In this series, I examine past behavior at ICANN, contrasting it with the Expected Standards of Behavior (ESOB), and ask you to decide for yourself whether it has been applied equally to everyone, or instead is applied selectively to achieve different results when different people are involved.
Philip S. Corwin is Policy Counsel at Verisign (the dot-com registry operator), and one of the co-chairs in the RPM PDP working group that is chartered to review the UDRP, URS and other rights protection mechanisms.
On October 23, 2018, Mr. Corwin sent a bizarre email to the RPM PDP working group mailing list in his “capacity as co-chair” rebuking me
for using the term “wish lists”.
I responded within an hour, pointing out how the exact same term had been used by others at ICANN, including in the RPM PDP:
Kristine Dorrain – Amazon Registry Services:Yes, I think that’s right. the key is to figure out the topic. Most of the questions are actually “proposed solutions” or someone’s wishlist. [source]
or
Kristine Dorrain – Amazon Registry:@George and that is the
danger…..I oppose any proposal this is a vague wishlist (unicorn) of what would be nice in Disneyland….proposals should be concrete with only a few implementation details left. [source]
or
Kristine Dorrain – Amazon Registry:Otherwise this is just a pie in the sky wishlist. [source]
It’s preposterous that any reasonable person could think that the term “wish lists”, whose common meaning is “a list of desired things or occurrences”, would be a violation of any norms, as others point out.
Yet, I was the only one rebuked by Mr. Corwin. This is an example of being singled out for disparate treatment. I’ll leave you to decide whether this is another example of a double standard at ICANN. This illustrates the dangers of an ESOB that allows for rules and penalties to be invented on the fly and arbitrarily applied in order to reach predetermined results. Indeed, it already has been used as such, given that my participation rights in ICANN working groups have been eliminated.