Please RSVP to nathalie.peregrine@icann.org. Remote participation details will be sent the week of 25 May 2015.

Please join the interim co-chairs of the Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues Working Group for a one-hour webinar on Thursday 28 May 2015 at 1400 UTC, to hear about the preliminary recommendations that have now been published for public comment by the Working Group.

This Working Group (WG) was chartered by the GNSO Council in October 2013 to conduct a Policy Development Process (PDP) with the aim of developing policy recommendations to guide ICANN’s implementation of an Accreditation Program for privacy and proxy service providers. The topic of privacy and proxy registrations had been identified upon the conclusion of ICANN’s negotiations with the Registrars Stakeholder Group for a new Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) as an issue that remained unresolved and that would be suited for a PDP. The 2013 RAA contains an interim Specification on Privacy & Proxy Registrations that is due to expire on 1 January 2017.

The WG’s Initial Report, containing a number of detailed preliminary recommendations and several open questions for which it is seeking community input, was published for public comment on 5 May 2015. The announcement, forum for submitting comments, and a copy of the WG’s Initial Report can be found here: https://www.icann.org/public-comments/ppsai-initial-2015-05-05-en. The WG’s preliminary recommendations include: (i) requiring that accredited providers expressly include certain mandatory provisions in their customer terms of service; (ii) an obligation to relay initial electronic requests seeking to contact a customer; (iii) an illustrative framework for the handling of requests from trademark and copyright owners for the disclosure of customer contact information; and (iv) steps regarding provider de-accreditation. Open questions on which the WG has yet to reach consensus include the escalation of relay requests, how to deal with disclosure requests received from law enforcement and other third parties other than intellectual property rights-holders, and whether domain names associated with online financial transactions should be able to use privacy or proxy registrations.

This webinar will highlight the WG’s preliminary recommendations and open questions, including an opportunity to ask questions of the interim co-chairs. All are welcome; please reply to nathalie.peregrine@icann.org if you wish to attend and to receive details about logging on to the webinar.