raising awareness of stakeholder group charter injustices

[Alex Gakuru]

Count me in on awareness volunteers.

Alex Gakuru

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 4:19 AM, Robin Gross<robin at ipjustice.org> wrote:
> 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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