ICANN day 5
The day begins with the Good meeting the Bad. The At Large Constituency (ALAC) briefing the Registrar Constituency (RC) on their planned "Summit", which if funded would bring lots of people from the hundred-plus Internet Society chapters and similar "at large" but not otherwise "stakeholders" in ICANN, and begging we wealthy, miserly, penny pinching Registrars for funding, or a nod of approval.
The irony is that the real reason the RC votes to cut ICANN funding for travel isn't beacuse the RC is opposed to funding travel by non-funded participants to ICANN meeting, but because we can't find a way not to be paying the business class air fare and five star hotel costs of the Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC), the so-called Commercial and Business Users Constituency (CBUC), and the so-called Internet Services Provicer Constituency (ISPC). The latter three are wicked non-poor and the cross-corrolation of their voting patterns is in the high 80 percentiles, which is a polite means of observing that the issues advanced by commercial and business entities and network operators at ICANN are profoundly unlikely to be unrelated to intellectual property. They get snippy when we use the C word, "captured", or the S word "shells".
Anyway, whether the venue is Cairo or Mexico City, I used my mic time to ask the organizers to bring more than just "policy" to the event, but that they make an effort to help identify the requirements for scripts their communities use, and send that data to us, then I flit off to the "IDN Workshop".
The close of the day is the open mic, which I actually manage to pass on this time, followed by the Board voting on things decided well before the open mic period.
Structural reform from the multi-stakeholder form (Ira Magaziner's leperous legacy) to contractual parties and non-contractual parties, with the voting not changed or slightly changed or more than slightly changed from the present balance of powers (see Good, Bad, and inferred Ugly, above) passes in part, and the new gTLD process passes.
