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Why ICANN’s CEO did not vote on .xxx

Kevin Murphy, April 11, 2011, 07:58:58 (UTC), Domain Policy

President and CEO Rod Beckstrom has explained his decision to abstain from voting on ICM Registry’s .xxx top-level domain when it came before the ICANN board last month.

As expected, Beckstrom provided substantially the same explanation for his abstention as he did at the Brussels meeting last June – not on the merits of .xxx, but because he had legal concerns.

Specifically, he abstained because he objected to one of the majority findings of an Independent Review Panel, which forced .xxx back to the table last year after ICANN had tried to reject it.

Beckstrom wrote, in a recently published statement (pdf):

while I accept the contribution to ICANN’s accountability and transparency provided by the existence and the use of the independent panel review process, I nonetheless remain concerned about the determination by two of the three panelists that the ICANN board should not use business judgment in the conduct of its affairs.

This refers to the “business judgment rule”, a piece of California law under which courts give deference to the judgment of company directors, unless their decisions were made in bad faith.

If an IRP panel – the last port of appeal for companies upset with ICANN’s decisions – were required to use this rule, it would substantially raise the bar for a successful complaint.

But the panel in the case of ICM Registry versus ICANN (the only such panel to date) decided, by a 2-1 vote, that ICANN’s actions should be “appraised not deferentially but objectively.”

This allowed ICM to win its case by merely showing ICANN had acted outside its bylaws, and not necessarily in bad faith.

The dissenting IRP panelist, Dickran Tevrizian, wrote: “The rejection of the business judgment rule will open the floodgates to increased collateral attacks on the decisions of the ICANN Board of Directors”.

However, the IRP did not specifically rule that ICANN “should not use business judgment” as Beckstrom’s statement suggests, just that the IRP was not obliged to defer to it.

Beckstrom’s statement also gives a shout-out to the Governmental Advisory Committee:

In addition, I note the concerns of the GAC, which while not expressed as a clear decision, was nonetheless directional.

As I previously blogged, ICANN approved the .xxx contract over the objections of some members of the GAC, using the fact that the GAC’s official advice was vague enough to be worked around without explicitly rejecting it.

Beckstrom, incidentally, did not even sign the .xxx contract with ICM, which I believe is a first for an ICANN registry contract. It was instead signed by general counsel John Jeffrey.

(via InternetNews.me)

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