Council Colleagues:

It appears that I have incorrectly attributed the authorship of the referenced article to Prof. Mueller, who posts the great majority of blog posts at the website. The author of this particular article is Farzaneh Badii. I apologize for any confusion my misattribution may have caused.

Regards, Philip

Philip S. Corwin, Founding Principal

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From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Phil Corwin
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2016 7:19 PM
To: council@gnso.icann.org
Subject: [council] Two Letter gTLD Domains

Council colleagues:

Over the weekend Milton Mueller posted a rather provocative blog at http://www.internetgovernance.org/2016/08/26/another-government-land-grab-in-the-name-space/ , concerning the just-closed comment period on Proposed Measures for Letter/Letter Two-Character ASCII Labels to Avoid Confusion with Corresponding Country Codes (at https://www.icann.org/public-comments/proposed-measures-two-char-2016-07-08-en). It prompted me to review the filed comments, and I noted that the NCSG, IPC, and registry SG all came out against aspects of the staff proposal that concerns Prof. Mueller.

While this item is not on our agenda for the September 1^st call, I would hope that we can at least begin a preliminary discussion during the concluding AOB section. I would like to better understand the historic context for the current proposal. Beyond the specifics of the proposal, my more general concern is that ICANN may be moving to implement a general policy for gTLDs that originates from ICANN staff rather than a PDP, and that apparently there is not even GAC Consensus Advice to which the proposal is responding.

Thanks and best regards,

Philip