I often check the document properties for comments submitted to ICANN's various task forces, committees, etc just to see exactly who wrote what and for whom.

I usually come up empty - most ICANN'ers write their own stuff.

This doesn't seem to be the case for a bunch of the submissions to Whois Task Force Three. For instance, today we received comments from Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. that appear to have been rooted in a form letter authored by Steve Metalitz of the IPC.

Other submissions, notably those from HBO, eBay and the MPA, appear to have been authored by Ryan Lehning -  IETF contributor, Smith & Metalitz associate and Counsel for the CCDN.

For fun, I decided to merge a few of these documents and compare the redlines (see the attachment to this post). Even in instances where the properties of the Word document were updated to reflect the submitting author, its patently obvious that these are all slight variations on the same document.

Now I'm not saying that there is anything patently wrong with this, but I do find it interesting - in a funny, odd sort of way. Odd in that the same constituency that seems to pull further and further away from ICANN every day would deem it necessary to lobby the GNSO in such a forceful (and obvious) way when it would be trivial for these same organizations to participate in ICANN via the IPC in a way that actually helps the community understand exactly what there needs are.

For instance, here's some nice irony for you - some of these same firms declined to participate in the data gathering exercise that TF3 went through. This would have been an excellent time for them to get in early with actual data that would have highly influenced the final report of the task force. But it didn't happen and now the Task Force is stuck in a pretty sub-optimal spot with its recommendations.

ICANN, the GNSO - the community, needs to get serious about individual participation in the policy making process and the way that it invites and fosters the participation of actual stakeholders instead of lobbyists and "the usual suspects".