Dear colleagues,
you may remember that I
volunteered during our meeting in Singapore to look into the JAS topic and
try find answers to our questions.
Unfortunately, I had to leave
the JAS session early due to other commitments, but read the report, the
transcript and other material available.
Since I assume this subject
will be discussed during today's call, please find below some information
that shall facilitate our discussion.
To start with, the JAS group
make very general suggestions on how to support needy applicants. I could
not find any information on how the program shall be operationalized. This
is certainly due to the fact that these practical questions are not part of
the mandate and be delegated to ICANN staff to work on.
However, I can now partially
answer some of the questions we raised.
We were of the opinion that
only waiving part of the application fees does not help needy
applicants.
In fact, the JAS recommendation
is that ICANN shall provide a multitude of support services in various
areas, such as cost reductions, staggered fees, partial refund from auction
proceedings, logistical assistance, technical help, legal and filing
support, third parties support facilitated by ICANN (translation, technical
support ...) etc.
If all these programs were in
place in due time, needy applicants could really benefit from that. That is
the good news.
It is also good that the JAS
group is also requesting the applicant to demonstrate certain financial
capabilities beyond the mere application fees, see sec. 3.2. These include
part of the potential fees for extended evaluations and for registry
operational costs.
On the other hand, there are
some worrying proposals in there, too.
- Exemption or deferment of
IPv6 implementation requirements as possible (sec. 4.1.1)
- Reduction of the Financial
Continued Operation Instrument Obligation to 6-12 months (sec 4.1.1)
- Deferred requirement of
DNSSEC (sec. 4.2)
On the IPv6 question, Tony
Harris asked a question during the session and I copy this part of the
transcript below:
>>TONY HARRIS: Good
morning, my name is Tony Harris. I am a member of this group, although I
have admittedly been absent for the last couple of months. I apologize. I
have been working on a project out of the office.
We had a meeting on Tuesday of
the ISPCP constituency and reviewed the Second Milestone Report.
There was one thing which
interested us, as a constituency I'm talking now, and that was a mention of
not requiring the applicants that are subject to this program to implement
IPv6. That was a little surprising because, first of all, you may not have a
choice because IPv4 addressing blocks are not all that abundant and they are
slowly running out.
And the second thing is, why
would it concern a needy applicant registry? That is something which is the
concern of the carrier or the Internet Service Provider who at some point
would providing connectivity to the registry and/or the back office. And
eventually it could also scale back to a concern of the back-office
provider. But we fail to see -- to understand how it would affect the actual
applicant, the needy applicant. At least on a technical basis.
On a cost consideration, for
example, in Latin America, you can obtain IP address -- IPv6 address blocks
at no cost at all. It is considered for the foreseeable future to be
experimental and necessary. And LACNIC is not charging for these blocks at
this time.
So we just -- I thought I would
put this comment on the table since you are going to write the final report.
It might be something worth revisiting because it doesn't seem to make much
sense.
Thank you. >>CARLTON
SAMUELS: Thank
you, Tony.
Can I ask Eric Brunner Williams,
who is a member of the team, to respond to that.
Eric, you have the floor.
>>ERIC BRUNNER
WILLIAMS: Thank
you very much, Mr. Chair.
Tony, the requirement is in the
Applicant Guidebook. It's a policy requirement which is independent of any
particular constituency, or their views on the subject. It's something
that's come out of GNSO consensus policy.
Our recommendation is that it --
that the requirement is capable of being deferred because v6 is simply not
available in parts of the world.
Additionally, under ARIN 124, v4
addresses are reserved for critical infrastructure. We expect this proposal
to be adopted also by RIPE and APNIC. Registries are a critical
infrastructure, and so as we get to the exhaustion portion of the v4
allocation regime, these critical infrastructure elements are reserved --
have access to the reserved pool of v4 addresses.
So I hope that makes sense out of
it; that is, there are -- v6 is actually not pervasively available. We do
not want the requirement to limit registries from being located in portions
of the world where v6 is not available. And v4 capability -- v4 allocations
are still available for critical infrastructure under the exhaustion regimes
of at least one, if not more, of the RIRs.
Thank you. >>CARLTON
SAMUELS:
Tony.
>>TONY HARRIS: I just want to thank
Eric for the response and I will relay it back to the constituency. Thank
you very much for the clarification.
While this was a helpful
explanation, IMHO the remaining concern are:
- Needy applicants will most
probably not operate their own registry backend system, but use third
parties's products for that or even outsource the whole operation to a
registry backend provider. It can be expected that IPv6 as well DNSSEC will
be included in all solutions that are offered by specialized companies.
Waiving the requirement or deferring it would establish two classes of
registries and thereby introduce and perpetuate a scheme
discriminating needy applicants. Certainly, in areas of the world where IPv6
is not available, it cannot be used, but all registries should be IPv6 and
DNSSEC ready.
- A reduction of the Financial
Continued Operation Instrument Obligation may result in stability issues if
registries cannot properly fulfill their - primarily technical -
contractual obligations towards ICANN. While it is well understood
that needy applicants might not be able to demonstrate sufficient financial
capabilities, ICANN should allocate funds available to help out if needed so
that the stability of all registries is granted.
- Any assistance by ICANN in
the area of providing legal and filing support for needy applicants beyond
the information that is publicly available (such as in the faq section of
new gTLD program website) may result in unfair treatment of applicants.
ICANN should not be confronted with allegations that needy applicants
benefit from "insider knowledge" that other applicants to not get access to.
Therefore, legal and filing support should be better provided by third
parties and this can be financially supported.
I am looking forward to talking
to you later today.
Thomas Rickert