ICANN Board, Accountability Working Group 'Closer' to Alignment Than Perceived, Chehadé Says
ICANN's board and the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN's Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) are “much closer to being aligned” on proposed changes to ICANN's accountability mechanisms “than it appears in the chaotic nature of the multistakeholder model,” said ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé during an appearance on C-SPAN's The Communicators set to appear online Friday and to be broadcast on C-SPAN Saturday. The ICANN board is aligned with CCWG-Accountability on the basic contours of the groups' draft ICANN accountability proposal but has been objecting to a few portions of the proposal, including those that deal with enforcing proposed new ICANN community powers, said Chehadé.
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Chehadé, members of ICANN's board and members of CCWG-Accountability are set to meet Friday and Saturday in Los Angeles on the board's concerns with the ICANN accountability proposal, with the aim of moving closer to a consensus on the accountability proposal ahead of ICANN's planned Oct. 18-22 meeting in Dublin. The Dublin meeting is to be a staging ground for presenting final or near-final versions of community proposals on ICANN accountability and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition plan to the full ICANN community. “We will sort through” concerns the ICANN board has on proposed enforcement mechanisms and other issues “and I hope we exit” the Los Angeles meeting much closer to alignment on the ICANN accountability proposal, Chehadé said. The multistakeholder model often makes disagreements look much worse than they truly are because “it's noisy, it's chaotic,” Chehadé said.
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling separately urged ICANN stakeholders to “focus on bridging their differences” on the CCWG-Accountability proposal during the Los Angeles meeting. “This transition planning is testing the multistakeholder model as never before,” Strickling said in a Wednesday blog post. “The world is watching to see if stakeholders can find a consensus way forward. Making history is hard work and on matters this important, it is never a smooth path to reach agreement. Do not get discouraged or frustrated.” Stakeholders should focus on areas where there is a clear consensus and then fill out the details of those provisions, Strickling said, noting that “there is not enough detail in the current draft for NTIA to conduct a thorough analysis of how the plan meets our criteria.”