price caps when that issue came up because you hoped it might serve to limit speculation. I have ZERO intention to be elitist here. I confess, my radar was tuned in on the domainers’ role, perhaps for too long. We were in a time crunch,  with limited information,  most of the public comments had been form generated and our “leader” on this Roberto seemed to know a reasonable path forward.

All that said, taking whatever responsibility I must bear, I still believe that you are being naïve to suggest that the AG made some careful study of any of this and felt compelled to save the day. Perhaps that’s just a narrative you are trying to establish to get people into a reform mindset (I agree with most of your suggestions about polling and trying to figure out what the informed public wants!) but we all know that he was lobbied and saw a political opportunity here and took it, something that also gives me pause, as you know.

I’m not sure I’ve said anything new and we might just be repeating things back to each other at this point. Perhaps the best path forward is to explore ways to better reflect the will of end users and, for that, I’m 100% on board.
Jonathan

From: Evan Leibovitch <evan at telly.org>
Date: Friday, May 8, 2020 at 10:06 AM
To: Jonathan Zuck <JZuck at innovatorsnetwork.org>
Cc: David Mackey <mackey361 at gmail.com>, CPWG <cpwg at icann.org>
Subject: Re: [CPWG] Calif. AG mentions ALAC advice in note to ICANN re: PIR

On Fri, 8 May 2020 at 05:17, Jonathan Zuck <JZuck at innovatorsnetwork.org<mailto:JZuck at innovatorsnetwork.org>> wrote:
The fact is there was no real consensus among the At-Large about the acquisition of PIR. There were essentially 4 proposals on the table:

  1.  Approve the sale
  2.  Approve the sale with conditions (which is what both the ALAC and NCSG settled upon)
  3.  Deny the sale (essentially what happened)
  4.  Take .ORG away from PIR and move it to a new entity

As I said, you got that wrong. Totally wrong. You fully missed the core issue which was not "will Ethos screw registrants" but "did ISOC violate the letter and spirit of the terms under which ISOC was delegated .org in the first place". And, as history has now shown, you (and ICANN) needed the CA AG to save the day.

There WAS a strong consensus, led primarily by Roberto Gaetano, NOT to let the sale go through without concessions so the group was motivated to identify the appropriate concessions and perhaps bake them into the .ORG contract so they would. Survive changes of ownership.

The issue was never about concessions. It was about stewardship of .org as a registry that was just a little different from the others, and whether it could be treated like as a chattel the way other domains are.

The consensus appears to be that if Ethos jumped through just a few more hoops, made just a few more garbage PICs and a better advisory board, the sale would have been OK.  That was not the view of ISOC chapters. It was not the view of EFF. It was not the view of the American Red Cross or the Girl Guides. It was not the view of the thousands of charities and nonprofits that signed onto petitions. It is not the view of financial analysts who discovered that the new registry would be saddled in debt and inevitably forced to raise prices beyond the norm. It was not the view of people who were around during the original delegation of the domain to ISOC. It was not the view of a single .org registrants who expressed an opinion. It was not the view of human rights organizations.

But the CPWG and ALAC knew better than all of them!!

You should be embarrassed to have led that dereliction of duty. ICANN does not seek independent wisdom from ALAC, it is seeking a reflection of the public mood. The voice on the street, if you would, distilled maybe but without judgment or second-guessing. And if ALAC could get something so important so massively wrong that ICANN's government oversight had to step in to fix, it's impossible to have any confidence that it will get any of the minor opinions right.

 Now we can argue that many in the At-Large had a relationship to ISOC which may have convoluted this discussion

Considering that the overwhelming consensus of ISOC Chapters and the official stance of the ISOC Chapter Advisory Council was to oppose the sale, clearly there were no signs of undue influence this way. Nobody is arguing this so I wonder why you raise it.

but there were also serious issues with the public comments that arrived in volume and form the primary indication of “public” dissatisfaction with the deal.

Such as? Did you do any due diligence and contact any of the commenters before summarily deeming their opinions inferior to yours?

That you use quotes on the word public in the above context is -- I don't have a better word for it -- disgusting. The height of dismissive elitism.

We also need to set aside the fact that while many in the At-Large work for non-profits, we are not the voice of non-profits at ICANN.

Let's be really clear here. In this role you are not the voice of anything. ALAC's role is to CHANNEL what end-users want from ICANN and advise based on that, not pull opinions from scratch out of your collective behinds. In this extraordinary case, evidence of sentiment outside the bubble was plentiful. Any outside research at all would have inevitably led to the correct conclusion on this issue, instead you chose to ignore and "denigrate" it.  This corporate oblivion to the real public sentiment is clearly what drove the CA AG to intervene. So you could have foregone that dreaded government intervention simply by ensuring that ICANN knew the public mood rather than making one up.

While I was in ALAC the "who the hell are you to claim to speak for the billions?" retort from the domain industry always bothered me. On reflection I realize that it was a perfectly valid criticism and holds true today as much -- maybe more -- than ever. ALAC lacks any credibility that it listens to the outside world. It  guesses, based on its own biases and framed by ICANN staff, and as such represents the view of no more than the 15 ALAC reps and a handful of other self-appointed "experts" -- present company included. There is zero effort made to take the pulse of the public mood on issues, a flaw that was exposed to the world this time.

Indeed ... who the hell is ALAC to claim to speak for the billions? That question now needs to be asked from within At-Large too.

The original theory in At-Large's design was that ALSs were supposed to offer a kind of broad-based audience that could be used to discuss issues of import within a broader population and bring their opinions back, through RALOs, to ALAC. Not billions, but much better than a few dozen and guaranteed to be geographically diverse. For a ton of reasons well beyond the scope of this thread, the ALS theory has proven a complete failure. It can't work, ALAC never allocates the time and process to enable ALS consultation to take place. And ALAC gets so involved with trivial and irrelevant ICANN issues that could easily overwhelm broad grassroots consultations.

There were, of course, dissenters in the NCSG as well, such as Kathy Kleinman, who believed that PICs were inherently evil and a product of a top down decision making process under Fadi

For the record, and consistent since the day PICs were invented, I agree with Kathy. So should ALAC.

Now Evan, you might think that means they are not “fit for “purpose” because of your belief in what represented the public interest but I find it difficult to believe that the At-Large is somehow corrupt and purposefully subverted that public interest.

Oh hell no. I'm not accusing anyone of corruption. Complacency, egotism and maybe even cowardice, but not corruption.

- Evan
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