With my thanks to all who participated in the discussion on policy cooperation with the GAC at the CPWG meeting 28 August, here’s my summary:

Cooperation was seen as useful and expanding it into policy areas worth exploring, looking for issues where we agree and can find common interests. “How and where can the interests of the end users benefit from this cooperation” was suggested as a criterion to inform us about topics to embark on. Addressing issues where the opinions of the two groups are already close to each other is to be preferred. Trying to convince each other on issues we disagree upon is not a good use of our time.

The need to retain our identity and to avoid perceptions of our being “an arm” of another stakeholder group was stressed. On the other hand, when our ideas with another group do align, we should not shy away from saying we agree with them.

As to concrete issues for the policy dialogue with the GAC, the ones that already have been subject to discussions at numerous joint ALAC-GAC meetings – EPDP and SubPro – were mentioned. As a third topic, survival of multistakeholderism in the ICANN context was suggested.

GeoNames where (in spite of the lack of consensus both inside At-Large and the GAC), it might be worth exploring the extent to the overlap , the subset of issues that both might agree upon. In this connection, the default role of the 2012 AGB was mentioned, whether going back to it on many issues would be preferable compared to alternatives that have been proposed.

Global public interests and safeguards (highly regulated sectors, verified TLD’s, registration restrictions, DNS abuse). This topic would include whether SubPro PDP has properly addressed the CCT recommendations that need to be implemented before another new gTLD round.

The need for “getting our own act together” was recognized on issues where there is no internal ALAC/At-Large consensus at present.

Best,

Yrjö