Dear Discussion Group Members: Welcome to the planning group for the next stage in the development of new top-level domains. Thank you for agreeing to participate in this important work. My Introduction. I expect that I have met most of you already, but my name is Bret Fausett, and I am the General Counsel of Uniregistry, Corp., an applicant for a number of new gTLDs and the current registry operator for a smaller number of new gTLDs. I also am a member of the GNSO Council, appointed from the Registry Stakeholder Group. As you may know, at its regularly scheduled meeting at ICANN50 in London, the GNSO created this special discussion group to start the policy development work for subsequent rounds of new gTLD applications. A link to the GNSO's resolution is below: http://gnso.icann.org/en/council/resolutions#20140625-2 As it does with all working groups, the GNSO appointed an Interim Chair, from the Council, to organize the group and get it started. I was appointed to fill that role. What is a “Discussion Group”? You will note that this group is called a "discussion group." This is different from other working groups with which you may been involved previously. To the best of my knowledge, this mechanism has not been used before, so we will be creating this together. Let me provide some background on why the GNSO selected this mechanism, which also will provide some guidance on our way forward. Typically, new policy development processes start with a request by the GNSO Council for an issue report from ICANN staff on a reasonably defined policy issue. Following the preparation of the staff issue report, the GNSO can vote to create a policy development process. When it does, the Council creates a working group to develop policy recommendations that the Council can evaluate and adopt. Adopted policy recommendations ultimately work their way to the broader ICANN community and then to the ICANN Board. Here, with regard to the subject of new top-level domains, the GNSO thought that the issues we might possibly examine for future rounds of new gTLDs were, at present, too numerous and too undefined to move directly to issue reports. As a consequence, this "discussion group" was created to specify the issues that we might choose to examine for future policy development efforts. A Proposed Way Forward. Our job is simply to identify, and ultimately categorize, the issues that future policy development processes might consider. We want to divide the issues into logically connected pieces that staff can turn into issue reports for the Council, and that the Council, in turn, can assign to policy development working groups. I think this means that every issue, identified by any member of the discussion group or a stakeholder group it represents, is included on a list of possible issues for future consideration. For example, if you believe that new gTLDs launching on random days of the week confuses consumers, you could suggest that we add "Should new gTLDs launch to the public on a uniform day of the week?" to the list of issues for future consideration. Such an issue might be followed by its rationale, “Rationale: Consumers may be confused as to when they are able to register names if some gTLDs launch on Monday, some on Tuesday, etc.” Ideally, the proponent of an issue for consideration would draft the statement of the issue and its corresponding rationale using neutral words that did not prejudge the policy outcome. At this issue identification stage, you shouldn't need to convince anyone of the value of a uniform launch day, only that this is a real issue of concern to you. Ideally, members of the discussion group with similar issues would come together to create a single agreed issue statement for their common issue. After we have a master list of issues that we have created on this list and/or in a wiki or other workspace format, I propose we categorize them into logical sets. I don’t have a clear idea of what that categorization might look like, but I expect the organization will make itself more clear to us as we create the issues. Issue identification and categorization will be the bulk of our work. Because we are identifying issues, not solving hard policy problems, I expect that most of our work will be collegial, non-contentious and can be completed before the end of 2014. I expect we won’t always agree on what the policy outcomes should be, but we will have those discussions when the PDPs start in a few months. * * * * * I look forward to our first meeting next week, and I hope that we will be have most of our discussions, and do most of our work, on this mailing list and using the available wiki/workspace tools that ICANN makes available to us. — Bret -- Bret Fausett, Esq. • General Counsel, Uniregistry, Inc. 12025 Waterfront Drive, Suite 200 • Playa Vista, CA 90094-2536 310-496-5755 (T) • 310-985-1351 (M) • bret@uniregistry.link — — — — —