Do info actions need the Constitutional Committee?

The "von Bergen" naming action closed at epoch 651: DReps 61.3% yes of eligible power, SPOs 9.0%, and the Constitutional Committee 0%, from three no, one abstain and three who did not vote.

The three no votes all give the same reason. Ace Alliance, Cardano Japan Council and Eastern Cardano Council each find the action unconstitutional under Article II.6(1), because the metadata sits at a plain HTTPS URL rather than a content addressed one. All three say explicitly that this is a finding about format and not about the naming. Tingvard abstained on a different basis: it does not judge an info action at all, because the action has no ledger effect.

So two committee members published opposite readings of their own mandate on the same action.

The rules do not settle it either. Article III.1(4) says the committee votes on constitutionality "including any proposed or contemplated actions contained within "Info" actions". The ledger sets no threshold for info actions at all, they can never be ratified and always expire. And the one guardrail that asks anything of an info action, TREASURY-01a for the Net Change Limit, asks it of the DReps alone.

There is precedent for that last reading. Three info actions propose a Net Change Limit for epochs 613 to 713:

Net Change Limit	Closed	DRep yes	CC yes
350M ada	epoch 612	61.3%	57.1%, 4 of 7, below the two thirds
300M ada	epoch 618	44.1%	85.7%
500M ada	epoch 647	62.4%	83.3%

The 350M limit is the one that has been treated as in force, even though its committee share sits below the quorum the committee needs everywhere else. The later 500M action calls it "the existing 350,000,000 ada Net Change Limit for Epochs 613-713" in its own motivation, and the chain agrees: enacted withdrawals in the period passed 300M ada in epoch 645, so the 300M action, the one with the comfortable CC majority, cannot have been the operative limit. The committee then voted those withdrawals constitutional as they came.

So what is a CC vote on an info action worth? A finding the committee owes on everything, an advisory signal with no standing, or something it can decline outright? I do not think the community has settled on one.

Leaving the constitutionally required info actions aside (NCL currently, could be more...or less) what the constitution guarantees (via tenet, so it is an area that can be clarified, hopefully with full descriptions of rights) is that the CC cannot censor information. This indicates that there can be no binding result based on how the CC votes.

That the CC can vote on info actions at all is, I believe, a learning surface, and we have so few of them as it is. If so, it would indicate that we should expect a signal from CC votes on info actions.

So your description of "an advisory signal with no standing" is pretty close. I would frame it as "an advisory signal that cannot bind", rather than no standing, since the standing in question is whether a fairly elected CC has a right to influence the status of information. The advisory signal is basically "IF this information were to placed in front of the CC as a TWD, PC, or CU governance action, we would rule constitutional/unconstitutional.

I also think that any formatting or submission issues that would earn an unconstitutional should point toward simplifying submission of info actions. Should be treated as tooling issue, IMO.

As far as the NCL is concerned, there is a tricky interaction when the constitution requires an info action, but the CC cannot bind them to the constitution. The intent of the constitutionally required info actions was to create a phased process for all TWDs: scope, signal, live vote. While there are a lot of live threads for how to iterate the NCL concept, we have to consider whether an info action is an appropriate vessel, if we are still able to get the phased process.