At the ALAC-NCSG meeting on Monday, a decision was taken to attempt to draft a statement on the proposed new rights protection mechanisms (originally the "strawman" proposal) and more specific all the allowing into the TMCH variations of trademarks that had been found to be abusive by a UDRP or Court. A number of drafts were circulated and the statement below was the result:

We are deeply concerned about the flawed process that led to the creation and adoption of the so-called strawman proposal for new gTLD rights protection mechanisms. Despite assurances that staff would not create or alter community-developed Policy, some aspects of this proposal were adopted outside of the appropriate policy development processes.

While we appreciate staff's admission that this particular proposal was a policy issue and not an implementation detail, the explanations provided for the adoption of the policy that the GNSO Council did not support and that the ALAC deemed to require GNSO development have been woefully inadequate. Circumvention of the bottom-up model is a serious issue that deserves attention and redress. We call upon ICANN to reverse this trend and respect the community-led bottom-up multi-stakeholder policy development process that ICANN claims to champion.

Following this, an extensive discussion was held during the open GNSO meeting. One of the issues that came out of this was that many (but certainly not all) GNSO Council (and presumably GNSO) members feel that the salient issue is not that the Board has chosen to override the majority position of the GNSO that some of the strawman issues were definitely policy, but rather that it was done without at least the courtesy of telling the GNSO that they were planning to do so, explaining the rationale in detail, and giving the GNSO an opportunity to interact with the Board and staff before the definitive decision was taken. I would suggest that this is closer to the message that we want to deliver to the Board. I have told Robin Gross, that we would let her know prior to the Open Forum whether we support the above joint statement or not. Alan