FYI - please note the follow-up from Verisign on Name Collisions. Kind regards, Olivier -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Upcoming Event to Discuss Name Collisions Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 07:34:54 +0000 From: Drazek, Keith <kdrazek@verisign.com> To: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond (ocl@gih.com) <ocl@gih.com> Hi Olivier, I hope you're doing well! I wanted to bring this October 29 event to your attention. http://gtld-collision.eventbrite.com/ <http://gtld-collision.eventbrite.com/> Verisign is working with OTA and others to support this effort to bring interested parties together to further discuss the name collision issue in light of ICANN's recent announcement and NGPC vote. Our goal is to bring together potentially impacted parties and have a constructive technical and policy dialogue around a relatively new concept -- mitigating name collisions through SLD blocking -- that was just approved by the NGPC with insufficient public consideration. The event will take place in Virginia (near Dulles Airport), but the plan is to enable remote participation. ICANN and new gTLD applicants will of course be invited to participate. Verisign is continuing to review ICANN's latest plan <http://www.icann.org/en/groups/board/documents/resolutions-new-gtld-annex-1-...> to mitigate the risks and impacts from name collisions and we are concerned that ICANN may have again missed an opportunity. While the newest proposal demonstrates that progress was made by ICANN in several areas, including agreeing to implement SSAC advice, to conduct an educational outreach program and to conduct a qualitative analysis of each string prior to delegation, we are concerned by ICANN's "alternate path to delegation," as described in Section 3.3 of the Collision Occurrence Management Plan. It would appear that this "alternate path" is based solely on query volume indicators from a potentially insufficient subset of root zone data. If so, it would appear to be a circumvention of the necessary study that ICANN has otherwise finally agreed to conduct. The "alternate path" mechanism focuses on the blocking of a list of second-level domains (SLDs) taken from the DITL data. Such blocking is however untested in this context and we are reviewing the potential impacts that such blocking might cause. At this early point, we believe it is premature to conclude that this mechanism truly addresses the risks of and from collisions. We plan to say more about the "alternate path" concept once our review is complete, which we expect before the end of the month. We remain concerned with ICANN's processes for the introduction of this new proposal. It goes without saying that**ICANN should have posted the Collision Occurrence Management Plan, especially the newly introduced concept and methodology in Section 3.3 and the staff analysis of public comments prior to putting it to the NGPC for a vote. Had the staff recommendation only sought authorization to conduct further study and/or to develop an additional plan that would have been posted for public review and comment, we would have no argument with the procedures followed leading to the NGPC vote. Instead, ICANN staff has recommended, and the NGPC has authorized, a new process that was not previously subject to scrutiny or public comment and which we believe may actually circumvent the intent of the remaining NGPC resolutions. I'd welcome your thoughts on this, both personally and if the ALAC has reviewed and discussed ICANN's plan. If you're interested in participating in the event, please let me know. Regards, Keith