Greetings fellow Council Members, I am pleased to be able to report to you that the Final Report of the new gTLD Auction Proceeds Cross Community Working Group has just been circulated to the WG for a final “eyeball” review by the WG. It has taken 3.5 years, but it is here at last. A brief summary for you: There are 12 recommendations in the report. I will highlight just a few of them in this correspondence to you, loosely quoting from the report. Recommendation #1: The CCWG recommends that the Board select either mechanism A or mechanism B for the allocation of auction proceeds, taking into account the preference expressed by CCWG members for mechanism A. (As a reminder, Mechanism A: An internal department dedicated to the allocation of auction proceeds is created within the ICANN organization Mechanism B: An internal department dedicated to the allocation of auction proceeds is created within the ICANN organization which collaborates with an existing non-profit.) Recommendation #2: The CCWG recommends that an Independent Project Applications Evaluation Panel will be established. The Panel’s responsibility is to evaluate and select project applications. Neither the Board nor staff will be taking decisions on individual applications… Recommendation #7: Existing ICANN accountability mechanisms such as IRP or other appeal mechanisms cannot be used to challenge a decision from the Independent Project Applications Evaluation Panel to approve or not approve an application. Recommendation #8: The CCWG did not reach consensus to provide any specific recommendation on whether or not ICANN org or its constituent parts could be a beneficiary of auction proceeds… It is likely that there will be some minority statements submitted before the deadline (28 May, presumably 23:59 UTC, but I am not certain of the actual cutoff time). Under discussion is whether to include them into the final document as an Appendix or post them on the CW’s wiki with references to them included in the final report (likely via an Appendix of URLs). The next steps are the formal adoption of the final report by the WG, and then its submission to the SO/AC’s for their consideration (and hopefully) adoption. Given success with that process, it goes to the ICANN Board for their consideration. Please reach out to me with any questions that you might have. Best Regards, Stephen Deerhake AS Domain Registry