For me, today was the first real day of the ICANN meetings. It was neatly broken up into two discrete bits – everything that happened before lunch, and everything that happened after.

First thing this morning I had a meeting with the GNSO Review team from the London School of Economics. These very pleasant folks are conducting a review of the GNSO’s effectiveness for ICANN’s Board of Directors. We talked for roughly two hours about everything – good, bad and ugly as it related to the function of the GNSO within ICANN. I can’t help but thinking that a review of ICANN by the ICANN Board of Directors might be more suitable.

At the end, they asked me specifically what I wanted to make sure they heard from me. I had three points that I underlined with them:

a) Someone needs to ensure that the expectations of the Board, GNSO and Senior Staff are well communicated and understood. This is management 101 stuff. People cannot succeed for you if they don’t know what you expect of them. People cannot be expected to be accountable for their behavior unless these expectations are clear.

None of this is in place today. The Board doesn’t set clear expectations for the GNSO, and the GNSO doesn’t set clear expectations for the ICANN policy staff that support its policy development activities. And each wonders why the other isn’t doing things in a way that supports the common goals. This is indicative of a classic management failure. i.e. ICANN’s Board has been A Bad Boss. The GNSO Council has been A Bad Boss. We shouldn’t settle for this mediocrity – change must be had.

b) That ICANN is a tremendously opaque organization and that the GNSO has wrongfully inherited much of this legacy. ICANN does not render itself accessible, nor does it properly communicate the basis for its decisions. A lot of this has to do with poor organization and some of it is by design. The GNSO can only be as transparent and accessible as its parent structure. In its current state, the GNSO is tremendously inaccessible, which is more representative of ICANN’s failures, not necessarily of the GNSO itself. Please help us be better by improving yourself. Do something simple – start with your website. Use it as an exercise to start setting best practices and minimum standards for your Supporting Organizations. In the meantime, expect us to continue to live up to the example that you set for us.

c) That ICANN needs to give the GNSO enough room to fail – and succeed. ICANN has a history of attempting to engineer the success of the GNSO. This is a top-down approach that is clearly not working. The GNSO needs to be comfortable in its capabilities and be in a position to exercise a certain amount of discretion in how it achieves its goals. If it fails to live up to the mandate provided to it by ICANN’s Board, the Board should be prepared to designate a successor organization that might be in a better position to fulfill the Board’s expectations. Start with Annex A of the bylaws. Lets move all of the procedural requirements out to a new document that the GNSO manages. The bylaws should only include as much detail as is necessary for you to ensure that our work product is consistent with ICANN’s requirements. Right now, this isn’t even clear because these very important objectives are hidden beneath 20 layers of procedural crud that say silly things like “You have 10 days to produce specific report X” and “You must conduct a serious discovery process in Y time period”. The doesn’t need deadlines from the Board – the GNSO needs the Board’s guidance so that the GNSO can perform. Set your expectations clearly and we’ll live up to them.

Lunch was, well…lunch. If you have lunch at the Intercontinental and are looking for a substantial meal, avoid the chicken breast – a very small chicken breast accompanied by a miniscule portion of poached potato slices. I wondered whether they had left half the dish in the kitchen or something. While tasty, it really didn’t do much to satisfy my appetite.

This afternoon was a mish-mash of meetings. It was an interminable proceeding and I can’t actually say that much of substance was accomplished. The highlight for me was review of some of the starting elements of ICANN’s next budget. If you are a consultant, get in line at the Marina del Rey office. The trough is deep and wide. Cash for consultants everywhere. I asked Kurt Pritz what the impetus for these massive consulting expenditures was and didn’t really get a great answer. In a normal company when you see consulting investments like the ones in the budget document we looked at, you can usually track it back to some explicit strategic decision made  to fulfill some growth imperative, deal with competitive threats or to implement massive change processes etc. According to Kurth, these decisions haven’t been explicitly made – which really left me scratching my head. Why is such a heavy investment in consultants being made?

During one of the breaks I had a great discussion with some of the ICANN policy support staff about how we can better organize the GNSO website to maximise its utility to the various stakeholders and participants. I described my vision of the GNSO website as being two parts of a whole – one specific set of resources geared towards ensuring that the GNSO could more effectively coordinate the works of its various task forces, commitee’s and council. This really means better tools for the GNSO. Right now we rely way to much on email and basic website links. We need more interactive group tools like file managers, calendars and the like that make it easier for us to work with one another in the online environment.

We also need to realize that its unlikely that anyone is going to hand us the tools we need to make this happen. If we’re serious about acquiring better tools so that we can guarantee better results, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. I have some thoughts in this area that I’m going to write up to see if I can get the ball rolling in this area.

The second half of the whole includes a set of resources that help the GNSO communicate more effectively with its stakeholders and interested parties. This really just means “making it easier to find stuff on the website” and “making it much easier to understand our processes and become involved in them”. Really though, these communications initiatives would be better suited for implementation on the ICANN website first so that the parent organization has a clear hand in setting the best practices for the rest of its supporting organizations. Not sure why such a hard-core, internet focused organization has such as hard time getting its act together on a basic website strategy. Somebody needs to make this a priority.

We also reviewed the GNSO Rules of Procedure, the basic documents which outline how the GNSO gets stuff done. Some substantive changes were made to the current proposal – all for the better in my opinion. There was some disagreement about how forceful we should get about deadlines for getting items on the agenda. My view was that we should err on being more rigidity in the process because it would lead to greater predictability in the outcome. Marilyn Cade of the Business User Constituency wanted to leave enough flexibility in the process to ensure that we could be responsive to issues that jumped out of the bushes at us.

While I agree with the point in principle, I don’t think that it makes much practical sense leaving something as important as our agenda open to last minute surprises. I would much prefer to reschedule a meeting, or schedule an emergency meeting according to some special procedures rather than leave everything open until the last minute. Wdidn’t resolve this in the meeting – the right people weren’t at the table, but we will pick it up again in future discussions this week.

I was quite pleased that I managed to convince the group to commit some resources to testing out whether or not we could cheaply and effectively start transcribing the meeting recordings of the GNSO Council. I’ve recently discovered that machine transcription services like Castingwords.com are remarkably effective and very affordable. We’ve submitted an MP3 recording of  recent meeting to their service for transcription.  If the group is satisfied with the results, we will be undertaking a longer three month trial to determine whether or not there is some lasting value to having our meetings transcribed. Personally, I’m a big fan of transcriptions because I can search them, copy from them and incorporate them into the policy documents that I’m continuously working on. There’s a lot to be said for implementing this degree of accessibility.

This evening will be purposely quiet for me. The calm before the storm. The point of no return. The schedule from tomorrow through next Saturday is non-stop. I’m going to make the most of it, do some reading and try and get a good nights sleep.

Unless you’ve got a better offer.

During the GNSO Council meeting in Vancouver, I made the remark that “Everybody at this table is a stakeholder. We all have an interest in this issue.” Councillors were talking about conflicts of interest and abstaining, and in my opinion, generally missing the point about what ICANN and the GNSO is all about.

Before I get too deep into this post, I should clarify what I mean when I use the term “conflict of interest”. A conflict of interest is when someone’s private interests get in the way of their performance of a public duty – that their private interests will benefit from the decisions they make in the course of fulfilling their public duty. Private, in this sense, can be taken to mean “personal or professional” and not necessarily disclosed.

Wikipedia has this to say:

A conflict of interest is a situation in which someone in a position of trust, such as a lawyer, a politician, or an executive or director of a corporation, has competing professional or personal interests. Such competing interests can make it difficult to fulfill his or her duties impartially. Even if there is no evidence of improper actions, a conflict of interest can create an appearance of impropriety that can undermine confidence in the ability of that person to act properly.

– courtesy of Wikipedia

ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization exists mostly to provide ICANN’s Board of Directors with substantive recommendations regarding policy related to Generic Top-Level Domain Names. For instance, the question of whether or not to create new top-level domain names like .web or .rader is an area of policy currently being discussed by the GNSO. The GNSO is made up of constituencies¹ which are theoretically intended to represent the interests of significant stakeholders.

By definition, the GNSO is a collective of special interest groups – each with their own unique perspective, agenda and special areas of interest. The ISPs are worried about networking and connectivity issues, the Non-commercial Users are worried about free speech and privacy issues and the registration providers are worried about the business of selling domain names and managing DNS infrastructure. All of these special interest groups have an explicit role in making policy recommendations to the board and each is directly affected when those recommendations become binding policy.

“But wait…” I hear you saying. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest? How can someone help develop policies that they might directly benefit from?”

That’s the beauty of it. Everyone in the GNSO has a conflict of interest, but each of those interests are different. These differences have the tendency of balancing each other out. For instance, the business users certainly wouldn’t let the registration providers (registries and registrars) pass along a policy recommendation that charged Fortune 500 customers $1,000,000 per year for their domain registrations.

The only time this gets sticky is when ICANN’s Board of Directors tries to listen specifically to individual participants instead of the constituencies and the GNSO itself. We recently heard from ICANN Board member that it was difficult to listen to the GNSO because people’s interests aren’t always apparent. So instead of asking questions about those interests, this board member shut out all input on the subject from anyone affiliated with the GNSO. He based his decisions on what he thought ought to happen based on his perception of the view of the issues as summarized by ICANN’s staff. And ignored the more balanced view of the GNSO in the process. ICANN wasn’t designed in a way that allows direct input to the Board to happen in a fair, unbiased and useful manner. Anything received by the Board from individual participants is an end-run around the process and should be treated as such. I don’t know why the Board continues to invite it – its broken and diminishes the value of the standard processes we’ve all agreed to.

But back to conflicts of interest.

I’m hearing now that the GNSO needs to try and be more neutral in the way it develops its policy recommendations. Neutral to the point of reducing the participation of affected parties in certain circumstances because of how this might appear to the outside world. In a normal organization lacking the structural balance of the GNSO, this might be a reasonable approach. In this case, it further undermines the basic deal that lead to ICANN’s creation.

The basic deal was that the private sector would assume management of the DNS from the United States Government. ICANN was specifically created by the private sector to provide the framework necessary to make this happen. Unfortunately, it appears that Paul Twomey and Vint Cerf have a much different interpretation of the terms of the basic deal. The Twomey/Cerf ICANN framework looks a lot more like a miniature ITU – which has very little to do with the private-sector, and everything to do with Big G governments.

“But wait…” You’re saying.

(That’s the second time! How do I know you’re saying that? You say it a lot.)

“But wait…aren’t governments used to managing things like those managed by ICANN? Doesn’t every government have a ton of experience with regulation and managing economic policy and all the other things that ICANN keeps getting accused of doing badly?”

ICANN isn’t a regulator, it doesn’t regulate and it certainly doesn’t manage economic policy. The people that say that are either misinformed or misinforming. Usually both.

Sometimes ICANN looks like a regulator because it places limits on certain practices and makes other practices mandatory. But think back, where do these limitations and mandatory measures come from? A lot of times, they come from the GNSO. And who is the GNSO? Say it with me – The GNSO are the users and suppliers of the system. Remember – the very same people that help make the policy are often affected by the policy.

ICANN’s GNSO does not need to avoid conflicts of interest in its proceedings, rather, it needs to manage them. It needs to ensure that the utmost transparency exists around the affiliations and interests of its members and ensure that the record is clear regarding the terms of each contribution made to the development of each policy .The GNSO needs to increase the rigor with which it documents the policy development process to ensure that substantive conflicts are noted, and to assist each constituency in ensuring its members are making the appropriate disclosures.  The GNSO must avoid calls to implement a regime of safe neutrality. The premise of which are entirely inconsistent with ICANN’s original mandate.  Instead, the GNSO needs to implement conflict of interest management policy that deals head on with the challenges created by the involvement of the private sector so that the private sector can bring its expertise to bear in dealing with the challenges that lay ahead of the ICANN community.

Interesting conflict, no?

¹ The Internet Service Provider Constituency, The Intellectual Property Constituency, The Business Users Constituency,
The gTLD Registrar Constituency, The gTLD Registry Constituency and The Non-Commercial Users Constituency.

…When they forced a reduction in wholesale prices for the .net domain last year, none of the eight major registrars passed the $10 million in savings on to their customers. It went to their bottom line.

 - CNET via Free2Innovate.net.

The *fact* is that the average selling price for .net domain names is much lower than it was last year prior to the price decrease. Users are getting .net domain names cheaper now than they were a year ago. This is fact, I have data that I can share that supports this.

The error that Free2Innovate is passing on stems from the misperception that “book” or “sticker”  prices are equivalent to “street” or “selling” prices. In a competitive market, discounting from the published price is a common activity. Calculating economic pricing impact using book prices is about as accurate as predicting GDP based on sales forecasts – it can be done, but the data is speculative and can’t be used definitively for any economic analysis that requires any measurable degree of certainty.

There are other equally concerning errors in the CNET piece as well. For instance, the connection between domain name registration and domain name resolution services is far less substantial than what the article implies. At no other level of the DNS are these functions so co-mingled as they are at the TLD level. Somehow, the DNS functions at the second-level, and the root-level, quite nicely without the benefit of massive subsidies from registration activities. Furthermore, IP address registration and resolution functions are completely separate as well – and all of these are managed on a non-profit basis without the benefit of massive infrastructure subsidies from related, but mostly tangental functions.

Whether or not one agrees with the terms of ICANNs settlement with Verisign is almost irrelevant. The important issue is how badly the ICANN Board and Staff handled this matter. The factual problems I point out here, are *exactly* the same factual problems that were promulgated by ICANN’s senior staff in their recommendations to ICANN’s Board of Directors. These same errors and misjudgements figured centrally in the Board’s consideration of this highly important matter.

These problems cannot simply be swept under the rug by pronouncements that ICANN must move on and attend to other work. In fact, it is more critical now than ever before to stop and take a look at the quality of the decisions made, and the quality of the recommendations supplied to the Board to inform their decisions. ICANN must also realize that it is no where near transparent or accountable enough that we can simply take its word that “this is a good decision” when the facts clearly show that ICANN has not followed their own processes, that key data and decision points are not part of the public record and that the ICANN staff, at best, provided the board with an incomplete understanding of the facts relative to the situation.

I’m no longer arguing about the status of the Verisign settlement. In fact, let’s take a deep breath and move on. We lost, they won. Water under the bridge.

Rather, I’m arguing about the future of ICANN. 

I’m arguing against the scope-creep and increasingly opaque shroud that has fallen over an organization that I would formally have called ours. I’m arguing against the encroachment of the United States judiciary system and Department of Commerce onto the public commons, a commons that still belongs to you and I. I’m arguing against an uninformed and unaccountable “coordinator” imposing its world-view and values on the community. I’m arguing against a private California contractor who’s vision of bottom-up, consensus based decision includes “consulting” with its stakeholders via the Washington Post and New York Times – against an organization that views using the courts of California and Virginia and the sub-committee hearing rooms of Washington D.C. as appropriate venues for making its most important sdecisions. I’m arguing against a Board of Directors who feels that it is acceptable to justify their decisions by denigrating the actions of the well-intended people that most support it.

I’m arguing for an organization that balances my interests – personally, and professionally - with the interests of every single other user – public and private, small and large, individual, corporate and governmental - of the Internet’s domain name system. An organization that acts as steward of the community, and caretaker of the public trust. I’m arguing for the vision and ideals that we signed on for when we endorsed the future promised by the Green Paper, White Paper and original ICANN bylaws. Ideals embodied in an organization that can look its stakeholders in the eye and ask it hard questions about all types of situations, good or bad, so that we can be part of the solution – or at the very least, understand the hard and uncomfortable decisions, whether we actually like them or not.

I’m arguing for MyCANN.

And you should be too.

You can draw a straight line between the ICANN Board's decision to abandon accountability and its decision to give Verisign a perpetual monopoly on .COM.
An ICANN that routinely disregards its obligation to open its Board meetings to public scrutiny, even to post timely minutes, is an ICANN that can never be trusted to make decisions in the public interest.

– icann.Blog

The same issues that are now biting the Registrar community square in the ass.

First they ghettoized Individual Users, and we did not speak out—
because we did not represent Individual Users;
Then they isolated and ridiculed the activist Board members and critics, and we did not speak out—
because we are not activist Board members or critics;
Then they dissolved the DNSO General Assembly, and we did not speak out—
because we did not participate in the DNSO General Assembly;
Then they antagonized the Country Code Managers, who resisted fairly well, but we still did not speak out—
because we were not Country Code Managers;
Now they are marginalizing the Registrar community —
…and few are left to speak with us.

…with apologies to Martin Niemöller.