Attached is a the final comment from the BC regarding ICANN's call for comments on New gTLD Registry Agreement (<http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/closed-generic-05feb13-en.htm>link<http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/base-agreement-05feb13-en.htm>). This comment period closes today, 20-Mar. As discussed on our member call last week , this comment does not propose any changes to previous BC positions. Instead, the comment applies prior BC positions to the proposed new Ry agreement. After circulating to members on 15-Mar, I received comments and made these edits: Marilyn Cade offered several comments. First, I added BC mission statement on page 1 (citing the Charter). In the section on Ry Agreement amendments by ICANN, Marilyn suggested amending the 2010 position repeated on page 5, changing wording and deleting several sentences. There was no other Member support for amending our prior position, and I did not feel it was right to selectively omit previous and relevant positions. However, I did change the concluding sentence of this section to reflect the tone that Marilyn suggested: "…and therefore has concerns with the amendment process as proposed in Section 7.6(c). " Elisa Cooper noted her support. Chris Chaplow noted support and suggested emphasizing our "request" for regional names exception/centralized process. I changed the first sentence under this section. Chris suggested asking for 2 and 3-letter country codes, but this is part of reserved status and not subject to the release mechanism in Specification 5. No change. Chris noted that we called these "regional" instead of territory since that was the vocabulary at the time of that BC comment (2011). No change. John Berard noted his support Angie Graves noted her agreement. Bill Smith noted support, except for the section on Ry Agreement amendments by ICANN. Bill reiterated his view that the current process does not allow public interest to take precedence over contracted parties. He suggested that contract parties are "free to exit an agreement of the new terms required by the public prove unacceptable". Lacking significant member concurrence with Bill's changes I did not alter the comment based on prior positions. Bill noted that he looks forward to future discussions in the BC where we might change our position on unilaterally amending contracts. The FINAL BC comment is attached, and I will post to ICANN today. -- Steve