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At Large Report to Council 14/12/02

Report on the At Large (5 December 2002)

Status: Received at Council Meeting 021214

1. "At Large" as directed by ICANN. On 31 October 2002, the ICANN Board adopted new Bylaws that establish an At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC). According to Article XI, Section 2(4) of the new Bylaws "The role of the At-Large Advisory Committee ('ALAC') shall be to consider and provide advice on the activities of ICANN, insofar as they relate to the interests of individual Internet users." The ALAC is expected to come in effect around the 15th of December. It's members will strictly be "Icann approved".

2. http://www.at-large.org/ Kent Crispin's website listing "at Large structures"

3. ALOC (at large organizing committee-Esther Dyson and Denise Michel) Currently with the following members: The At-Large Organizing Committee currently includes the following members:

4. Icannatlarge bottom up

Icannatlarge has now 1049 registered members. See http://icannatlarge.org/view.phpsortorder=chrono

The Icannatlarge website situation

Shortly before the ICANN Bucharest meeting in June, Bret Fausett took over as hostmaster for icannatlarge.com, while I was still webmaster. I had asked him to take up that role in order to effect some separation of control. The hostmaster can lock out the webmaster.

Since April 2002, I had been asking to be replaced as webmaster, mostly due to the serious funding- and time shortfall. Obstruction and inaction on InternetNZ's pledged payment did not help either. For lack of anyone else stepping up to volunteer, I continued as webmaster until October 19.2002.

On 27 August Joanna Lane, then Panel Chair, pushed the Panel to change the domain name icannatlarge.com to one that did not have the .com extension. This caused a break with the status quo and brought about a major diversion in organizing a vote for a new Domain name.

On 25 September the members voted to have icannatlarge.org as their preferred Domain Name. This led to Joanna Lane's resignation immediately after the vote was made public, ostensibly because she had been intimidated by possible legal action over having any icann string in the domain name.

(the defeated choices were: AtLarge.org ,netatlarge.org, worldatlarge.org and internetatlarge.org)

Jefsey Morfin owned the name icannatlarge.org, but immediately after the vote, his ownership lapsed and the name was picked up by Marc Schneiders and subsequently passed on to Hans Klein. The Domain did not resolve until the end of October.

On 19 October the Panel resolved a motion of Hans Klein and Jamie Love that Bret Fausett should be the new webmaster as my replacement.

Bret Fausett's sole action was to remove "all" text on the Front Page that was embarrassing for ICANN (such as the "palace coup" speech of Chuck Costello, member of ICANN's' At Large Study Committee) and replace it with a Shanghai meeting announcement. Bret: "I see no reason to have anything remotely controversial on the front page". (Bret Fausett had formally endorsed Alejandro Pisanty as Board Member, a notorious opponent of At Large elections and Chair of the Board's Evolution and Reform Committee). After that the site remained embarrassingly out-of-date for nearly a month. On November 3, 2002 the Forum section of the icannatlarge.org website was defaced, ostensibly by a hacker/intruder. See http://www.icannatlarge.com/forum/viewtopic.php"t=278 for a screenshot of the defacement.

Bret Fausett immediately closed down the whole Forum, without determining the nature of the intrusion. (I found out later that there had been a simple misuse of the Forum Admin password and no deeper penetration.)

Despite repeated requests Bret Fausett did NOT bring the Forum back on line, thereby restricting all discussion to the mailing list atlarge-discuss@fitug.de , with a limited number of subscribers and under control of ICANN-friendly Thomas Roessler.

On Nov 28., after nearly a month of frustration and asking had passed and nothing had happened, I took it upon myself to revive the discussion forum with all its content, under the original icannatlarge.com domain.

I did revive the entire old website along with the Forum, with a front-page notice announcing that the Forum and the original website had been revived and that the content of the two sites was likely to start to diverge. As soon as I had the time, I replaced the ICANN logo and the title header on the .com site and announced a de-registration facility in the Forum. I have now pointed the member sign-up links to the icannatlarge.org site in order to preserve a single membership list under control by the elected Panel.

In the last few days a large number of changes has been made to the icannatlarge.org site by Vittorio Bertola, now both supervising Panel Chair and de facto webmaster of that site. Please compare both sites now: http://www.icannatlarge.org/, http://www.icannatlarge.com/

Further complications David Farrar, who participates on the atlarge-discuss list and who had been silent when the Forum had been removed, saw fit to react to my salvage action as follows:

"Bret is the lawyer here but in my lay opinion this is a clear breach of a number of laws, even though icannatlarge.org is unincorporated. If Joop refuses to destroy the membership list and stop using the logos etc then legal action could well be an option. As Joop is in NZ this might be the natural jurisdiction and I believe I could find a lawyer to act for no charge. "

Cr. Farrar has not retracted this preposterous posting but has continued making further unsubstantiated personal attacks. As the InternetNZ Council has committed itself to support for the icannatlarge effort, it needs to be informed about this. Although a legal fight about the existence of the icannatlarge.com site could well be in the interest of At Large outreach and I am in fact quite keen to see which interests would fund such "pro bono" legal action, I feel that such a public scrap between two councillors would not be in the best interest of the image of InternetNZ.

Joop Teernstra

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