Summary GNSO Public Forum

Luxembourg, 12 July 2005

Order of the meeting:

1           Overview from the chair of the Whois task force, Jordyn Buchanan on developments since the last meeting in Mar del Plata (April 2005) and  current and future issues for input from the public forum.

2          Open mike for comments on Whois work

3          Presentations from the chair of each of the constituencies of the GNSO

4          Open mike for general comments

An email address was set up to allow comments during and immediately after the public forum so that individuals had more than one way to provide their input. 

Most constituency statements are available online at http://gnso.icann.org/ .  This document summarises by topic the discussion that took polace during the open mike session. 

Alternative enforcement mechanisms/graded sanctions

Jordyn Buchanan (Chair, WHOIS Task Force; Register.com, USA) encouraged the GNSO to take up a policy development process to create enforcement mechanisms in ICANN’s contracts to give the new compliance hires tools other than terminating contracts.

Bruce Tonkin (Chair, GNSO Council; Melbourne IT, Australia) agreed and noted that the topic had been under council discussion for some time. The council would work cooperatively with ICANN operational staff to see if there are sufficient resources for a policy effort in that regard and also to provide suggestions to start that process. The council would seek staff input on what sanctions would be useful and then institute a PDP.

Support for GNSO Public Forum

Two speakers – Thomas Roessler (W3C, Luxembourg) and Mark McFadden (Secretary of the ISPCP Constituency; University of Wisconsin, USA) welcomed the open mike aspect of the Public Forum and hoped it would become a regular feature. 

Bruce Tonkin responded with thanks and said that the comments made during the public forum would be summarized and presented to the board’s own public forum. 

.NET agreement

Bhavin Turakhia (Chair, Registrars Constituency; LogicBoxes.com, India) said the .NET agreement was not consistent with the PDP on the process for introducing new registry service being dealt with by the GNSO.  He hoped that the .NET agreement could be re-opened and modified and also that the GNSO process is not undermined particularly regarding .COM and other registries to which it should be applied. 

Becky Burr (Independent consultant, USA) said that she had represented two sTLD applicants and had in this capacity done a comparison of the .MOBI and .NET contr5acts to see if .NET had received any extra concessions.  Aside from the price cap issue, the modifications regarding consensus policy are inherent in the contract itself and do nothing to change it.  Verisign did not get anything that mobi or jobs didn’t get. The limitations there are limitations on the fundamental bargain which is the definition of a consensus policy.  Modifying the standards for consideration of proposed registry services is not within the itemized list of topics which may be the subject of policy making.  Unless an issue goes to the stability and security of the internet, it’s not going to be within the scope of consensus policies. 

Bruce Tonkin responded that there were certainly differences about the merits of particular changes, and that not all the changes that surprised people were material changes. The issue had been that the changes were a surprise and there had been no opportunity to hear input such as Becky’s. 

Later in the public forum the .NET issue was returned to:

Becky Burr said she understood concerns about process but said that the difference between the contract posted for public comment and the final contract was due to the critical process of negotiating the contract.  If ICANN had to publish a contract before it, get comments on it and award only that contract, their hands would be tied in a negotiating sense. 

Jordyn Buchanan responded that this was separate from posting material changes for review by the community prior to the signature of the contract and acceptance by the board.  It seems reasonable that final copies of contracts be posted for community review prior to their signature as opposed to posting a draft agreement that may be subject to significant changes.  Regarding substance, many of the changes made were ultimately not significant, but one of them – the limitation to apply a consensus policy to registry services approval process – seems crazy to suggest that it’s not a substantive change, especially as the GNSO Council has a PDP underway on that very issue.  That PDP was also initiated at the request of ICANN staff so it is bizarre to suggest now that somehow that’s not a policy issues.

Bruce Tonkin said that he had asked ICANN’s general counsel to answer a question in the Council meeting to follow about whether there should have been a PDP or not.

Marilyn Cade said that her memory was that consensus policy, i.e. a requirement of consensus policy in order to change contracts, was developed in order to ensure that burdensome policies not be applied to the contracted parties without consensus policy.  Change meant that in representing business users there were safeguards in the ability to trust that no significant changes would happen to protect users as well as affected parties. Any change in the role or capability of consensus policy would be extremely troubling.

Bret Fausett asked Becky Burr about the value of having different registries subjected to different consensus policies.  Or, if it’s the same consensus policy, then why not move to some standardized language?

Becky Burr responded that we do have standardized language about consensus policy and Marilyn seemed to be talking about the pricing cap issue which should be taken off the table.  The definition of consensus policy is in the bylaws, and in addition to that is a definition of security and stability.  Verisign had a contractual limitation about consensus policy in its contract, including the .NET contract, that was much narrower. We need to distinguish between policy and consensus policy.  ICANN can develop any policy it wants that applies to the way it operates – it can’t call all of them consensus policies. 

Bruce Tonkin said the changes had not been explained by ICANN staff and suggested drawing a distinction between the concern about process and whether the changes had merit or not.  There is a difference between policy and consensus policy.

 Best practices/outreach and information regarding string length of TLDs

Ken Fockler (independent consultant, Canada) asked if the GNSO was the appropriate body to deal with doing outreach and education on string length where (e.g. .info and .museum) the TLD string is longer than three characters.  Ken asked if the issue was a concern of the GNSO, whether it should be raised again and if it was still a problem.

Bruce Tonkin responded that as ICANN’s budget grows, so does the expectation for services such as information and awareness raising on issues like this and also IDNs.  He hoped the GNSO could create a best practices area on its website that would spread information on issues like this to application developers.  The issues was of relevance and importance to the GNSO and had been analysed to some degree by the ISPCP constituency.  

Tony Holmes (Council member, ISPCP Constituency, British Telecom, UK) said that ISPs had taken part in the dialogue that tried to resolve the problem but that it was difficult because there wasn’t a particular body or trade association in the software world to get the message out to.  The problem has reduced, but more through osmosis than any particular action.  Additional support is needed to get the message of how to treat longer string length TLDs.  This is a good time to discuss posting this information on the ICANN website with ICANN staff.

Bruce Tonkin suggested tying the website work in as a specific measure to be undertaken in response to the operational plan’s general aim to improve the website.  He invited people to think about what other elements could be included.

Bret Fausett (ALAC liaison to the GNSO Council, USA) recalled that ICANN had issued an advisory on the string length issue several years ago and suggested that announcements of new TLDs (exceeding 3-letter strings) be accompanied by this initial advisory.  This would keep improving awareness of the issue. 

Ken Stubbs (Registry Constituency member of GNSO Council; Afilias, USA) said ICANN should work more closely with the educational community in providing seminars for educators as well as material in that area.  Relevant consortiums and trade associations might be identified and given a point of contact at ICANN where a specific programme can be rolled out.

Tony Harris (ISPCP Constituency member of the GNSO Council; CABASE, Argentina) suggested comptia.org as one such association. 

Maria Zitkova (Chair of Registry Constituency; SITA, Switzerland) said she had been involved with the issue and that following the Mar del Plata meeting, IANA published a list of all existing TLDs on the IANA website in a simple text format that is downloadable by applications.  This could also be pointed to in any announcements. 

Tony Holmes said the issue of awareness should be prioritized with greater urgency than the category of updating the website and posting additional information. 

Strategic planning and operational planning

Mark McFadden said that there had been in the past six months a significant partnership between the community and the staff on strategic planning but that this had broken down in recent weeks.  He asked the council to respond to that breakdown and talk about how it will be repaired. He asked councilors other than those involved in that partnership to speak to the issue.

Marilyn Cade responded to echo Mark’s comment and note that the council take seriously the need to partner with staff to continue the improvements to the process brought about in Amsterdam and after.  The council should return to its thinking that led to generating the Amsterdam forum on the strategic plan and reestablish that leadership work within the cross supporting orgnaisation work and work with the staff. 

The US Dept. of Commerce’s statement on the relationship between ICANN and the USG

Milton Mueller (Chair of the Non-Commercial Constituency; Syracuse University, USA) asked if the council had any reaction to or would like to express an opinion on the US Dept. of Commerce’s recent statement.

No Council member responded.

Structural problems with ICANN

Ross Rader (Registrar Constituency member of the GNSO Council; Tucows, Canada) asked Milton Mueller to enlarge on his statement during the constituency reports that ICANN had structural problems. 

Milton Mueller said he meant the tension between staff and GNSO regarding what is policy and what is part of the contract.  There has always been an intense amount of ambiguity, going very far back and the issue recurs every time a significant policy decision is made. Milton had frequently viewed the staff as having too much latitude to ignore policy directives from below – even though ICANN promotes itself as a bottom-up organization -  sometimes viewing that as cynical and others as inherent to the structure of ICANN that management has certain incentives while the GNSO has others. Bringing that back to the WSIS discussion, there is not a clear separation – despite the report – that governments do public policy and the private sector and civil society do technical coordination.