All, here is my report on what happened in the Board since the last ALAC call. The Board held a retreat in Mountain View, California on May 11-12. Board retreats are devoted to strategic issues, rather than to dealing with current agenda items. In particular, this one featured a presentation on rights and duties of ICANN Directors under the applicable US laws; some reports and advance discussions on the next IGF; and a discussion on ICANN's responsibilities towards its constituents, in which I tried to raise the post-Registerfly issues and, in general, the importance of strengthening ICANN's responsiveness to registrants. A Board call was held on May 15, but due to a change of time I ended up being on the flight back from the US at that very time. Anyway, the main agenda item was the release of the draft budget for next year, which has now been published for comment. The rest of the report refers to discussions happening on the Board list, and decisions taken in the meanwhile. The third ICANN meeting of this year, which was supposed to be in Asia/Pacific, will be held in Los Angeles instead. There was really no alternative due to a number of practical problems, but I (and others) stressed the importance of keeping the rotation running; staff plans to replace the next North American meeting with an Asia Pacific one, as per a new schedule that is already published. There has been a lot of discussion on the increasing speed of exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, and whether ICANN should have a role in the transition, and which one, given that most of the policy-making responsibility lies with the RIRs, that are currently discussing policy proposals for a fair distribution of the last chunks of the IPv4 space (regions that traditionally used less of them are asking to get a reservation so that they can continue getting IPv4 addresses for longer than the others). This issue is likely to come up more and more in the upcoming months. IDNs also came up as an issue - there are some Board members that share the feeling that quicker progress is necessary on this matter. In San Juan this issue should be raised again in the various involved SOs and ACs, also as some advices by some of them (for example, on the matter of IDN ccTLDs) are expected to arrive. "IDN ccTLDs" is a very sensible matter involving a lot of complex issues (ranging from roles & responsibilities of different actors, to the extent & applicability of national sovereignty) and will possibly become hot in the future. Domain tasting/kiting issues, and registrant protection ones, came up on the Board list regularly. The Board recognized our request for an issue report on domain tasting, and is waiting to see what comes out of it in the GNSO. Exactly as in the At Large, there are different preliminary views on the matter, but no immediate action is in sight as of this moment. On post-Registerfly, a RFP on data escrow was posted, and we are waiting for the CEO to release a plan in San Juan. Finally, on June 8 Alejandro Pisanty's term on the Board finished, and his seat was taken by Bruce Tonkin, newly elected to the Board by the GNSO. The next Board call is scheduled for June 18, and will likely feature a discussion of the Ombudsman's reports on the ALAC's alleged failures to treat ALS applications fairly and in a timely manner. Wendy and Patrick's blog posts on the EURALO elections also spawned some discussion on how well the ALAC is doing. In the end, while it is likely that any structural change will be deferred to the upcoming ALAC review, there may be some time devoted by the Board, in San Juan and/or on the next call, to the discussion of ALAC performance issues. Regards, -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------