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Accountability Structures Expert Panel

In fulfillment of ATRT Recommendations 23 and 25, calling for a review of ICANN's Accountability Structures, ICANN has identified an international panel of experts to serve on the Accountability Structures Expert Panel (ASEP). Short biographies of each of the three experts is included below.

The ASEP is interested in hearing from the ICANN community regarding your thoughts on ICANN's accountability structures, particularly the Reconsideration process and the Independent Review process, and whether they can or should be modified. Your comments and inputs can be submitted to ASEP@ICANN.org and comments can be viewed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/asep/. Please provide your input by 1 October 2012.

The ASEP will be posting documents on this page as they are available.

ASEP Project Plan posted 24 September 2012 [PDF, 83 KB]

Background on Accountability Mechanisms:

Reconsideration Process:

ICANN's Board Governance Committee is responsible for receiving requests from any person or entity that has been materially affected by any ICANN staff action or inaction if such affected person or entity believes the action contradicts established ICANN policies, or by actions or inactions of the Board that such affected person or entity believes has been taken without consideration of material information. Note: this is a brief summary of the relevant Bylaws provisions. For more information about ICANN's reconsideration process, please visit http://www.icann.org/en/about/governance/bylaws#IV and http://www.icann.org/en/groups/board/governance. A suggested Reconsideration Request form, an explanatory timeline for the Reconsideration Process and Reconsideration Request documents are available here.

Independent Review Process:

ICANN has established a separate process for independent third-party review of Board actions alleged by an affected party to be inconsistent with ICANN's Articles of Incorporation or Bylaws. For additional information about the independent review process, please refer to ICANN Bylaws Article IV, Section 3. The Bylaws provide that requests for independent review will be referred to an Independent Review Panel ("IRP"). ICANN has designated the International Centre for Dispute Resolution to operate the independent review process. To initiate a request for Independent Review, please complete the ICDR form which can be found here [PDF, 75 KB]. ICDR will then contact you to discuss the process in more detail. For more information on the ICDR's International Arbitration rules and procedures, click here. Details of the supplemental rules for the ICANN process can be found here. IRP documents can be found here. Answers to recurring questions regarding the IRP are located here.

Members of the Accountability and Transparency Expert Panel:

MERVYN E KING S.C.
BA. LLB (Cum Laude) H Dip Tax (Wits), Ph.D (h.c.) in Law (Wits)

Mervyn E King

Mervyn King is a Senior Counsel and former Judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa. He is Professor Extraordinaire at the University of South Africa on Corporate Citizenship, has an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of the Witwatersrand, is Chairman of the King Committee on Corporate Governance in South Africa, which produced King I, II and III, President of the Advertising Standards Authority and First Vice President of the Institute of Directors Southern Africa

He is Chairman of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), Chairman Emeritus of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and a member of the Private Sector Advisory Group to the World Bank on Corporate Governance. He chaired the United Nations Committee on Governance and Oversight.

He has been a chairman, director and chief executive of several companies listed on the London, Luxembourg and Johannesburg Stock Exchanges.

He has consulted, advised and spoken on legal, business, advertising, sustainability and corporate governance issues in 49 countries and has received many awards. He is the author of The Corporate Citizen and Transient Caretakers, with Teodorina Lessidrenska, and sits as an arbitrator and mediator locally and internationally.

 

GRAHAM MCDONALD

Graham McDonald

Graham McDonald has had a legal career spanning over 40 years during which he has acted an attorney involved in the establishment of the legal assistance for Australia's indigenous population, in his own law firms, as a corporate regulator, the inaugural Australian Banking Ombudsman, Chair of the Superannuation Tribunal, and for 22 years as a Presidential Member of Australia's Administrative Appeals Tribunal which hears and determines appeals from Federal Government departments, agencies and Ministers. Graham is a judicial pensioner and currently serves on the Board of Auda, the company that regulates Australia's domain names where he is also chair of the Finance and Audit Committee.

 

RICHARD MORAN

Richard Moran

Richard A. Moran is a nationally known authority on corporate leadership and workplace issues. He is the Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chair at Accretive Solutions and serves as director on several boards. He is a venture capitalist, former executive at software companies and a former Accenture partner. His clients have included News Corporation, AT&T, Apple, Hewlett Packard, American Airlines and Oracle. He often works with corporate boards to improve effectiveness and serves as director on the boards of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors, EASi, Perfect Forms and First Giving. He has also served on boards of Mechanics Bank and GluMobile to name a few. Mr. Moran holds an A.B. from Rutgers College, an M.S. from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from Miami University.

Rich is credited with creating the genre of "business bullet" books, based on the premise that business is often best directed by simple, rather than complex principles. His previous books include: National Bestseller Never Confuse a Memo with Reality; Beware Those Who Ask for Feedback; Fear No Yellow Stickies; Cancel the Meetings, Keep the Doughnuts; and Nuts, Bolts and Jolts. Rich's latest book is Sins and CEOs. He has appeared on CNN, NPR, CNBC and also in Fortune, the Financial Times, and other media discussing change and leadership. His radio show In the Workplace runs weekly on KCBS. He is the President of Moran Manor & Vineyards and lives in San Francisco with his wife and four children.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."