Preliminary Statement of NGO and Academic Internet Study (NAIS) On Proposal for Restructuring ICANN

We have preliminarily reviewed with interest the proposal offered last weekend by ICANN's President Stuart Lynn to fundamentally restructure ICANN. Let us share our initial reaction:

The proposal assumes that ICANN's experiment in an inclusive, directly represented At Large Membership has failed, and that ICANN's structure will not include such a membership in the future.

Yet, the Board has abridged its own process to evaluate the merits of the report prepared by its own advisory committee on that matter - the At Large Study Committee - which only a few days ago recommended that ICANN continue to develop an At Large that would elect board members. Since the Board is now unlikely to take the action necessary to host an election in the next six months, the At-Large Directors' terms will expire and the At-Large Membership will be terminated without any decision by the community or the Board that such termination is justified. We believe that the ALSC report, along with our own recommendations regarding its implementation, should be openly evaluated before the whole idea of the At Large is abandoned.
As we have stated in the past, openness, transparency, inclusiveness, and participation are critical elements of a legitimate ICANN. However, the Lynn proposal fails to provide adequate support to these principles. We continue to believe that end users and the public at large must have the ability to participate meaningfully in ICANN, to act as a watchdog on its activities, and to hold it accountable for its decisions that affect the public interest. In its current form, the Lynn proposal would hamstring the community's ability to conduct these important activities.
ICANN has typically described itself as "a technical coordination body for the Internet". Re-focusing on ICANN's core mission is at the heart of the Lynn proposal, indeed "mission" is mentioned with great frequency throughout the document. However, we believe that the appropriateness of the Lynn reforms will not be clear without an explanation as to what the core mission activities are. We urge Dr. Lynn to elaborate on his own conception of ICANN's technical coordination mission, to define the activities that constitute that mission, and to continue to explore mechanisms to ensure compliance with that mission.