Dear members:
The small working group created at the
I am reasonably happy with the solution. The new structure is
bicameral and involves two distinct voting “houses,” one for
contracting parties (registries and registrars) and one for noncontracting
parties (i.e., users, with an even number of votes for commercial and
noncommercial stakeholders). There is an even number of votes for commercial and
noncommercial stakeholders.
This new structure eliminates an old injustice in the GNSO’s
structure. Back in 1999, ICANN created 3 business user constituencies with a
total of 9 votes, all three of them essentially trademark/IPR advocacy groups, and
only one noncommercial user constituency. As a result public interest/noncommercial
voices were constantly marginalized and the IPR/trademark interests became a
dominant force in domain name policy. Later, registries and registrars were
given weighted voting, which balanced the trademark groups but gave industry
suppliers too much control. The new structure is a huge victory for a more fair
and balanced domain name policy making apparatus. It balances all stakeholder groups
evenly and requires balanced support across both houses before any proposal can
go through.
An unfortunate but important fact about the process of
reaching this agreement is that we received very little support for balanced
representation from our colleagues in ALAC. For reasons that are not entirely
clear, the ALAC representative on the working group, a Nomcom appointee, was
exclusively concerned with retaining Nomcom appointed seats on the Council and
showed little or no concern about the broader political balance on the Council.
I will communicate more on that topic later, but this will make our joint discussions
with ALAC in the upcoming
A general description of the new structure follows:
General Principles of Agreement:
A. No single stakeholder group should have a veto for any
policy vote.
B. Council recommendation of binding policy should have at least one vote of
support from at least 3 of the 4 stakeholder groups.
C. Each House will determine its own composition.
E. Equal number of votes between commercial and non-commercial users.
New Structure:
a.
A Contracted Party House – an equal number of registry and registrar
representatives and 1 Nominating Committee appointee. The number of
registry and registrar stakeholder representatives will be determined by the
ICANN Board based on input from these stakeholder groups, but shall be no fewer
than 3 and not exceed 4 representatives for each group.
b. A Non-Contracted
Party/User House – an equal number of commercial and non-commercial user
representatives and 1 Nominating Committee appointee. The number of
commercial and non-commercial stakeholder representatives will be determined by
the ICANN Board based on input from these stakeholder groups, but shall be no
fewer than 5 and not exceed 9 representatives for each group.
GNSO Council Chair. No consensus was reached on this
point. NCUC supported having the chair be a neutral party with voting
status appointed by Nomcom. The business constituencies blocked consensus on
this and prefer to elect the Council chair by obtaining a 60% majority of
either house.
Voting thresholds (incomplete list):