[ncdnhc-discuss] ICANN | .org Reassignment: Applicant Comments | 1 October 2002 (fwd)

[Milton Mueller]

Alejandro:
Thanks for the heads up. When you say this:

>>there is some strong wording about the NCDNHC in this assessment

You mean the Neustar assessment. 

That is the _only_ applicant comment that has a particular animosity 
for the NCDNHC's contribution to the evaluation. I will explain the 
underlying reason for that below.

But first, you need to know that we dealt with Neustar's comments at 
length in our Supplemental Report, which you can read here:
http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/ncdnhc-supplemental-report-12sep02.pdf

That report (specifically, pp 7-9) went through Neustar's original
objections
point by point and showed just how unfounded (and even dishonest, in
certain cases) they were. I note that in its second reply comments 
Neustar does not bother to acknowledge our Supplemental Report. They 
simply repeat discredited arguments or shift rhetorical grounds a bit.

As an example, in its first-round comments Neustar tried to claim as 
endorsers of its proposal four organizations that had simply been 
asked to respond to a survey. We pointed out that these 
organizations had NOT endorsed their proposal in our Supplemental
Report. Neustar was rather silent on that issue this time around. 

(Neustar's first round comments, a 50-page rhetorical barrage, is
chock-
full of this kind of camouflage. We had to go through it sentence by
sentence to separate fact from fiction. It wasn't fun.)

Neustar has now been reduced to two arguments. One is that we
were biased in favor of noncommercial entities. That argument just
doesn't work. Our top choice, Unity Registry, was a for-profit, and
of our top 4 recommended choices, 2 were noncommercial and two
were commercial. No amount of spin can present such results as
reflecting a bias toward noncommercial entities.

The other argument is that NCDNHC suffers from a conflict of 
interest because it gave applicants points for helping noncommercial
participation in ICANN. I think we handled this issue correctly. We
recognized that direct assistance to NCDNHC is but one of many
possible ways of assisting noncommercial participation in ICANN.
We did not show any particular bias toward those who selected to
do this via the NCDNHC. But we did recognize those who did 
propose to work with NCDNHC as a legitimate way of being
responsive to and supportive of noncommercial participation. 
One could claim conflict of interest if we had insisted on 
recognizing direct contributions to the NCDNHC as the ONLY
form of supporting noncommercial interests in ICANN. But we
did not.

Note that our top applicant, Unity, does not provide any direct 
assistance to NCDNHC, but it does other suitable things. Of the top 4,

ISOC/PIR/Afilias and GNR proposed direct forms of working
with NCDNHC; Unity and IMS/ISC did not. Also note that applicants
who did propose direct methods of assisting NCDNHC, such as
UIA, did not get top rankings. 

Alejandro, this is one area where I hope the ICANN Board will
show some real integrity and make it clear that an applicant's
ability to make lots of noise - and lots of implied threats - will
not affect its decisionmaking. ICANN staff has already shown
a major bias toward Neustar by casting them as the second-
ranked proposal, when in fact the combination of the technical and
usage-oriented reports should make ISOC, Unity and GNR 
the top-ranked applicants. Nothing in the results significantly
differentiates Neustar from RegisterOrg, yet the staff report
reduces the status of RegisterOrg, unfairly I think, to below
Neustar's.

I think the source of the problem here is that Neustar 
strongly EXPECTED to be the winner, and their low rankings
in the NCDNHC report came as a shock to them. I guess they
think that their only option at this point is to create an ugly scene
so that Board members, who may already perceive NCDNHC
negatively because of its housing dissent, will further split
ICANN and disregard the duly authorized evaluation team. 

But think about the implications of that. 
Neustar's apparent willingness to hurl mud and exploit any 
available rhetorical devices to discredit our report does not
make them a very promising candidate to operate .org. It's
not that we can't take criticism, it's the fact that the criticism
is not legitimate and is deliberately manipulative and destructive
that bothers me. How can an applicant of such low integrity be
entrusted with a resource so valuable to the noncommercial
community? 

--MM