Special Summary Report of 9 Jan 2025 Meeting to ALAC

You can glean a wider perspective from GNSO Council Jan 2025 Matters of Interest and/or from GNSO Council Jan 2025 Meeting Records.

1. Board Ready Recommendations

• Council agreed that it should seek to limit the likelihood of Council approving PDP recommendations that the ICANN Board is ultimately unable to adopt. To that end, Council discussed the desire to ensure it submits “board-ready policy recommendations” to the Board, to the extent possible. Generally speaking, a policy recommendation is considered board ready when: the recommendation is likely to achieve board adoption, i.e., the recommendation has been approved by a GNSO Supermajority Vote and will most likely be considered by the Board to be in the best interests of ICANN Community and ICANN org.
• Council created a Board Readiness Small Team to study what gaps exist, from the perspective of PDP WG participants, which led to the Board rejecting recommendations, and to determine how to fill those gaps.
• Council was provided with an update on the Board Readiness Small Team via slide presentation which included some preliminary insights out of interviews conducted with 4 EPDP Phase 1 WG members. The panel of interviewees will be expanded, while preparations are under way for interviews regarding EPDP Phase 2 and thereafter, Subsequent Procedures. Work on conclusions is anticipated to be completed by ICANN82. 

2. Urgent Requests

• This pertains to the GAC's concerns over the implementation of the EPDP on the Temporary Specification Phase 1 Final Report, in particular, Recommendation 18, specifically around the issue of the response timeline for urgent requests of registration data. The relevant portion of Recommendation 18 reads, “A separate timeline of [less than X business days] will considered for the response to ‘Urgent’ Reasonable Disclosure Requests, those Requests for which evidence is supplied to show an immediate need for disclosure [time frame to be finalized and criteria set for Urgent requests during implementation].” 
• Council along with the Board and the GAC have initiated a Trilateral Meeting to try to resolve the GAC's request for more policy work to handle such urgent requests. The GAC have also offered to work on a universal method for authenticating (LEA) requestors. However, Council is of the view that further discussion is needed to establish (a) clear understanding of policy vs implementation work, and (b) what else is needed to make Recommendation 18 work. 
• The next Trilateral Meeting is expected to take place in late Jan or early Feb.