[CWG-Stewardship] My concerns with the draft proposal and an alternative option

[Malcolm Hutty]

On 30/11/2014 19:51, Martin Boyle wrote:
> As for the link to ICANN accountability:  with what we've got from
> Frankfurt, I think we have a reasonable idea of what we need from
> stream 1.  We cannot tell stream 1 what answer we want, but we can
> tell it what issue(s) we need them to consider.  Again, if we seek to
> engineer the whole piece, we risk simply missing the deadline and
> trespassing on the responsibilities of others.

Martin,

This paragraph opened my eyes to a possible misunderstanding on my part
of your position.

As you know, I think that resolving some (not all, but some critical)
ICANN accountability issues is essential to a successful NTIA
transition. After Frankfurt, I had begun to lose confidence that
CCWG-Stewardship shared this view.

This was very disheartening to me. I have no objection to leaving ICANN
accountability issues to be developed by CCWG-Accountability, so long as
the essential Workstream 1 issues make it into the final ICG proposal to
NTIA. But since CCWG-Accountability doesn't report to the ICG but the
ICANN Board, I think it is incumbent on this working group to pick up on
their output, and to ensure that ICG hears their output as part of the
"naming community's proposal". Hence my request for some placeholder
text in this proposal that CCWG-Accountability can fill out.

Seeing that there is no such placeholder text now, and having had
several of my approaches to try to achieve such text rejected in
Frankfurt, I had begun to think that the rest of this group wanted to
exclude anything relating to ICANN's policy-making role from the
ultimate transition proposal. That worried me greatly.

Your paragraph above gives me new hope that we can have a meeting of
minds, so please let me check that I have understood you correctly.
When you say "what we need from workstream 1", do you indeed mean that
the proposal from the names community, that goes to ICG, and ultimately
to NTIA, must include such proposals for ICANN accountability as
CCWG-Accountability decide are an essential precondition for NTIA
transition?

Or to put it another way, if CCWG-Accountability decide that ICANN must
be contractually bound to certain commitments to ensure that gTLD policy
remains transparent, community-based bottom policy (and so forth), are
you open to the possibility of having those commitments written into the
requirements that the PRT is to enforce on ICANN, alongside the
requirements for the IANA functions that this CCWG has defined?

Kind Regards,

Malcolm.

-- 
            Malcolm Hutty | tel: +44 20 7645 3523
   Head of Public Affairs | Read the LINX Public Affairs blog
 London Internet Exchange | http://publicaffairs.linx.net/

                 London Internet Exchange Ltd
           21-27 St Thomas Street, London SE1 9RY

         Company Registered in England No. 3137929
       Trinity Court, Trinity Street, Peterborough PE1 1DA