ICANN Needs to Finish Accountability Process Before Addressing Board Voting Threshold on GAC Advice, Comments Say
ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee should clarify the nature of its advice to the board and determine whether and how the GAC should be a policymaking body within ICANN, said comments filed over the weekend and Monday (http://bit.ly/1oXwOCq). The comments were in response to ICANN’s Aug. 15 proposal to increase the board’s voting threshold from 50 percent plus one board member to 66.6 percent (CD Sept 11 p15; Aug 20 p3). ICANN’s Business Constituency recommended ICANN delay consideration of the proposal until ICANN finalizes its accountability process (CD Sept 29 p6) (http://bit.ly/1q4ZUAJ). Comments were due Monday.
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The proposal received little support in comments so far. ICANN board Chairman Steve Crocker had said the proposal is merely “cementing” the board’s typical treatment of GAC advice. The GAC acts in an advisory capacity to the board.
The Software & Industry Information Association (SIIA) listed some conditions that should be included before proceeding with the proposal (http://bit.ly/1uS5lLd). ICANN’s accountability process should be finalized before any changes are made to its bylaws, it said. It isn’t “possible to evaluate how the GAC bylaw change would be affected by still-to-be determined accountability changes,” said SIIA. “The Board and ICANN stakeholders should have an opportunity to review the rationale behind GAC recommendations.” If the ICANN community were to approve the proposal, “there should be a discussion of whether all advice or just certain kinds of advice should be subject to the higher rejection threshold,” said SIIA. It would be “appropriate to consider a higher rejection threshold” when the GAC offers advice on the “interaction between ICANN policies and various laws and international agreements,” it said.
"Bylaw changes should not be enacted lightly,” and the current proposal shouldn’t be sanctioned now, said the Domain Name Association (DNA) (http://bit.ly/1pI7OAW). “We are concerned that this proposed bylaw change would seriously upset the balance of interests at play in the ICANN multi-Stakeholder model,” it said. “Scenarios can be developed and tested that demonstrate where this proposal can create an unworkable logjam of conflicting votes. The board “must recognize” that the Generic Names Supporting Organization and the Country Codes Names Supporting Organization are the “designated bodies for policy development within the multi-stakeholder model,” it said. “ICANN cannot allow GAC advice to act as a veto for policies developed by the GNSO or ccNSO or to unwind established policies developed by these communities.” DNA said that would put the multistakeholder model “at risk.”
The proposal “could constrain the willingness of the ICANN Board to push back on GAC Advice that did not take into account the role and responsibilities accorded to each of ICANN’s Supporting Organizations [SO] and Advisory Committees [AC],” said the Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) (http://bit.ly/1s2a6iV). Approval of the proposal should be “tied” to certain requirements of ICANN’s board when responding to GAC advice, including not overriding the “purview” of another SO or AC, said the RySG. Such advice shouldn’t “undo policy development work that has taken place within an affected community,” it said.