[Internal-cg] ICANN Board Concerns about CCWG Proposed Model -- My Assessment

[Drazek, Keith]

FYI, my summary/distillation of the concerns expressed by the ICANN Board in response to the CCWG proposal:

-- Introducing a different governance structure, i.e. membership, is new, untested, and cannot be proven to resist capture in the limited time available to meet the September 2016 date.
-- Shifting authority from the Board to an untested membership body is potentially destabilizing and will be difficult or impossible to sell as not introducing risk at a delicate time.
-- If we're going to shift authority, we must also shift a commensurate level of accountability, and the current SOs and ACs do not have sufficient accountability at this time.
-- ICANN and its SOs/ACs need to be safe from capture from outside and from within; empowering the SOs and ACs without clear safeguards is problematic.
-- Concentrating power in a new "sole membership" body is not balanced if it doesn't include all community members, and two groups (SSAC and RSSAC) have said they want to remain advisory.
-- Shifting from consensus-based decision-making to reliance on a voting structure is not consistent with the multi-stakeholder model.
-- The CCWG recommendation is too complex and difficult to explain/understand, so we need to make smaller, incremental changes that are more easily implemented and understood.
-- A recommendation requiring a substantial governance restructuring will suggest that ICANN is currently broken -- a politically risky message going into the transition.

This is my personal interpretation only.

Keith Drazek