Summary

  • In the first round, Chuck Gomes led Cavalli by thirteen votes to six overall. He still could not win: the chair needed enough support on both sides of the council.
  • Cavalli helped commission work on recovering wrongly transferred domains, then took on drafting and candidate-assessment assignments. Those decisions brought the council's procedures into contact with problems far beyond its meetings.

Thirteen votes for Chuck Gomes. Six for Olga Cavalli. No winner.

That was the result at the GNSO Council's meeting in Seoul on 28 October 2009. Cavalli's rival had more than twice her support overall, yet the election had to go to another ballot. To understand why, the votes had to be counted in two separate piles.

The council, ICANN's policy body for generic domain names, was holding its first meeting under a new two-house structure. One house brought together registries and registrars: the businesses that run domain registries and sell registrations. The other brought together commercial and non-commercial groups. Nominating-committee appointees also sat in the council; Cavalli belonged to the second house.

A chair needed 60% support in each house. Gomes had swept the first, seven votes to none. In the second, he and Cavalli had taken six each. His unanimous backing on one side could not make up for a tie on the other.

Under the procedures adopted that day, the leading candidate now faced a different contest: Gomes against “none of the above”. He won seven votes in one house and ten in the other. This time Cavalli supported him. She became interim vice-chair of her house, as the election announcement confirms.

The change in her vote is on the record; her reasons are not. What the tally does show is how the new structure made support across the two houses decisive, even for a candidate with a comfortable overall lead.

When a domain name goes missing

The council's work could be considerably more urgent than choosing its own chair. In January 2005, a hijacked domain had disrupted service for thousands of customers of the internet provider PANIX. Email went to the wrong servers, then bounced or waited for redelivery. ICANN's security report described the disruption and said PANIX had been unable to establish whether the affected mail had been misused. Losing control of one internet address had affected many people who did not own it.

In July 2009, the council cited that report when commissioning a working group to examine domain-transfer problems. Cavalli joined the unanimous vote. The questions were practical: should there be an urgent return process? How should an improper transfer be undone? What rules or best practices should govern registrar locks that prevent transfers?

The vote opened that work. A working group would consider the questions and make recommendations. For domain holders, the eventual value lay in a recovery procedure they could use; for councillors, the immediate task was to give the problem a route through the policy process.

A vote, a drafting team, a crowded diary

ICANN's nominating committee had selected Cavalli in September 2007. Her duties began on 2 November, for a term ending at the 2009 annual meeting. The committee reappointed her in August 2009.

The meeting records fill out what she did with the seat. Before the Seoul election, she voted against holding a secret ballot; that proposal failed. In February 2010, she volunteered for the team drafting the terms of work on vertical integration. She also joined the team assessing candidates for ICANN's accountability and transparency review. The council approved its candidate-endorsement process by 18 votes to one abstention, with her support.

Then there was the problem of getting through the work. Cavalli reported that the effort to set priorities continued every week and was taking longer than expected. Staff separately described overstretched institutional and community resources. The council could agree to start something in a meeting; carrying it forward depended on people finding time between meetings. Her report makes that less conspicuous part of governance visible.

Another institution, another kind of influence

Cavalli also appears on the IGF advisory-group roster from 2007. Programme preparation was part of that group's work. The Rio meeting archive records its September meeting in Geneva and the draft programme it revised for the forum in November.

Here the job was to help organise discussion. Under the 2005 Tunis Agenda, the forum's process was non-binding, with no oversight function or day-to-day technical control of the internet. Cavalli's two affiliations therefore describe different kinds of experience: preparing a forum's programme and participating in a policy council's decisions.

Across these early assignments, the recurring work was specific: commissioning an investigation into transfer rules, drafting a remit, assessing candidates, planning a programme. It required collective decisions and people willing to do the work that followed. The Seoul election gave the first part an unusually clear numerical expression. Seven votes out of seven on one side were not enough.