In a scathing letter from Chuck Gomes, Vice President of Verisign to Fadi Cheladeto CEO of ICANN Mr. Gomes lists 6 “examples of ICANN’s Unaccountable Actions as Requested by ICANN CEO Fadi Chelade”
The letter itself fills in the back story as it is an outgrowth of a discussion that the two men had during “the GNSO discussion at the recent ICANN meeting in Durban. ”
“In that exchange, I indicated that ICANN was not holding itself accountable and that ICANN was elevating risk- avoidance over true accountability.”
“In response, you asked me to send you a list of items that I felt displayed this behavior by ICANN.”
“This letter contains a short list of such items that I have prepared in response to your request.”
“By no means is this list intended to be exhaustive of the examples that could be identified to prove my point.”
“Rather, this list is intended to be illustrative of the kind of unaccountable actions we have seen from ICANN in the recent past.”
The letter then goes on to list 6 “Examples of ICANN’s Unaccountable Actions as Requested by ICANN CEO Fadi Chelade”
“1. One prominent example of ICANN’s unwillingness to be held accountable is with its agreements with registries and registrars.
Whether it is a desire to minimize the number of resources devoted to contractual compliance, reduce the cycles to achieve policy completion or to increase the amount of control that ICANN has in this multi-stakeholder model, these agreements from the start have been slanted to ICANN’s favor and burdensome for applicants, registrars, and registries.
All risks have been flowed down to registries and registrars with requirements to indemnify ICANN while removing any chance for the contracted parties to take action against ICANN, if warranted. This was compounded further in 2013 when the ICANN staff, in a surprise move, decided to impose the unilateral right to amend clauses in the new gTLD registry agreements. To this point of accountability, Verisign said at the time in a public comment the following:
In the current framework described in Section 7.6, ICANN cannot be held accountable because there is no mechanism to do so.
ICANN refuses to allow any dispute about the “public interest” to be settled by a court of competent jurisdiction.
Instead, ICANN is requiring arbitration lasting exactly one day.
This response alone is telling: How could judicial review of a regulatory authority’S unilateral actions possibly be against the “public interest”?…
