Dear Councilors,

Council leadership has had a chance to reflect on the letter from the Board on the adjustments to string contention resolution. It is clear that the Board’s suggested approach to string contention is balancing a number of different factors, such as relevant SubPro Recommendations, ALAC Advice, GAC Advice, as well as auction expert guidance. I’ll quickly break down each subject and give you Council Leadership’s take going into our meeting with our GNSO-appointed Board members.

• Auction Methodology: There will be no changes to the 2012 process (The GNSO did not approve recommendations to change this mechanism).  This should bring some certainty to applicants. We do not see an action item from Council on this item and believe the IRT is in the best position to work out details and take on community inputs.

• Alternative Strings: This approach is inventive but does not appear inconsistent with Policy. It essentially allows an applicant to select alternative stings, with the option to discard the first considered for the next one in line should the first one trigger a contention set. Since this is not against any policy, and appears to be primarily an implementation issue designed to reduce the number of applicants caught up in contention, we do not see an action item from Council on this item and believe the IRT is in the best position to work out details and take on community inputs.

• Un-adoption of Recommendation 20.6: This change would prevent resolution of contention sets through the formation of joint ventures. Like non-adopted Recommendations, this triggers an option for the Council to develop a Supplemental Recommendation in response. Importantly, it does not trigger an obligation to submit a Supplemental Recommendation (and given the binary nature of this issue, a supplemental recommendation may not be fruitful). Council leadership suggests that Councilors begin outreach within their C’s/SG’s to determine whether or not the community has an appetite for additional work on this topic or if Council should just let Recommendation 20.6 go as we have with several non-adopted Recommendations in the past.

On a more high-level note, while the reversal of an ICANN Board adopted GNSO recommendation (and the lack of obviously available tools to do so) has been a hypothetical, it has now become a reality. We will need to understand from the GNSO-appointed Board members what mechanism the Board is using. Specifically, we need to understand at what point the Board can withdraw its support for an already adopted Recommendation without that becoming Board policy making.  We will need to balance the Council’s priority to maintain the timeline for the Next Round of the New gTLD Program against what may be a gap in the procedural mechanisms for the Board to perform this action. We should consider whether to avoid the procedural debate at this stage and instead, seek to document and memorialize the process in the very near future (at the SPS perhaps). 

We look forward to both the initial conversations with the GNSO-appointed Board members and the input from Councilors about our path forward.

Thanks,

Greg