ICANN is heading into uncharted waters after a key community group flexed its powers to hold the Org accountable for a recent board decision.
The At-Large Advisory Committee has become the first of ICANN’s overseers to push for a formal objection to ICANN’s decision to delay its next large-scale accountability review.
In layman’s terms, the ALAC wants the other DPs of the EC — the ASO, the ccNSO, the GNSO, and the GAC — to support its ECRP for a CRR challenging ICANN’s decision to delay ATRT4.
All clear? Great. Thanks for clicking.
Or… perhaps that all deserves some unpicking.
ALAC, the group that represents end-users at ICANN, is one of the five members of the Empowered Community — the group from which, under its bylaws, ICANN derives its powers and authority over domain names and such.
The other Decisional Participants are the Government Advisory Committee, the Address Supporting Organization, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the Generic Names Supporting Organization.
One of the EC’s powers is the ability to file a Community Reconsideration Request challenging an ICANN board or staff decision, if three of the DPs support the request and no more than one objects.
ALAC has become the first EC member since ICANN split from the US government in 2016 to formally kick off the process of scrounging up support for such a reconsideration request.
It’s filed an Empowered Community Reconsideration Petition, giving the other four DPs 21 days to vote yay or nay on whether the request should be formally filed.
Its beef is with the ICANN board’s decision in May to delay indefinitely the fourth Accountability and Transparency Review Team, ATRT4, and replace it with a CEO-led meta-review.
ATRTs are community-led reviews that ICANN, according to its bylaws, have to carry out every five years. ATRT3 kicked off at the end of 2018 and concluded in 2020 but its recommendations have not yet been fully implemented by ICANN.
ATRT4 has already been delayed for a year once by the board, last April, but the board wants the delay to continue so the community can take a step back and review, as one group put it, “why we review, what we should review and how best to review”.
I’m not making this up. One review is being replaced with a broader, CEO-led, meta-review that reviews the reviews. I haven’t even mentioned the Pilot Holistic Review or the various Continuous Improvement Programs.
The root rationale here relates to intellectual bandwidth. Arguably the biggest issue facing ICANN in recent years is its perceived (or actual) inability to get anything done in a timely fashion, and part of the reason for that is that community members, most of whom have day jobs or are volunteers, are forced to spend so much time navel-gazing or entangled in Tolkienesque cobwebs of red tape.
ALAC’s petition (pdf) accused the board of “usurping” the community by delaying ATRT4, in violation of its bylaws:
The EC, and by extension the ICANN community, believes that this continuing contravention of the Bylaws and disregard for ICANN’s Core Values poses a serious threat to ICANN’s mandate… It also significantly undermines trust in, and protection of, ICANN’s multistakeholder model of governance. This brings about a real risk of negative actions against ICANN, which could result in the loss of its mandate or could substantially risk the credibility and effectiveness of ICANN’s multistakeholder model.
It wants the decision to delay ATRT4 reversed. The question is, will it be able to muster up support from two other Decisional Participants, as required by the bylaws? I’d say that ALAC’s most-natural ally is the GAC, with the GNSO, seemingly baffled by the ALAC’s filing, the most likely to object.
The other four DPs have until a minute before midnight July 10 to submit expressions of support or objection.
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