Completely agree with that, Tamir, and would add that in Canada
exorbitant fees are one of the major problems with the Access to
Information Act. Just today a journalist on my Twitter feed was
complaining that the Ottawa Police Service had asked him pay $6,300
for an access to information request. We certainly don't want to move
to a system like that.

In better practice countries, public bodies are expected to shoulder
most, if not all, of the cost of responding to access requests. Given
how fundamentally public ICANN's role is, and how importance
consultation, transparency and accountability are to their mandate,
the same should hold true for them.

However, I think there is also a need for ICANN to have a way to
dismiss requests that are, legitimately, unreasonably burdensome or
vexatious. Newfoundland and Labrador's new model is intriguing in this
regard. They have a clause in the law that allows them to dismiss
vexatious or unreasonable requests, but doing so requires the consent
of the Information Commissioner - an independent body. This sort of
brings us back to a fundamental challenge with reforming ICANN's
access to information system, which is the need for some sort of
analogous independent branch (I'm not completely certain the Ombudsman
fits the bill).

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Tamir Israel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Yes, but even in Canada, this tool is sometimes [mis]-used to force
> people to narrow their requests unnecessarily.
>
> I don't think it's unreasonable to go one step further and make ICANN
> shoulder a high degree of the cost here unless it becomes truly
> unreasonable, in which case tailoring the request or offering to let the
> requestor pay should be the remedy. They get all these revenues from
> DNS, may as well put them to good use.
>
> Best,
> Tamir
>
> On 10/6/2015 12:03 PM, Nicolas Adam wrote:
>> In Canada, when it is, you just have to pay the extra work load and/or
>> material to get it, and they offer you to refine your search instead
>> and work with you on your request. There is no way that a no is
>> acceptable.
>>
>> Big item for transparency and accountability IMO.
>>
>> Nicolas
>>
>>
>> On 06/10/2015 9:47 AM, Karel Douglas wrote:
>>> In some jurisdictions this can be a legitimate reason for denial if
>>> the request is too burdensome.
>
>