[Advisors] Get Canada connected coalition

[Evan Leibovitch]

On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 20:57, Marita Moll <mmoll at ca.inter.net> wrote:

> Hello advisors. Hope you are all well and managing your way through this co-vid
> crisis. I have just finished a week of middle of the night meetings at
> virtual ICANN68 -- Kuala Lumpar time zone. This is the future of
> international meetings for some time to come, I'm afraid. It is simply
> too dangerous to have such gatherings until a reliable vaccine is found.
>

As someone who attended ICANN meetings for more than a decade, let me offer
a contrarian view -- that having its meetings online is actually the best
thing that could happen for the public interest.

A virtual meeting does not require ICANN's At-Large and other
public-interest stakeholders to beg for the funding that enables us to
participate. It truly does enable (almost) anyone to participate, anyone to
listen in from their home. And while not everyone has or can afford
high-speed Internet, access to the meetings is now orders of magnitude less
expensive than airfare to Malaysia.

Further, this kind of access becomes a great equalizer. You and I have the
same access to the ear of ICANN leadership as the industry lobbyists.
Expense accounts to pay for after-meeting drinks at the bar to push
industry interests (where far too many of ICANN process and administrative
decisions are made) don't vanish but are far harder to accomplish.

Consider that ICANN just made perhaps its biggest decision of the decade
(from the perspective of public interest) this year when it rejected the
application to turn the .ORG registry to a for-profit owned by hedge funds.
It didn't need lots of in-person meetings to do the right thing, arguably
having those would have enabled the vested interests to put more pressure
on ICANN to let it pass.

If the ICANN At-Large Advisory Committee was offered a decent R&D budget,
and the ability to actually survey the public rather than just guess at its
needs -- with the tradeoff of having to drastically reduce travel and do
more virtually -- that's a choice it should take in a heartbeat. But it
won't. Too many of its members (with the notable exception of a few
including Marita) are amateur politicians who enjoy pretending they're the
UNSC three times a year, in a cavernous meeting room with real-time
interpretation. Yes there is the reduction of human contact, but that could
be offset in a less expensive way if At-Large held its own global
conferences OUTSIDE of regular ICANN meetings. That way  it could focus on
advancing the public interest rather than just knee-jerk responses to
whatever trivial issue ICANN wants to burn volunteer time chasing now.

Just my opinion.

- Evan
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