[NCSG-Discuss] ATRT2 announced

[David Cake]

I overlooked that Stephen Conroy was named "Internet Villain of the Year" in 2009 http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/conroy-named-internet-villain-of-the-year-20090713-di8q.html

On 16/02/2013, at 12:33 PM, David Cake <dave at difference.com.au> wrote:

> http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-2-15feb13-en.htm
> 
> Very pleased to see that NCSGs endorsed candidate, Avri Doria, in on the team. Congratulations Avri, very pleased to have your depth of wisdom about process and your strong voice for transparency and accountability on the team. Interesting that after all the debate about GNSO endorsement, only 2 of the 4 GNSO endorsed candidates got picked. 
> 
> Somewhat boggled to see that Stephen Conroy, who is the Australian Communications Minister, is on the team personally. He is a very senior minister in a fairly embattled government, during an election year. He has never shown any direct involvement in ICANN before - he turned up when ICANN was in Sydney, but only for the necessary few hours for his speech, and didn't discuss much ICANN specific. I'd be very surprised if he puts the appropriate level of effort in, actually it would be very problematic domestically if he did (for example, it certainly isn't enough of a priority for him to justify skipping parliamentary sitting weeks to attend ICANN meetings, given he is leader of the government in the Senate). I imagine he will drop out quickly, and probably try to have an underling sit in for him (I'd guess one of the Aus GAC reps) even though that isn't valid according to the RT rules. I look forward to hearing how this pans out. I should note that relationships between Electronic Frontiers Australia and Stephen Conroy are generally a long way from good - he once accused us in Parliament of an orchestrated campaign to mislead the nation, for example, and we successfully led the campaign against his (radically unaccountable and non-transparent) policy to filter Australian internet access. 
> 
> Cheers
> 
> 	David
> 	
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncuc.org/pipermail/ncuc-discuss/attachments/20130216/5d8043d7/attachment-0001.html>