ALAC Comments on Accountability and Transparency Frameworks and Principles for Consultation

DRAFT of 18 October 2007

There are ALAC proposed comments on ICANN's Accountability and Transparency Frameworks and Principles for Consultation (Principles in PDF form here), posted for public comment on 17 October 2007. ICANN will hold a public forum on these principles during the Los Angeles meetings, on Tuesday, 30 October 2007, from 3:30-5:00 pm, local time. The public comment forum closes on Monday, 12 November 2007. Comments received by ICANN to date can be viewed here.

– D R A F T –

The At Large Advisory Committee commends ICANN for creating its proposed Accountability and Transparency Frameworks and Principles for Consultation. This document is an important step forward in ICANN's continued evolution and in furthering the trust placed in ICANN by the worldwide community of Internet users. In the interests of increasing ICANN's transparency and accountability and strengthening and clarifying the draft principles, the At Large Advisory Committee makes the following recommendations:

Document Disclosure Policy: ICANN needs a "bright line" correspondence policy. Not all correspondence received or sent by ICANN (not even all policy-related correspondence) is published on the "correspondence" page of the ICANN site. How does ICANN determine which pieces of correspondence are published? Right now, we don't know what we are missing.
In Person Meeting Disclosure Policy: ICANN should have a "bright line" policy regarding the disclosure of person-to-person meetings between ICANN Board/Staff, on the one hand, and persons with financial interests in the outcomes of ICANN policy processes or contract negotiations, on the other. These meetings ought to be posted in chronological order on the ICANN web site. They need be no more detailed than "John Registry met with Jane ICANN on Monday, November 12th, by teleconference, to discuss certain changes in the .EXAMPLE registry contract related to domain tasting" or "Sue Trademark met with Jerry ICANN on Monday, November 12, at the ICANN offices in Marina del Rey, to discuss the UDRP." Everyone who meets with ICANN in person or by telephone should be required to post a short description of the meeting to an ICANN website, which ICANN will review, edit if necessary, and post for public review. This need not place an undue burden on ICANN staff, and the notice process could be automated by and large.
Reconsideration Policy: Process and policy should be reviewed to determine whether it is working as intended. What sorts of actions of the organization are intended to be within scope of policy. Under what circumstances might the committee issue a "stay" of some action? No such stay has ever been issued, to what is it supposed to apply?
ICANN Economics: At the recent meeting in Los Angeles, we learned that ICANN now has an economist who is responsible for advising ICANN on the economic effect of ICANN's operations and decisions. This person's work, important to the Board and the decisions it makes, should be completely transparent. Any communications between the economist and ICANN's policy staff or Board members should be published for community review. While the input of the ICANN economist can be a valuable input into the policy process, economists do not all reach the same results, even given the same set of underlying data. So that the economist's reports and recommendations can be evaluated and validated, all of his or her underlying data should be published, together with a complete description of the methodologies employed.
Budget Planning. All requests for funding should be posted on the ICANN web site, so that the community can evaluate the decisions ICANN makes about what to include and what to exclude in its budgets.

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