Letter to ICANN on NCSG

Posted by Pranesh Prakash at Jul 28, 2009 10:00 AM |
The Centre for Internet and Society sent the following mail to ICANN regarding their attempt to impose their own charter for a Noncommercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG), instead of accepting the one drafted by the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC).

Dear Sir or Madam,

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society - Bangalore. We are a Bangalore based research and advocacy organisation promoting consumer and citizen rights on the Internet. We currently focus on IPR reform, IPR alternatives and electronic accessibility by the disabled. Please see our website <http://cis-india.org> for more information about us and our activities.

It has come to our attention that ICANN is imposing the ICANN staff-drafted charter for a Noncommercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) and ignoring the version drafted by civil society. As you know, the civil society version was drafted using a consensus process and more than 80 international noncommercial organizations, including mine, support it.

This is an unacceptable situation since the governance structures contained within the NCSG charter determine how effectively noncommercial users can influence policy decisions at ICANN in years to come. On behalf of Internet users in India - I would strongly urge you to reject the staff drafted version of the charter and adopt the version drafted and endorsed by civil society.

Best wishes,

Sunil Abraham
Executive Director
Centre for Internet and Society