Hello All, As reported in the minutes of the Council meeting on 12 May 2005. The Council decided form a working group with a representative group of volunteers from the GNSO to review the staff Transfers report in order to seek clarification, further information and provide guidance for the 6 month review and to report back to the Council. This is a call for volunteers that wish to participate and work with the ICANN staff. Ross Rader has volunteered to act as chair of this working group. See below for a description of the working group task. GNSO Council members should forward the names of volunteers to the GNSO Secretariat within 7 days, and the GNSO Secretariat will then arrange a time for a teleconference with the working group and ICANN staff. The aim should be to report to the Council at the GNSO Council meeting in Luxembourg. The GNSO Council will then use the report as a basis to request the staff to carry out specific tasks necessary to produce the 6 month report. Regards, Bruce Tonkin I Background ============ Recommendation 28 of the Consensus Policy on Transfers: (http://www.icann.org/gnso/transfers-tf/report-12feb03.htm ) states: (I have replaced references to the DNSO and Names Council with the new terms) "That the implementation and execution of these recommendations be monitored by the GNSO. Specifically that; a. ICANN Staff analyse and report to the GNSO Council at three, six and twelve month intervals after implementation with the goal of determining; i. How effectively and to what extent the policies have been implemented and adopted by Registrars, Registries and Registrants, ii. Whether or not modifications to these policies should be considered by the GNSO as a result of the experiences gained during the implementation and monitoring stages, iii. The effectiveness of the dispute resolution processes and a summary of the filings that have been resolved through the process. b. Pursuant to which, the GNSO Council may instruct the staff to; i. Continue bi-annual reviews in a manner consistent with the aforementioned requirements, or; ii. Report again to the GNSO Council in an additional twelve month time frame. c. The purpose of these monitoring and reporting requirements are to allow the Names Council to determine when, if ever, these recommendations and any ensuing policy require additional clarification or attention based on the results of the reports prepared by ICANN Staff." The ICANN staff have produced a 3 month report dated 14 April 2005, available at: http://www.icann.org/transfers/transfer-report-14apr05.pdf The report is based on public comments received, statistics from registry operator reports, and questions and complaints received by ICANN staff. Note also that the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee is preparing a report on domain name hijacking, and one of its possible recommendations which was discussed in the ICANN meeting in Mar Del Plata was making it mandatory for a losing registrar to send a notification to the Registrant (this is presently optional for the losing registrar). Note that it is still the gaining registrars responsibility to authenticate the registrant, and receive authorisation. II Working Group task ====================== The task of the working group is to: (1) review the content of the report of 14 April 2005 with respect to: i. How effectively and to what extent the policies have been implemented and adopted by Registrars, Registries and Registrants, ii. Whether or not modifications to these policies should be considered by the GNSO as a result of the experiences gained during the implementation and monitoring stages, iii. The effectiveness of the dispute resolution processes and a summary of the filings that have been resolved through the process. (2) Identify the work items for the 6 month review. In particular determine what additional information and analysis is required to assist the GNSO in determining whether any refinements are required for the policy. Note this analysis may include a similar process to that used in the recent analysis of the practices of registrars with respect to requirements of registrars to provide information on the purpose for data collection and information on the recipients of the data. In this analysis an ICANN staff member documented the business processes used by the top 10 registrars, and a 10 other registrars chosen randomly. This analysis could complement the anecdotal evidence provided from public comments and queries received by ICANN staff. III Deliverable ================ The working group should produce a report to the GNSO Council with recommendations to the GNSO Council for work to be done by ICANN staff in the 6 month review.