Here's a draft. I incorporated some text from Mark's edit of Javier's
draft, but deleted a lot of the specifics. I hope you guys will
forgive me.
================================================================
Statement by the gTLD-MoU Policy Advisory Body concerning the IANA
draft Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation:
The gTLD-MoU Policy Advisory Body welcomes the announcement by IANA
of the third draft of the draft Bylaws and Articles of
Incorporation, and endorses them as the basis for creation of the
new IANA.
PAB further wishes to express its appreciaton for the effort
undertaken by IANA to act as a "fair broker" for consensus among
stakeholders. It is clear to all objective parties that no single
group currently represents the consensus of all stakeholders in the
Internet. And, while IANA itself is not immune from bias, three
characteristics make it uniquely suited to act as a "fair
broker": 1) it has a long and respected history that gives ample
proof of its ability to act in a fair and impartial manner, 2) no
other entity knows as much about the operational requirements for
the new IANA, and 3) no other entity has spent more time in
intelligent consideration of the requirements for the new IANA.
One of the stakeholder forums is the International Forum for the
White Paper (IFWP). This process has, for the last two months,
brought together a significant number of stakeholders of the
Internet from around the world, and has facilitated discussion of
some of the most important issues regarding the redesign of IANA.
As suggested by Tamar Frankel, facilitator of the IFWP process,
consensus search has been carried out in small break-out sessions,
but generally, consensus has not been pursued in the plenary
sessions of this meetings. This allows talk about work-in-progress,
without prejudicing results for further meetings, but does not provide
a mechanism for aggregating consenus.
However, many of the results of the IFWP do seem to reflect clear
consensus of the Internet Community, and we believe they have been
correctly understood by IANA and incorporated in the Third Iteration
of the Bylaws.
An important area for which there has been wide agreement was that
there be some kind of membership organization associated with the
new IANA, with at least some directors elected from a general
membership. Some camps insist that the membership should be of
individuals only; others insist that only organizational membership
be allowed.
The draft Bylaws defer implementation of such a structure, citing
several significant difficulties with various implementations of a
membership organization. It is also worth noting that the
controversies alluded to above would have to be resolved, and IANA
feels (rightly, we believe) that these issues simply cannot be
resolved in a time frame consistent with what is required.
PAB is uniquely suited to comment on this matter. It is, in fact,
an open membership organization. It has no financial requirements
for membership, such as dues or membership fees. Nominally, only
legal constituted organizations can be members, but, because there
is no financial requirement, very small organizations, such as sole
proprietorship businesses, have joined. These are for all
practical purposes, individual memberships.
PAB has little real power, and has not existed for even a year, yet
it has already experienced what can fairly be called an unsuccessful
takeover attempt. This illustrates without a doubt that IANA's
concerns are well founded. An open membership organization with
significant power would be a much jucier target than PAB, and
implementation of such an organization must proceed very cautiously.
That being said, the very existence of PAB is predicated on the
worth of membership organizations.
We note that the proposed structure of IANA includes
half the directors being selected through Support Organizations,
with the remaining half selected at large through some as yet
undetermined process. If that process were some sort of election
conducted by a carefully constructed member organization, the model
would be very close to the PAB/POC model. We encourage IANA and the
interim board to consider this very seriously, and we look forward
to working with them on this matter.
-- Kent Crispin, PAB Chair "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html
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