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What are the roles of the ALAC?
What are the roles of the ALAC?
Representing the At-Large Community, the ALAC is the primary organizational home in ICANN for individual Internet users. Under the ICANN Bylaws, the roles of the ALAC are to:
- Consider and provide advice on the activities of ICANN as they relate to the interests of individual Internet users. This includes policies created through SOs, as well as ICANN operations and many other issues for which community input and advice is appropriate;
- Play an important part in ICANN’s accountability mechanisms;
- Coordinate some of ICANN’s outreach and engagement efforts to individual Internet users.
The range of individual Internet users, whose interests that the ALAC represents, is quite broad. They include registrants (people who hold domain names), consumers, and the billions of average web users and visitors.
While ICANN is a technical organization with a focused mandate, its bottom-up, consensus-driven, multistakeholder model gives the ALAC a unique position to play -- average users that don’t have vested business interests, political interests, or even technical backgrounds can also have a voice to influence the evolution of the critical logistical infrastructure layer of the Internet. Such position is rare to find in other international organizations in the world.