Dear Councilors,

In preparation for item 4 on Thursday’s Council agenda (Council discussion - Expedited PDP (EPDP) on the Temporary Specification Phase 2: Final Report), Council leadership has worked with the staff support team to identify potential approaches for considering the EPDP Team Final Report and recommendations. In doing so, we considered various options in light of the ICANN Bylaw and EPDP Manual requirements, the EPDP Team’s guidance on interdependency of the recommendations as well as consensus designations (see for further background https://docs.google.com/document/d/11iMk_HqFLKlnWvmJocZmXKnpjUJFqJOB/edit).

Based on our assessment, we would like to recommend to the Council the following:

• Consider SSAD-related recommendations as one package (rec #1 - #18) and considerer priority 2 recommendations as a separate package (Rec #19 - #22)

We will explain further our rationale for this recommendation on our call on Thursday but in short:

1. This aligns with the EPDP Team’s indication that recommendation to consider the SSAD- related recommendations areas interdependent;
2. Allows for potential fast tracking by the ICANN Board of priority 2 related items which are related to the implementation of phase 1 recommendations and as a result could be passed on to the Phase 1 IRT as soon as adopted;
3. All priority 2 recommendations designations have a consensus or full consensus designation.

We hope you can all come prepared for Thursday’s meeting to provide your feedback on this recommendation and/or put forward alternative suggestions.

As a reminder, while the EPDP Team Final Report has already been shared with the Council, there are still a couple of minority statements that are in the process of being completed (by 24 August at the latest). However, that should not prevent your respective groups from beginning your review of the other parts of the report which will not change.

Best regards,

Keith