Hey Carlos

were not PICs a voluntary offer by applicants???

MM: No. Here is the real situation. An applicant applied for a TLD according to rule set in the DAG which says if she does X, Y and Z the application will be approved. Then she gets a comment from the GAC which says “we will actively oppose your application and tell the board to not approve it unless you do things we want you to do.” Think of the risk for the applicant. They have already committed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars to the application. They have been waiting for 3, 4 maybe 5 years to start. The GAC/ALAC attack on their application might sway the board – it is all arbtitrary, they don’t know. So what do they do? They minimize the risk by caving in to their demands, which take the form of a PIC

why do you say PICs (as opposed to Safeguards) were imposed by GAC / ALAC?

MM: As far as I know, which could be wrong, no one in the GNSO asked applicants to institute a PIC.

In general, PICS are an inherently arbitrary and policy-circumventing part of the new TLD process. If an applicant WANTS to make a PIC, it can do so in its application, we don’t need PICs at all. All PICs do is allow extortion of applicants to get them to introduce policies that could never gain consensus in the GNSO process.

Hope this explains

Dr. Milton L Mueller

Professor, School of Public Policy

Georgia Institute of Technology

Internet Governance Project

http://internetgovernance.org/