One in three women say they have seen sexism at ICANN

Almost a third of female members of the ICANN community say they have witnessed sexism in the community, according to the results of a recent survey.

Asked “Have you ever experienced or witnessed what you perceive to be sexism or gender bias within the ICANN community?”, 30% of women respondents said “Yes”.

Only 17% of men answered in the affirmative. Overall, 75% of respondents said they had not seen such biases in action.

The broad survey into gender balance at ICANN was carried out over a month in June and July with a web-based tool and got 584 responses.

Participants were self-selecting, and there were slightly more female respondents than male (going against the grain of usual participation data), so the results should probably not be considered completely scientific.

The survey did not offer its own definition of sexism, so respondents were able to use their own judgement.

Of those who said they’d seen sexism in the community, most said they’d seen it at ICANN’s regular public meetings. Over a third said they’d witnessed it on mailing lists.

The older the participant, the more likely it was that they had seen behavior they considered sexist.

ICANN suggests that this could be because behaviors have changed as ICANN has matured, or that younger people have different definitions of sexism than their older peers.

Of those who said they had witnessed sexism, only four people chose to report it through ICANN channels such as the Ombudsman. Three of those people were men.

Almost half said they “chose” not to report the behavior, while 41% said they were unsure how to go about reporting it.

Some people who chose to add additional color to their responses said that they had only heard about the reportable incident second-hand.

The survey also found that almost 60% of respondents believe that there are barriers to participating in the ICANN community.

Those people were given the opportunity to rank factors that could act as barriers. Cost came out in a strong lead, but gender was found to be just as much a barrier as language.

That may be not so much a critique of the community itself, but rather of the backwards attitudes to women in some of the countries in which ICANN hosts its meetings.

Only 9% of women respondents said they have personally experienced a gender-related barrier to participation. Cost, lack of time, knowledge and geography all came out ahead.

When it came to solutions, the survey found that almost three quarters of respondents supported voluntary targets to promote gender balance in the community.

However, fewer than half of respondents — still a rather high 41% — said there should be “mandatory” quotas of women.

Unsurprisingly, support for affirmative action along mandatory lines was much higher among women than men, and much higher among the younger crowd than the old-timers.

The full report and a rather pretty infographic can be downloaded in the UN language of your choosing from here.

Election season at ICANN

Two significant votes are coming up soon in the ICANN community, with the GNSO Council looking for a new chair and the ccNSO ready to select a new appointee for the ICANN board of directors.

The ccNSO election will see an actual contest for what is believed to be the first time, with at least two candidates fighting it out.

The GNSO vote is rather less exciting, with only one candidate running unopposed.

It seems Heather Forrest, an intellectual property lawyer, occasional new gTLD consultant, and professor at the University of Tasmania, will replace GoDaddy VP of policy James Bladel as Council chair a month from now.

Forrest, currently a vice-chair, was nominated by the Non-Contracted Parties House.

The Contracted Parties House (registries and registrars), evidently fine with Forrest taking over, decided not to field a candidate, so the November 1 vote will be a formality.

In the ccNSO world, the country-codes are electing somebody to take over from Mike Silber on the ICANN board, a rather more powerful position, when his term ends a year from now.

Nominations don’t close until a week from now, but so far there are two candidates: Nigel Roberts and Pierre Ouedraogo.

Roberts, nominated for the job by Puerto Rico, runs a collection of ccTLDs for the British Channel Islands.

Ouedraogo is from Burkina Faso but does not work for its ccTLD. He is a director of the Francophone Institute for Information and New Technologies. He was nominated by Kenya.

Both men are long-time participants in ICANN and the ccNSO.

Roberts, who currently sits on the ccNSO Council, tells me he believes it’s the first time there’s been a contested election for a ccNSO-appointed ICANN board seat since the current system of elections started in 2003.

Silber has been in the job for eight years and is term-limited so cannot stand again. The other ccNSO appointee, Chris Disspain, will occupy the other seat for another two years.

Chalaby named next ICANN chair

Cherine Chalaby is to be the next chair of ICANN.

In a case of burying the lede extreme even by ICANN standards, current chair Steve Crocker announced the news in the 11th paragraph of a blog post entitled “Chairman’s Blog: The Montevideo Workshop Wrap-Up” this evening.

Crocker wrote: “the Board had an opportunity to participate in the discussion of the Board’s future leadership, and have indicated unanimous support for the future election of Cherine Chalaby as the next Chair of the ICANN Board.”

No formal election has happened yet, but the board decided to come to a consensus on which way they will vote anyway.

Chris Disspain has been selected future vice-chair using the same informal process, Crocker wrote.

The actual raising of hands will take place during the board’s Annual General Meeting in Abu Dhabi at ICANN 60 in early November.

Chalaby was born in Egypt, also holds British citizenship, and lives in ICANN’s home town of Los Angeles.

He’s the first ICANN chair to come from the financial services world, having served a career at Accenture before joining Rasmala Investments.

He’s been a member of the ICANN board since the Nominating Committee selected him in December 2010 and was elected vice-chair a few years back.

His stint as chair will not be long. I believe he’s term-limited and will have to step aside at the end of 2019.

Crocker, an early internet pioneer, has been chair since 2011. No doubt ICANN is planning a big send-off for him at ICANN 60.

More delay for Amazon as ICANN punts rejected gTLD

Amazon is going to have to wait a bit longer to discover whether its 2012 application for the gTLD .amazon will remain rejected.

ICANN’s board of directors at the weekend discussed whether to revive the application in light of the recent Independent Review Process panel ruling that the bid had been kicked out for no good reason.

Instead of making a firm decision, or punting it to the Government Advisory Committee (as I had predicted), the board instead referred the matter to a subcommittee for further thought.

The newly constituted Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee, which has taken over key functions of the Board Governance Committee, has been asked to:

review and consider the Panel’s recommendation that the Board “promptly re-evaluate Amazon’s applications” and “make an objective and independent judgment regarding whether there are, in fact, well-founded, merits-based public policy reasons for denying Amazon’s applications,” and to provide options for the Board to consider in addressing the Panel’s recommendation.

The notion of a “prompt” resolution appears to be subjective, but Amazon might not have much longer to wait for a firmer decision.

While the BAMC’s charter requires it to have meetings at least quarterly, if it follows the practice of its predecessor they will be far more frequent.

It’s possible Amazon could get an answer by the time of the public meeting in Abu Dhabi at the end of next month.

ICANN’s board did also resolve to immediately pay Amazon the $163,045.51 in fees the IRP panel said was owed.

The .amazon gTLD application, along with its Chinese and Japanese versions, was rejected by ICANN a few years ago purely on the basis of consensus GAC advice, led by the geographic name collisions concerns of Peru and Brazil.

However, the IRP panel found that the GAC advice appeared to based on not a great deal more than whim, and that the ICANN board should have at least checked whether there was a sound rationale to reject the bids before doing so.

Will ICANN punt on .amazon again?

Amazon is piling pressure onto ICANN to finally approve its five-year-old gTLD applications for .amazon, but it seems to me the e-commerce giant will have a while to wait yet.

The company sent a letter to ICANN leadership this week calling on it to act quickly on the July ruling of an Independent Review Process panel that found ICANN had breached its own bylaws when it rejected the .amazon and and Chinese and Japanese transliterations.

Amazon’s letter said:

Such action is necessary because there is no sovereign right under international or national law to the name “Amazon,” because there are no well-founded and substantiated public policy reasons to block our Applications, because we are committed to using the TLDs in a respectful manner, and because the Board should respect the IRP accountability mechanism.

ICANN had denied the three applications based on nothing more than the consensus advice of its Governmental Advisory Committee, which had been swayed by the arguments of primarily Brazil and Peru that there were public policy reasons to keep the gTLD available for possible future use by its own peoples.

The string “Amazon”, among its many uses, is of course the name of a river and a rain forest that covers much of the South American continent.

But the IRP panel decided that the ICANN board should have at least required the GAC to explain its public policy arguments, rather than just accepting its advice as a mandate from on-high.

Global Domains Division chief Akram Atallah had testified before the panel that consensus GAC advice sets a bar “too high for the Board to say no.”

But the governmental objections “do not appear to be based on well-founded public policy concerns that justify the denial of the applications” the IRP panelists wrote.

The panel, in a 2-to-1 ruling, instructed ICANN to reopen Amazon’s applications.

Since the July ruling, ICANN’s board has not discussed how to proceed, but it seems likely that the matter will come up at its Montevideo, Uruguay retreat later this month.

No agenda for this meeting has yet been published, but there will be an unprecedented public webcast of the full formal board meeting, September 23.

The Amazon letter specifically asks the ICANN board of directors to not refer the .amazon matter back to the GAC for further advice, but I think that’s probably the most likely outcome.

I say this largely because while ICANN’s bylaws specifically allow it to reject GAC advice, it has cravenly avoided such a confrontation for most of its history.

It has on occasion even willfully misinterpreted GAC advice in order to appear that it has accepted it when it has not.

The GAC, compliantly, regularly provides pieces of advice that its leaders have acknowledged are deliberately vague and open to interpretation (for a reason best known to the politicians themselves).

It seems to me the most likely next step in the .amazon case is for the board to ask the GAC to reaffirm or reconsider its objection, giving the committee the chance to save face — and avoid a lengthy mediation process — by providing the board with something less than a consensus objection.

If ICANN were to do this, my feeling is that the GAC at large would probably be minded to stick to its guns.

But it only takes one government to voice opposition to advice for it to lose its “consensus” status, making it politically much easier for ICANN to ignore.

Hypothetically, the US government could return to its somewhat protectionist pre-2014 position of blocking consensus on .amazon, but that might risk fanning the flames of anti-US sentiment.

While the US no longer has its unique role in overseeing ICANN’s IANA function, it still acts as the jurisdictional overlord for the legal organization, which some other governments still hate.

A less confrontational approach might be to abstain and to allow friendly third-party governments to roadblock consensus, perhaps by emphasizing the importance of ICANN being seen to accountable in the post-transition world.

Anyway, this is just my gut premonition on how this could play out, based on the track records of ICANN and the GAC.

If ICANN can be relied on for anything, it’s to never make a decision on something today if it can be put off until tomorrow.