FY12_Op. Plan & budget_ALAC comments

ALAC Statement on the draft FY12 Operational Plan and Budget

ALAC recognizes the great improvement of the process of the operational plan and budget preparation, and highly appreciates the interaction that the staff have had with the community at all stages of that process.
As for the substance, ALAC is glad to notice that the draft FY12 Operational plan and budget was presented with sufficient explanation and high level of details that allows for deep discussion and comments.
Nevertheless, ALAC wants to make the following remarks:

• In paragraph 4.7 about the community support, there is a comprehensive description of the process of additional service requests from the ICANN constituencies except the way those requests were treated and decided on by the staff.

As far as At-Large is concerned, most of the few resources allocated do not cover the projects applied for. At-Large applied for projects, not for money: replacing (for example) funding a RALO General Assembly by 6 additional travel support slots will not allow the GA to be held.
And yet, the links with the strategic plan elements were clearly established for all the presented projects. Some of them have even been applied for last year with a clear support from all, and we were told that they will have better chance to be covered by FY12 budget.
ALAC is still asking for the integration of those projects in the FY12 budget, and, for the ones that could not be integrated, providing clear description of the reasons for their rejection or postponing. We also expect that a formal statement will be provided telling when the non-integrated projects will be funded.

• In the paragraph 4.8 about the policy development support, it was planned to allocate resources for the implementation of improvements requested by ALAC, consisting, inter alias, in supporting during the period 2010-2013 one General Assembly for each of the five Regional At-Large Organizations (RALOs) held in conjunction with either an ICANN or key regional Internet stakeholder meeting in order to set priorities, develop strategies for improving participation, including capacity-building programs.

Since no support for GA was budgeted in the first year (FY11) of the mentioned period, we were looking for resources allocation for at least 2 General Assemblies for FY12, but unfortunately, none was planned in the draft budget.

• In the new gTLD program budget, we did not see any provision for the support of the applicants who need assistance in applying for and/or operating a new gTLD as per the ICANN Board resolution 20 made in Nairobi. ALAC thinks that a reasonable percentage of the application fees recovered by ICANN should be allocated to the so called support.

• The ICANN Developing Countries Summit is planned to take place in Dakar, during the ICANN 42^nd International meeting. While ALAC welcomes such initiative to promote the developing countries participation in the ICANN process, and especially in its policy development, it notices that there is no financial prevision dedicated to this very important event. ALAC believes that resources should be allocated to such an event if it is not already done. In case it is, we would like to know where they will come from (which item of the budget includes them).

• While ALAC recognizes the ICANN efforts in the translation field by the increase of translated documents and the maintenance of a multilingual ICANN Blog, it notices with concern that no improvement in the interpretation field is expected. The quality of the interpretation is sometimes inacceptable, and all the working groups are working in English only, which prevent the non-English speakers to participate. The impact of such a situation is that the latter cannot fully participate in the policy development process. ALAC considers this issue as a priority for an international organization that boast of being inclusive and multi-stakeholder with a bottom-up decision making system.

• The registry fees for the 18 existing gTLDs do not follow any rule and show an arbitrary way of charging registries: some do not pay the fixed fees, others do not pay the per transaction fees, and the value of the fixed and the per transaction fees changes from a registry to another. We can notice that dot com does not pay the per transaction fees while the dot cat (community TLD) pays the per transaction fees at one of the highest rate ($ 1 per transaction) as well as the fixed fees. ALAC does think that the community not for profit TLDs should be charged at a minimum rate while the lucrative TLDs should be charged normally according to well-defined rules.