ICANN to review reviews after review review request fails

An effort by ICANN’s At-Large community to force the Org to stick to its bylaws commitments to periodically review its accountability and transparency has failed after nobody else supported it.

As I reported last month, ALAC petitioned its Empowered Community co-members to get ICANN to overturn its decision to delay Accountability and Transparency Review Team 4, which is already more than a year late.

The other EC members — Government Advisory Committee, the Address Supporting Organization, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the Generic Names Supporting Organization — had until July 10 to file their letters of support or objection.

But it received no support and the ccNSO actively objected. The threshold for the petition to go ahead was three votes in favor and no more than one vote against.

The ccNSO pointed out that the current cycle of constantly reviewing itself is broken and getting worse over time. It instead called for a fundamental change in how ICANN reviews itself:

We strongly believe that breaking this vicious cycle can only be achieved if the community pauses and critically assesses the current review system. Specifically, the community should evaluate the breadth and number of reviews by looking at purpose, scope, frequency and associated workload of all ICANN Bylaw mandated reviews (a review of reviews), before embarking again on an Accountability and Transparency Review, or any other Bylaw mandated review.

The GNSO Council had a motion on its table last week that would have expressed non-support for the ALAC’s petition, but a vote was deferred until August, by which point it will be moot anyway.

The ASO and GAC do not appear to have publicly expressed an opinion.

It was the first time any community group has attempted to get the Empowered Community to flex its powers over ICANN. Since Org’s split from the US government nine years ago, the EC has been essentially ICANN’s sovereign body.

The petition being thrown out enables either, depending on your point of view: a) a horrifying, bylaws-defying power grab by Org that threatens transparency and accountability or b) a common-sense step away from an interminable, soul-crushing, resource-sapping cycle of endless navel-gazing.

What it means is that ICANN is going to conduct a meta-review, reviewing how it conducts reviews, and then will fiddle with its bylaws to implement a new renew regime.

ICANN’s mighty overlord flexes on transparency

ICANN is heading into uncharted waters after a key community group flexed its powers to hold the Org accountable for a recent board decision.

The At-Large Advisory Committee has become the first of ICANN’s overseers to push for a formal objection to ICANN’s decision to delay its next large-scale accountability review.

In layman’s terms, the ALAC wants the other DPs of the EC — the ASO, the ccNSO, the GNSO, and the GAC — to support its ECRP for a CRR challenging ICANN’s decision to delay ATRT4.

All clear? Great. Thanks for clicking.

Or… perhaps that all deserves some unpicking.

ALAC, the group that represents end-users at ICANN, is one of the five members of the Empowered Community — the group from which, under its bylaws, ICANN derives its powers and authority over domain names and such.

The other Decisional Participants are the Government Advisory Committee, the Address Supporting Organization, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the Generic Names Supporting Organization.

One of the EC’s powers is the ability to file a Community Reconsideration Request challenging an ICANN board or staff decision, if three of the DPs support the request and no more than one objects.

ALAC has become the first EC member since ICANN split from the US government in 2016 to formally kick off the process of scrounging up support for such a reconsideration request.

It’s filed an Empowered Community Reconsideration Petition, giving the other four DPs 21 days to vote yay or nay on whether the request should be formally filed.

Its beef is with the ICANN board’s decision in May to delay indefinitely the fourth Accountability and Transparency Review Team, ATRT4, and replace it with a CEO-led meta-review.

ATRTs are community-led reviews that ICANN, according to its bylaws, have to carry out every five years. ATRT3 kicked off at the end of 2018 and concluded in 2020 but its recommendations have not yet been fully implemented by ICANN.

ATRT4 has already been delayed for a year once by the board, last April, but the board wants the delay to continue so the community can take a step back and review, as one group put it, “why we review, what we should review and how best to review”.

I’m not making this up. One review is being replaced with a broader, CEO-led, meta-review that reviews the reviews. I haven’t even mentioned the Pilot Holistic Review or the various Continuous Improvement Programs.

The root rationale here relates to intellectual bandwidth. Arguably the biggest issue facing ICANN in recent years is its perceived (or actual) inability to get anything done in a timely fashion, and part of the reason for that is that community members, most of whom have day jobs or are volunteers, are forced to spend so much time navel-gazing or entangled in Tolkienesque cobwebs of red tape.

ALAC’s petition (pdf) accused the board of “usurping” the community by delaying ATRT4, in violation of its bylaws:

The EC, and by extension the ICANN community, believes that this continuing contravention of the Bylaws and disregard for ICANN’s Core Values poses a serious threat to ICANN’s mandate… It also significantly undermines trust in, and protection of, ICANN’s multistakeholder model of governance. This brings about a real risk of negative actions against ICANN, which could result in the loss of its mandate or could substantially risk the credibility and effectiveness of ICANN’s multistakeholder model.

It wants the decision to delay ATRT4 reversed. The question is, will it be able to muster up support from two other Decisional Participants, as required by the bylaws? I’d say that ALAC’s most-natural ally is the GAC, with the GNSO, seemingly baffled by the ALAC’s filing, the most likely to object.

The other four DPs have until a minute before midnight July 10 to submit expressions of support or objection.