1.2.7 The Bylaws Amendments in Yokohama

When the Board in Cairo asked staff to prepare new bylaws to flesh out the Cairo Compromise, neither those at the meeting nor the ICANN community as a whole had reviewed all the Compromise's possible implications. When the proposed bylaws were published immediately before the Yokohama meeting, the Board once again encountered strong opposition from the community, and criticism that it had both betrayed the spirit of the Cairo Compromise and failed to accurately gauge community sentiment. Members of the public interest community strongly criticized both the proposed bylaws and the process behind it.

While the proposed amendments did provide for the direct election of five At-Large Directors, followed by a period of study, they were self-extinguishing, deleting themselves from the ICANN bylaws as soon as the 2000 At-Large Election was finished. In the absence of direct action by the Board, this left ICANN with no process for ever selecting At-large Directors to the Board after 2000. At the same time, the amendments proposed that the "placeholder" At-Large Directors-those Directors of the Initial Board-would leave the Board at the end of 2001.

Since no process had been established to replace the departing Board members, the "At-Large" seats they occupied would vanish when their terms expired, leaving the At-Large community represented by just the five Directors elected in 2000. And even those Directors' terms were set to expire in 2002. Barring direct action by the Board, At-Large representation on the Board would dwindle from nine seats, to five, to zero. Advocates urged the Board to rethink the proposed amendments, and to secure At-Large Directors' positions for the foreseeable future.

Once again, the Board reversed course. It amended the bylaws to secure the positions of all nine At-Large Directors until late 2002-though the bylaws setting up an At-Large Election self-extinguished after the 2000 election. Under those terms, the 2000 At-Large election took place-and ICANN was left, once again, without a clear concept of how to represent the public's interest in ICANN's activities.

1.2.6 Opposition to the Indirect Election

1.2.8 Where we find ourselves