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ICANN director withdrew gTLD application

Kevin Murphy, August 6, 2012, 22:36:16 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN director Judith Vasquez applied for a new gTLD but then withdrew the bid at the last minute.
That’s among a tapestry of factoids relating to conflicts of interest to emerge from the minutes of recent meetings of ICANN’s board of directors that were published this week.
It’s also emerged that the New gTLD Program Committee — established as a subset of the board “without conflicted members” — actually now has four “directors with conflicts that have been mitigated”.
Vasquez, a businessperson heavily involved in media and telecoms in the Philippines, according to the minutes of the May 6 meeting:

disclosed that she withdrew her new gTLD application through the customer service center, though the withdrawal cannot be completed through the TAS due to the system being offline.

As you may recall, the TLD Application System (TAS) went down April 12, suggesting that Vasquez’s bid was withdrawn close to or after that date — the original deadline for filing new gTLD applications.
It’s not know what gTLD she (or a company she works for) was applying for, or why the application was withdrawn.
The potential for a conflict in her case was first noted in her published statement of interest when she joined the board in October last year.
But as I’ve noted before, Vasquez continued to vote on matters relating to the new gTLD program up until February 7.
She’s since joined the New gTLD Program Committee.
From the same May 6 minutes, it has emerged that directors Bill Graham and Kuo-Wei Wu were both probed for conflicts by a board subcommittee — set up a year ago in the wake of Peter Dengate Thrush’s move from the ICANN chair to Top Level Domain Holdings — which:

found that both of them had conflicts, but they had been already mitigated to the satisfaction of the subcommittee. And, therefore, the subcommittee determined that those two individuals, though conflicts were identified, had mitigated those conflicts with regard to the New gTLD Program.

Details of these conflicts have not been published. Both men have sat on the committee since its inception April 10.
A non-voting board liaison, Thomas Narten, was also considered conflicted but sufficiently “mitigated” to join the committee. He works as a software engineer for IBM, which has applied for a dot-brand.
Two other directors — Sebastien Bachollet and Bertrand de La Chapelle — were identified as having conflicts which they tried and apparently failed to mitigate to the satisfaction of the board.
Bachollet was unhappy with that classification, according to a statement he entered into the minutes several weeks later, which partly reads:

I still disagree with the conclusion of the Subcommittee and on the proposed mitigating measures. I will not enter into detail here, but now I have to accept this decision and I do.
I take this opportunity to underline that there is no appeal procedure in place allowing a second view on the matter.

Bachollet is a director of the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, .xxx’s nominal sponsoring organization, which is funded by ICM Registry, an applicant for three porn-related gTLDs.
The policy think-tank founded by De La Chapelle is or was funded by companies that applied for new gTLDs or offered services to applicants, according to his latest statement of interest.
The New gTLD Program Committee has 12 voting directors at present, three of which have been previously identified as conflicted but with their conflicts mitigated.
According to the May 6 minutes, ICANN’s chief lawyer John Jeffrey explained, in response to a query from de La Chapelle, why this is not a problem:

The General Counsel and Secretary explained that there are situations where a conflict may still exist, but mitigation can be completed that will remove that conflict from having an impact on the fiduciary responsibilities to ICANN or the other entity with whom the conflict may have arisen. Those directors or liaisons may then participate as if they were nonconflicted, acting without conflict in the decisions they make for the Board. He also noted that there could be situations where, upon mitigation, there may not be a conflict at all.

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Comments (5)

  1. JB says:
    August 6, 2012 at 10:43 pm

    Kevin
    Do you know the names of the members on the ‘New gTLD Program Committee’ and the companies they work for?
    Thanks

    Reply
  2. isis says:
    August 7, 2012 at 12:33 pm

    The existence of conflicts is neither unusual nor surprising. What is astonishing is that ICANN board members (Bachollet for example) would be incapable of identifying the most fundamental of conflicts.

    Reply
  3. Adrian Kinderis says:
    August 7, 2012 at 10:30 pm

    I believe the reason Vasquez stated during one of the public sessions was that she wanted to see what the process was like and to understand what it was like to be an applicant (???) She wasn’t very coherent and I couldn’t really understand her point.

    Reply

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