ICANN Meeting in Silicon Valley
ICANN opened its first 2011 meeting at Westin Hotel on 33
5 Powell Street, San Francisco. The meeting in Spring attracted more than 1000 participants from around the world. I spent a very busy week. Many people saw me running from one meeting room to another, which proved both the hectic schedule and my hard-working.
I spent most of the time at At-Large Meeting series of course. I chaired the APRALO Monthly Meeting on March 15 (17:00pm local time) and invited the Chair, Associate Chair and a group of Members of NomCom to do an outreach to the AP Community. I led the all the policy discussions on IDNs, IANA Review, Geographic Regions and new gTLDs and allocated the works to pertinent working groups or RALO members. However, actually all these works bounced back to me. On the at-large or apac mailing list, everyone can see that I myself drafted almost all the policy statements (recently on At-Large Response to GAC-Board Scorecard Consultation on trademark measures), responded to questionnaire (recently on NTIA Questions on IANA) and edited and organized the regional responses (recently on geographic review). With respect to planning of APRALO showcase, although a talkative VC blurred his allocated program agenda item on outreach and jumped to this item, I managed to invite the Chair of NARALO Organization Committee to give a briefing. His talk was very helpful to focus the work on organization, sponsorship and outreach. I’ve circulated the messages to apac list but only one person who is not affiliated with any member ALS volunteered. Pathetic! How long can I take pains to make the whole organization operate, despite all the free-riders? I had been looked forward to being replaced by March 2011, but all the people wanted to use me for longer time. The election must be completed in May and I will step down as the Chair of APRALO on or before June 1, 2011. That is FOR SURE.
I attended the Joint RALO meeting and pointed out that those inactive and non-participative ALSes should either be de-certified or withdraw from the RALO. It is ridiculous that an entity that had applied for to be certified as an ALS and committed to the RALO disappeared or refused to participate anymore. It is pointless to argue for loss of interests. If so, the uninterested ALS should leave at-large system voluntarily.
Among the policy meeting, the ALAC-GAC Joint Session was interesting. Most of the time was on the Scorecard consultation. I made a point that was supported by most at-large representatives from Europe, Latin America and Africa. I pointed out not all the governments in the diversified GAC had the same level of demand for trademark protection in new gTLDs and as a result they may not share the same views, but the people outside hardly heard from the those government that don’t seek overwhelming trademark protection. The response from the Chair of GAC was that IPR issues may have been traded off for negotiation on other issues. Well said, it has always been true among other international law and policy setting.
At other policy sessions, I made the comments, suggestions or asked questions on IANA Review, Government Objection against community-based new gTLD strings, IDN ccTLDs, ICANN bylaw review (WT-A), geographical area review (triple dilemma in AP: a cross-regional Small Island Chapter, a subregional or independent regional West Asia or Arab and a want-to-join-Europe Central Asia), interpretation policy and UDRP review, etc. What a busy week!
On Wednesday March 16, I took Caltrain to go to Stanford Law School. The trip was so smooth that I found the Law School Building effortlessly. At the Caltrain station, I got on the Stanford Shuttle and correctly got off at the Student Union near the Law School. The meetings with Stanford Law Professors were interesting and productive. The campus is indeed beautiful and magnificent. Hopefully those imported palm trees could survive the chilling weather Palo Alto.
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