Two applications failed initial evaluation due to registry services panel: 1-1155-50524 and 1-2090-26288. These are the evaluation results for them:
1-2090-26288
"Registry Services Eligible for Extended Evaluation Yourapplication (including Clarifying Question and Outreach responses) did not provide sufficient information concerning DNSSEC policies for the Registry Services Evaluation Panel to determine whether or not your proposal to disallow the prepublication of registrant DS records with no matching DNSKEY on the child would raise significant Security and Stability issues as described in Section 2.2.3.1 of the Applicant Guidebook (AGB). Yourapplication is eligible foran Extended Evaluation as described in Section 2.3.3 of the AGB."
Comment: this is was an overreach from the panel. Such stability measures that prevent domain registrants from changing to configurations that will make their domains inaccessible are in use in a bunch of TLDs, including TLDs with millions of registrations like .cz and .br. The full text that led to failure is from a non-public response on DNSSEC, and many other applications from the same back-end passed evaluation. This both indicates the panel looking in duplicity questions that were evaluated by the technical panel, and lack of consistent evaluation.
1-1155-50524
"The Registry Services Evaluation Panel was not able to determine whether your proposal to offer Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) registrations would raise significant Security and Stability issues as described in Section 2.2.3.1 of the Applicant Guidebook (AGB). Yourapplication (including Clarifying Question and Outreach responses) did not provide sufficient information concerning IDN registration policies, variant management policies, and resourcing plans in accordance with the criteria of Question 44 in the AGB. Yourapplication is eligible foran Extended Evaluation as described in Section 2.3.3 of the AGB."
Comment: IDN question was an optional question, and by answering to it, the panel failed an application for a question that was not required. Considering we already made good progress in IDN evaluation, by incorporating LGRs (Label Generation Rules), whether this could occur or not again is yet to be seen.
What is clear to me that lack of a concrete line between the registry services panel and the technical evaluation panel is likely an issue. Registry services are the "what" and technical infrastructure is the "how", and mangling the two is something to be avoided.
Rubens
