Working Group Releases ICANN Accountability Draft Proposal
ICANN's cross-community working group on ICANN accountability (CCWG-Accountability) released its draft accountability proposal, which recommends that ICANN community members have additional power to influence decisions made by the ICANN board. CCWG-Accountability has been developing its recommendations on a parallel track with work on the ICANN Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship working group (CWG-Stewardship), which released a revised draft proposal for an IANA transition plan in late April (see 1504280060). The CCWG-Accountability and CWG-Stewardship proposals are now “increasingly and effectively reliant” on one another’s recommendations to be effective, said CWG-Stewardship Co-Chairman Jonathan Robinson during an ICANN webinar Wednesday.
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The CCWG-Accountability proposal recommends community members have the ability to recall the ICANN board or remove individual board members, veto changes to the ICANN bylaws and other values documents, and reject board decisions on ICANN’s strategic plan and budget. The proposal recommends revising the ICANN bylaws to clarify the scope of ICANN’s policy authority, reflect elements of ICANN’s affirmation of commitments and establish a set of fundamental bylaws that could be revised only with community approval. The proposal recommends significant enhancements to ICANN’s independent review process (IRP), including making the IRP Panel a standing committee of seven independent members and making IRP Panel decisions binding upon the ICANN board. The proposal also recommends reforms to ICANN’s request for consideration process, including expanding the scope of permissible requests to include ICANN board or staff actions that contradict established policy. CCWG-Accountability said the draft proposal isn’t a consensus of the entire group, saying comments on the proposal are due June 3.
ICANN community members need to understand the strong link between the CCWG-Accountability and CWG-Stewardship proposals when evaluating either proposal as a separate report, Robinson said. CWG-Stewardship members “feel we’ve done a good job of not absorbing all” of CCWG-Accountability’s work into its own draft proposal but still ensuring that CCWG-Accountability was “aware of this group’s specific needs,” he said. The CWG-Stewardship revised draft proposal reflects the community’s concerns that an earlier draft proposal was overly complicated, with the revised proposal focusing on one cohesive structure proposal instead of presenting multiple options, Robinson said. He countered criticisms voiced by some stakeholders in the days since CWG-Stewardship released its revised proposal that it was too incomplete for them to effectively comment on it. CWG-Stewardship believes “the form and structure of the proposal is sufficiently complete for it to be evident how it’s envisioned it will work,” Robinson said. “Whilst there’s a necessary amount of work to be done on details and implications, that’s not sufficient to say that conceptually and in many areas of detail that the proposal is not sufficiently complete to have public comment on it.”
The end of the comment period on the CWG-Stewardship revised draft proposal on May 20 will start a compressed revision period in the lead-up to ICANN’s planned June 21-25 meeting in Buenos Aires, at which the IANA transition process will be the main focus, Robinson said. CWG-Stewardship plans to integrate public comments into a further revision of its proposal by June 8 so it can deliver the newly revised proposal to chartering organizations in sufficient time in advance of the Buenos Aires meeting, he said. CWG-Stewardship hopes to get a concrete vote on the revised proposal at the Buenos Aires meeting so it can submit the proposal to the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group for integration with other transition proposals, Robinson said.
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling asked the leaders of CCWG-Accountability and CWG-Stewardship Wednesday to update him by the end of June on the status of their planning and a timeline of future activities. NTIA had set Sept. 30, the date its current contract with ICANN expires, as a deadline goal for completing the IANA transition “but have stated from the start of this process that the transition planning should proceed according to whatever schedule the community sets,” Strickling said in letters to the working groups.