raising awareness of stakeholder group charter injustices

[Robin Gross]

I remain in shock over the Board SIC (staff's) treatment of the  
Stakeholder Group Charters and wonder if anyone from the board was  
even paying attention to what staff did with the Commercial  
Stakeholder Group Charter.

In particular, under the SIC approved charter for the CSG, they are  
going to allow any of the existing members of the IPR, ISP, and  
Commercial Constituencies VETO any board vote creating a new  
commercial constituency in the CSG.  Amazing!  The press should be  
having a field day with this level of incompetence and favoritism.

"4.2 Membership shall also be open to any additional constituency  
recognised by ICANN’s Board under its by-laws, provided that such  
constituency, as determined by the unanimous consent of the  
signatories to this charter, is representative of commercial user  
interests which for the purposes of definition are distinct from and  
exclude registry and prospective registry, registrar, re-seller or  
other domain name supplier interests."

We (noncommercial users) have really been asleep at the wheel over  
the last year while the ICANN Board of Directors had their heads  
filled with mis-representations about NCUC by relentless back-door  
lobbying.  They get it from the commercial/IPR crowd and they get it  
from staff, neither of whom want to see noncommercial users effective  
in policy development.   The fact that we haven't engaged in backdoor  
lobbying the way our critics do is coming back to haunt us by ICANN  
trying to take away our newly won 3 elected council seats for  
noncommercial users and staff imposing its "stranglehold" charter  
while ignoring all of work we did to develop one that was supported  
by global civil society (63 organizations + dozens of individuals in  
public comments).

We must push-back against ICANN injustice to get them to listen to  
noncommercial users and to stop developing policy through backdoor  
negotiations while ignoring the expressed will of the public and a  
bottom-up process.

ICANN is accepting public comments until 21 July on their imposed  
charter, so we have to weigh in loudly on their failure to follow  
bottom-up processes and allow noncommercial users to govern  
themselves.  More info on comment period:  http://www.icann.org/en/ 
public-comment/#stakeholder

[Considering the simple fact that not a single comment was taken into  
account by ICANN in the April comment period, one must ask oneself,  
"what is the point in commenting again?"  But we have to keep up the  
pressure and at least alert the public of ICANN squeezing out  
noncommercial users in policy development].

We must raise awareness of this injustice to noncommercial users in  
the next few weeks, including awareness with the press and political  
figures.   Are there any volunteers to work in a small task force  
with me to raise awareness (help with blogs, press releases, email  
lists, etc.) in the coming weeks? -- please let me know asap.

Thank you very much!

Best,
Robin

IP JUSTICE
Robin Gross, Executive Director
1192 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA  94117  USA
p: +1-415-553-6261    f: +1-415-462-6451
w: http://www.ipjustice.org     e: robin at ipjustice.org



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