Is there something wrong with the new GNSO Councillors?

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Is there something wrong with the new GNSO Councillors?

Thursday, October 1. 2009

The GNSO, ICANN's policy-making body for generic TLDs, is overseen by a Council made up of representatives from the GNSO's various stakeholder groups. For example, I sit on the Council as a representative of the Registrar Stakeholder Group.

The GNSO is currently being restructured. At the next ICANN meeting in Seoul, a new GNSO structure will be implemented, with a new Council being seated. As part of that new structure, one of the Stakeholder Groups, the NCSG (Non Commercial Stakeholder Group), has been awarded 6 representatives on the Council. But due to somewhat complex internal politics within the NCSG, it was decided that half of those reps would be chosen by the ICANN Board for the inaugural seating of the new GNSO Council.

So yesterday ICANN staff sent the Council a note indicating that the 3 Board appointees were Mohammed Rafik Dammak from Tunisia, Rosemary Sinclair from Australia and Debra Hughes from the United States. We were also told that their selection was the result of extensive due diligence and a careful review of the many people that had applied to the Board for the job.

All well and good, until I was made aware of an email from respected ICANN community member Bret Fausett sent to the At Large (another of ICANN's community structures) mailing list.

Bret questions the very sanity of the choices made for Rosemary Sinclair and Debra Hughes. I cannot resist quoting from his email. "Have you people lost your minds?," he asks, apparently talking to the Board directly. "Two of these people are not at all representative of non-commercial interests. You either failed to do any due diligence on these applicants or the process has been completely gamed. Either way, real non-commercial users should be disgusted."

Bret goes on to explain that although Rosemary Sinclair does work at a non-profit, it's one designed to represent the interests of corporations. As for Debra Hughes, he says that she is a trademark lawyer straight from the IPC (the old GNSO's Intellectual Property Constituency).

I don't know if there's any truth to this, but considering these claims are being made by someone as credible as Bret, I would tend to take them seriously and to think that they at least deserve some sort of response from ICANN…

Posted by Stephane Van Gelder in ICANN at 15:17 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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One of the most important points of the GNSO restructure was to ensure greater diversity of views among the Non-Commercial SG. Is someone really going to argue that the Red Cross is a commercial entity? It is about time that the consumer protection interests of non-commercial users were represented directly in the GNSO, rather than indirectly via the commercial constituencies. Hopefully we might have an easier time overcoming the contrived notion that 'consumer protection' and 'freedom of expression' are mutually exclusive concepts.

#1 Mike Rodenbaugh (Homepage) on 2009-10-01 18:57 (Reply)

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