Dear Councilors, I am forwarding the message below on behalf of Larisa Gurnick, Vice-President in ICANN’s Multi-stakeholder Strategy & Strategic Initiatives (MSSI) department. You may recall that the Competition, Consumer Protection & Consumer Trust Review Team’s (CCT-RT) final recommendations included several that were directed at the GNSO Council. This notification should provide you with additional information and context for the ICANN Board’s action in respect of those recommendations. Dear Members of the GNSO Council, The purpose of this note is to highlight the Board resolution passed on 1 March 2019 - see https://www.icann.org/resources/board-material/resolutions-2019-03-01-en - that calls for a set of Competition, Consumer Trust, and Consumer Choice Review Team (CCT-RT) Final Recommendations to be passed through to community groups. As articulated in the Board resolution, “recognizing that the Board has the obligation and responsibility to balance the work of ICANN in order to preserve the ability for ICANN org to serve its Mission and the public interest, the Board decided on three categories of action”: * Accepting recommendations, subject to costing and implementation considerations; * Placing recommendations (in whole or in part) in "Pending" status, directing ICANN org to perform specific actions to enable the Board to take further actions; * Passing recommendations (in whole or in part) to community groups the CCT-RT identified for their consideration. The Board noted fourteen such recommendations (9, 10, 12, 16, 19, 20, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35). We invite you to refer to pages 1-4 of the scorecard https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/resolutions-final-cct-recs-score... which compile pass-through recommendations, including the groups they are addressed to. Accordingly, ICANN org wishes to notify you of the recommendations the ICANN Board resolved to pass through to you, in whole or in part, for your consideration: * Recommendation 10. * Recommendation 16 (in part) Note: this recommendation was also passed through to the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP WG, Registries Stakeholder Group, Registrar Stakeholder Group, Generic Names Supporting Organization, Second Security, Stability & Resiliency of DNS Review Team as suggested by the CCT-RT. In the scorecard, the Board noted that “it is not accepting the policy directives that may be inherent here but rather, passes on such elements of the recommendation to the relevant community groups to consider”. * Recommendation 27. * Recommendation 28. * Recommendation 29. Note: this recommendation was also passed through to the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP WG, as suggested by the CCT-RT. To inform work relating to recommendations 29 and 30, the ICANN Board suggested that the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP WG could take on, “should they choose to do so, defining the term ‘Global South’ or agreeing on another term to describe underserved or underrepresented regions or stakeholders in coordination with ICANN org”. We would like to highlight the following language of the Board resolution: “in passing these recommendations through, the Board is neither accepting, nor rejecting the recommendations. […] Passing recommendations through to community groups is not a directive that the groups identified should formally address any of the issues within those recommendations. It is within the purview of each group to identify whether work will be taken on and the topics that the group will address”. As indicated in the resolution, the Board encourages community groups to be “mindful of any interdependencies with ongoing work and discussions”. Additionally, the Board suggests “to the referenced community groups that the CCT-RT's proposed priority levels be taken into account as the groups decide whether, how and when to address the CCT-RT recommendations that are being passed through […]”. Additionally, we would like to flag the Board suggestion that for transparency purposes, “it would be helpful to have records or reporting made available to the ICANN community on how the community group considered the items coming out of the CCT-RT. The Board encourages any level of reporting that the groups are able to provide as the ICANN org and Board track action on the CCT-RT's recommendations”. Please consider providing updates on your progress in addressing (as appropriate) these recommendations, to be included with ICANN org’s reporting. Background The Competition, Consumer Trust, and Consumer Choice Review Team (CCT-RT) released its Final Report on 8 September 2018 – see https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/cct-final-08sep18-en.pdf. The CCT-RT Final Report contains 35 recommendations and is the culmination of nearly three years of work, reviewing how the expansion of top-level domain names impacted competition, consumer trust and choice. For more information on the CCT Review and Specific Reviews, please read https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/governance/bylaws-en#article4.6. The ICANN Board took action on each of the 35 recommendations produced by the CCT-RT - see https://www.icann.org/resources/board-material/resolutions-2019-03-01-en - on 1 March 2019 and was informed by public comment input received on the Final report (see https://www.icann.org/public-comments/cct-final-recs-2018-10-08-en). The Board’s decisions on each recommendation is documented in the scorecard published at https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/resolutions-final-cct-recs-score.... A blog post on the Board action can be found at https://www.icann.org/news/blog/board-action-on-competition-consumer-trust-a... for more context. We thank you for your collaboration in considering the CCT-RT output. Please let us know whether you have any questions. Thank you. Best regards. Larisa Gurnick Vice-President, Multi-stakeholder Strategy & Strategic Initiatives, ICANN