Summary

  • The GAC's 26 October Bali communiqué asks ICANN's review redesign to retain the full required assessment of how the committee interacts with the Board and wider community, with a clear allocation between two proposed reviews.
  • ICANN's current Bylaws give the GAC control over its internal review mechanism while assigning assessment of its interaction with ICANN to the Accountability and Transparency Review. The June draft proposes moving the latter assessment to a Structural Review.

Imagine an inspector transferred to a new office while the inspection checklist stays on the old desk. Everyone can point to a room; no one can say who checked the actual work. That is the small bureaucratic trap inside ICANN's large Review of Reviews draft. It would divide scheduled work between an Accountability and Transparency Review and a Structural Review. The draft places the assessment of GAC interaction with the Board and the wider ICANN community in the structural room.

In its Bali communiqué of 26 October, the Governmental Advisory Committee gave that move a three-part test: keep the whole existing assessment, allocate it clearly between the two reviews, and avoid doing the same job twice. It also wants its own review arrangements preserved. This is a question about two different objects, easily blurred by the word “review.”

The current Bylaws separate them. Section 4.4 excludes the GAC from the ordinary independent organizational reviews of other ICANN bodies and instructs it to provide its own review mechanisms. Section 4.6(b)(ii)(B), meanwhile, asks the Accountability and Transparency Review to assess the GAC's interaction with the Board and community, including whether ICANN effectively considers governments' public-policy input on technical DNS coordination. One asks how the committee examines itself. The other asks what happens when its advice reaches ICANN.

The June draft proposes moving that second question to a Structural Review. A footnote expressly assigns the GAC-Board and community interaction assessment there; the proposed accountability review would still examine ICANN's wider performance against its mission and commitments. The new architecture will require a Bylaws change. The Reviews Cross Community Group is preparing a second draft for another public consultation, according to ICANN's consultation record.

The GAC raised the worry in its August submission. A broad structural review and an on-demand track could stray into its internal remit, it argued; the move of the interaction test could also produce overlap. Bali turns that concern into a direct instruction for the coming text. Readers should be able to identify the review that examines how advice was received, the review that examines institutional design, and the mechanism by which the GAC examines its own operation. Three tasks; three identifiable owners.