Dear RDA Scoping Team,

Please find below the notes and action items from yesterday’s meeting, which was repurposed as a Small Team meeting.

The next plenary meeting will be Thursday, 28 April at 14:00 UTC.

Best regards,

Marika, Berry, and Caitlin

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Action Items

1. RDA Scoping Team to begin reviewing Support Staff’s Initial Write-Up for the GNSO Council of Assignments 1 and 2. Full RDA Scoping Team to discuss needed timeline for review during the next meeting.
2. Owen to recirculate previous message regarding Whois Inaccuracy Complaint data for the team to review and see if anything else is needed from ICANN Compliance. (Note: completed 21 April)
3. Brian G. to check with ICANN org colleagues if there is (i) any additional publicly-available data that has not already been shared that the group could review and (ii) if the compliance auditing subject matter experts are available to attend next week’s call to discuss further details/answer questions regarding a potential accuracy-based audit.
4. Support Staff to work with IPC colleagues on open question for Proposal H. (Note: completed 21 April).
5. RDA Scoping Team to review the updates to the Gap Analysis Proposals (beginning on p. 8 of Google Doc) in preparation for next week’s meeting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sScP8MwgDCg4yvFNAYwQVql7DQob60vX/edit?pli=1.

21 April 2022

RDA Scoping Team Small Team Call

• Earlier this week, Support Staff shared a proposed write-up for the GNSO Council for assignments 1 and 2.
• The write-up was circulated as a Google Doc – please feel free to provide suggestions and edits in the form of comments: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13sP-2z7rusEYrDyntrgm-tcIavPMJndU/edit
• The deadline for review will ultimately be up for the full group to weigh in on.
• During next week’s meeting, with the full team, the group should discuss the outreach ICANN org is planning to the EDPB and how that could affect the timeline. Similarly, can any of the proposals kick off in the meantime? Perhaps there would be a logical break in meetings while data is gathered.
• Perhaps for the proposals that do not require personal data, the group can close on those today. In short, the group can document in further detail what these proposals would entail. The group would then determine which proposals could be sent to the Council.
• An RDA Scoping Team meeting is included on the draft schedule for ICANN74, but it is still a draft.
• Next week, the group can discuss how it would like to use this time.
• It could be a chance to present the proposals to the GNSO Council, for example
• During last week’s meeting, the group made substantial progress on Proposal A, in large part because of the CPH contributions. Support Staff made several updates based on last week’s conversations; encourage the group to read Support Staff’s additions to confirm the accuracy.

Proposal E – Review of Accuracy Complaints

• To further detail the proposal, a few items the group may wish to consider: (i) What information is the group expected to learn from the review of these complaints and how would that help inform the deliberations of the group; (ii) a practical way forward may be to review the information that is already available
• Expectation is the ST would understand what type of complaints are sent to ICANN Compliance and what the outcome rates are (for different possible outcomes) 

Could follow these steps: 

• Gather all complaints in any category related to registration data accuracy
• categorize each complaint:
  • group into categories (validation, verification, inaccuracy, other?)
  • assign an outcome status (corrected, suspended, confirmed as already accurate, etc) 
• Evaluate rates

• It may be helpful to contextualize the ICANN org complaints – for example, could be helpful to include the bigger picture, i.e., out of the total complaints, how many are are related to accuracy?
• Approximately six months ago, Owen previously looked at all of the published complaint data going back to 2013 re: total number of Whois inaccuracy complaints and the various subtypes
• Action: Owen to recirculate this email so that it at the top of the team’s mailing list. Note: completed – RDA Team to refer to Owen’s recent email
• One problem – if the domain name is removed from the zone, the ticket is closed. In other words, just because a ticket is closed does not mean a full investigation has been completed of the inaccuracy complaint.
• Action Item: Support Staff to check with ICANN org colleagues if there is any additional publicly-available data that has not already been shared that the group could review
• Question for the group: this will require review and analysis – is this something the team as a whole should be doing? Or would a small team of volunteers review the information once it is shared?

Proposal A – Registrar Survey

• The idea of the survey was shared with the RrSG as something the RDA Scoping Team has been discussing, but this has not been discussed in detail yet
• This will be helpful in vetting this with GNSO Council if the idea has been shared and garnered informal support from the RrSG
• Believe there could be some valuable input that registrars could provide. Once this group has come up with the questions, it seems like something ICANN org could do, rather than hire an outside company. This should not be a high cost.

Proposal D – Registrar Audit

• As you may recall, Request further information from ICANN org what information could be audited and in what timeframe. Important for the scoping team to understand what information might result from an audit to determine if/how it can inform the deliberations.
• Compliance colleagues have offered to provide follow-up information on the provided answers (if any)
• Based on the feedback provided by Compliance, is this an avenue the team would like to pursue?
• The response indicates that an audit can take two months to kick off; the selection criteria would need to be established.
• Seems that ICANN org is awaiting more input (from the EDPB, for example) before delving into the processing of redacted data. Would ICANN Compliance be willing to work with this team on an accuracy-related audit?
• Dispel the impression that an audit will would fix all of the problems with data privacy/redaction. Data protection implications must be covered and reviewed. In previous audits, many registrars based in Europe have sent redacted answers to ICANN org.  You cannot, for example, ask in an audit for issues or topics or questions that do not directly flow from the agreement, so if the registrar is not obliged to collect certain data under the RAA, then the audit cannot ask that.
• Would be helpful to interact with compliance if there is staff expertise to design a study or audit
• Brian to check with ICANN org colleagues, specifically the dedicated audit team, to see who the appropriate folks might be and get back to the group to see if engagement with this team is possible.
• ARS would likely not be the outcome of a PDP, as ARS was not based on a previous PDP.
• To put it in context, what we asked groups to do is to identify how current requirements are being met and how that can be measured. The idea is based on that measurements, we would then kind of move into Assignments 3 and 4 and review now that the group has relevant data, does it demonstrate any kind of gaps that need to be further investigated, either through a PDP or other means? If yes, those would then be recommendations and go back to the Council. At this stage, we cannot say if the recommendations would be based on consensus of this group or if it would just be documented as different perspectives from the team.
• Action: Support Staff to reach out to Lori S. to review the outstanding question to IPC, and Lori to answer the question by the end of the week.