> My reading of Joop's message below is different from your one.
> I think that he just pointed out the need to find an expert to help up > in case of incorporation outside the US was considered a possibility.
Many people are reading these messages who are not aware of the full
context. These include IFWPers who weren't in Monterrey, and Monterrey
DNSOers who aren't subscribed to the IFWP list, as well as others. They
don't know that you're just exploring avenues and gathering information.
They could easily construe these postings to mean that the DNSO has
already decided to incorporate and is in the process of doing so. I have
had queries to that effect. You can't expect others to know you are just
getting information. When they see you are looking for a lawyer to
incorporate, they might think it's already been decided.
People who haven't been involved in all the discussions and meetings, or
who haven't had the time to think it all through, might not realize that
the price of incorporation is very great, that it isn't simply a game of
signing a few papers so that you can have a pretty letterhead and a nice
business card to flash at parties. In the present case, for example,
it's a divorce proceeding with all the attendant separation of goods and
arrangements for providing for the children and visiting rights, a
grievous process that has effects lasting a lifetime, as many know.
And there will be consequences as regards the respective memberships. A
legally separated DNSO will not have the same membership as the ICANN.
That's how it will work out. Then the at-large membership of the ICANN,
which will cast the deciding votes in many decisions, and particularly
in the election of the final Board of Directors, won't be the Internet
community of DNS interests. This may very well be what Mr. Roberts and
Mr. Sims want, so that ICANN's Board is not subject to decision-making
by a coalition of DNS interests and ICANN can use its executive powers
to control the DNSO. This is precisely what goes on in the shadow
government administrative bureaucracies that Bill Semich has warned us
about: many do the work, but only a few make the decisions. So the
question of incorporation is really much more than a question of
liability, it is a question of who will have final authority.
There was never any intention in the White Paper or the community to
keep DNS interests removed from the NewCo. Just the opposite. It's an
invention of a few people who must not be permitted to get their way. Do
you see what they're doing, getting people used, little by little, to
being "represented" by lawyers rather than being present and making
decisions themselves? Sure, they'll let you form a DNSO, even help you,
so long as you end up with no real power, which they keep in their own
hands. The DNSO, outside ICANN, could become a mechanism for removing
the ICANN Board from responsibility to the DNSO.
So why give readers of these lists the idea that the DNSO has accepted
it?