Tom, you have also addressed this as a question to the candidates for the NARALO ALAC Member selection and in that capacity I will be glad to address this issue at the meeting tomorrow. However, since you have sent this to the entire NARALO list, the answer has far more to it than can be addressed on our candidate teleconference, and many of the recipients will not likely be at that meeting, I thought it appropriate to reply here as well.

In the name of transparency I will note that you had already addressed a similar question to the NARALO ALAC Members about two weeks ago, and I did address what I understood to be the issues at that time. I see that you copied the majority of my reply to you below under the title "Basis for ICANN approval of 4 .nyc TLD registry agreement changes". This was presented as my personal understanding and not necessarily the "basis" for the changes. And for the record, I am proudly an Unaffiliated Member of NARALO and not a fellow ALSer.  ;-)

On to substance.

.nyc is Generic Top Level Domain granted under the 2010 round of New gTLDs. It is under the sole control of the applicant and now registry operator, The City of New York through its Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications. It is of course subject to all of the ICANN policy associated with gTLDs.

When I say "sole control", that is of course subject to the terms of its contract and and other organization'                                                        s restrictions. Many city TLDs chose to also be "community" TLDs (examples are .berlin, .madrid, .paris and .osaka), and in that case, they would also be responsible to the community that supported the application, and that responsibility might include some of the user connections that you desire, But even in those cases, it would depend on the specifics of the contracts and relationships. Regardless of the details, the Registry Agreement is a legal contract between ICANN and the Registry Operator, and its amendment is governed by a host of ICANN policies.

At-Large through the ALAC, and with the RALOs and ALSes has a significant ability to influence many issues. That was not always the case, and we certainly do not implicitly overrule others in the multistakeholder community, but we are heard. That being said, one of the prime purposes of ICANN is to establish policy in the gTLD arena. And we do. But of course, once that policy is established, we have to follow it.

To look at one of the perhaps less onerous examples you gave, the contract amendment to add several new data fields to the Registration Data Directory (formerly WHOIS). These fields allow the registry to request that all registrants provide information indicating that they are indeed eligible to have a .nyc domain name.  Despite the seeming simplicity of the change, how a registry is granted the right to do this is through making a request to establish a new Registry Service (Registry Services is a specifically defined term). The Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) governs such changes. The RSEP is one of the earlier Consensus Policies establish within ICANN through MS Model deliberations. RSEP evaluates the change for potential security, stability or competition issues. If it has any of these a consultative process is started which ultimately might result in a the ALAC submitted a comment on the proposed registry service (we have done this a number of times). If it has no security, stability or competition issues, then the request is approved, and in this case, required a contract amendment (since the RDS fields are explicitly listed in the Registry Agreement.

Now, on to your question, can At-Large change this process to allow for more and explicit consultation. Yes, we can. (Whether we want to or not is a different question - with the New gTLDs, there were about 90 such requests in 2015.) We can cause the policy to be reviewed and potentially changed. I can speak with some authority on the process because I have initiated it twice, and in both cases, the end result was a new gTLD policy that, in my mind and those of many others, significantly improved the gTLD namespace. If you think that this issue is one worthy of the effort it will take to effect the change you want, I encourage you to learn more about the process. I will say (and I have the scars to prove it), you will need to convince a lot of other people that there is a problem and that it is worth addressing.

The other amendments are related to 2-character 2nd-level names. As I have mentioned in my earlier reply, this subject has been the topic of a number of formal Public Comments and the ALAC did contribute. I do not recall how much ALS input there was into these processes, but there was surely the opportunity for input at many level.

You ask whether your ALS, which clearly has a great interest in the .nyc TLD, should be consulted before the .nyc agreement is modified. I see no way that we can make a specific link between your ALS and the TLD unless the registry chooses to do so. The more general question is whether the wider community should be notified of potential contractual amendments and have an opportunity to comment. That is certainly an issue that could be raised, as with changing RSEP, we would need to make a strong case that there is a problem and that is is worth of community time to address.


Regarding the use .us as a model. .us is a ccTLD which operates under a completely different set of rules and constraints. At some level (certainly for a redelegation or transfer of a ccTLD to a new operator), there must be some demonstration that the interested parties within the country/territory support the registry operator and their policies. Of course, the form this takes, and the actual level of real support, varies greatly from country to country.

.us was historically operated by Verisign and was redelegated to NeuStar in 2001 ( https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2001-11-19-en). I don't know if the .usTLD Stakeholder Council was put in place out of a sense of public interest, or whether they had to commit to it in order to satisfy the US Government's procurement process. It is certainly a model that can be used for how .nyc should be operated, but perhaps unfortunately, there  is nothing in the current policies that could compel .nyc, as a delegated TLD, to adopt such a policy other than voluntarily. On the other hand, if your aim is to make sure that this type of problem does not happen again, a GNSO PDP on setting the policies for any future gTLD rounds (or other methods of release) has just started. It is doing a full review of all policies, and you (and anyone else) are welcome to take an active part in it. See https://community.icann.org/x/RgV1Aw to sign up.

Regards, Alan








 


At 08/05/2016 12:04 AM, Thomas Lowenhaupt wrote:

Fellow NARALO Members,

ICANN granted the city of New York the right to issue domain names using the .nyc TLD in January 2014. As of May 1, 2016, 76,682 names had been issued to individuals and organizations.

Connecting.nyc Inc. is an At-Large Structure associated with the ICANN and an active participant in its multistakeholder governance process. With our focus on the development of the .nyc TLD as a public interest resource, I recently reviewed the .nyc Registry Agreement page on ICANN's website < https://www.icann.org/resources/agreement/nyc-2014-01-23-en>, and noted that four changes to the original agreement had been recorded there. Three were under the heading "Authorization(s) for Release of Reserved Names," as follows:
The fourth was listed under "Amendment No.1 (31 March 2016)":
The existence of these changes came as a complete surprise to me. As Chair of Connecting.nyc Inc., a NYS nonprofit created in 2007 to engage and educate New Yorkers about the use of the .nyc TLD, and as an active participant in ICANN's governance processes through our association as an At-Large Structure, I had presumed we would have been consulted about changes to the registry agreement.

My desire for inclusion of individual Internet users in consultations about future registry changes provides the basis for this message.

Note: An earlier email on this general subject led some to think I was challenging the 4 registry changes as being out of compliance with approved ICANN procedures. This is not the case. And based on my perusal of precedent references kindly provided by a fellow ALSer (see them below), I’d say that ICANN and the city followed the “letter of the law.” However...

However, I do question the efficacy of a process that allows changes to a registry agreement without taking full advantage of the existing machinery of governance, i.e., the multistakeholder model and the extant At-Large Structures (ISOC-NY is also a NYC based ALS). With the Internet community having settled on a multistakeholder governance model, one would imagine that our ALS would be involved in changing the basic agreement that guides the operation of the .nyc TLD.

But perhaps we were excluded from the review process for good reason, for example, that the city’s governance structure more effectively represents the needs of the various stakeholders than the Internet’s multistakeholder model. After all, New York City does have a democratic governance system, and a general election was held in November 2013. Perhaps it's thought the people thereby approved or acquiesced to the registry agreement, and thus, in the eyes of ICANN, a city-based ALS should not have a formal role. If this is the situation, I would appreciate someone pointing me to the relevant guidelines. For indeed...

At this point, the city is acting as if there is no role for its residents in a traditional multistakeholder model. While there was a 20 month period during which the city acknowledged the role of the residents and users through a .NYC Community Advisory Board (May 2013 - December 2014), the city unilaterally decided that entity should cease to exist on January 1, 2015. And to my dismay, it followed this decision by eliminating all reference to the .NYC Community Advisory Board’s very existence from the city’s website.

NOTE: To my knowledge city government has not been provided with any requirement or guideline about the operation of an inclusive, multistakeholder governance process for the .nyc TLD. So I’m not faulting the city administration for the current state of affairs. To do so would be to assume greater awareness and concomitant responsibility about this new resource than is seemingly warranted. 

What’s to be done?

This email seeks the assistance or NARALO in learning if Connecting.nyc Inc. should be provided with an opportunity to consult and consent to future registry agreement changes. We see precedent for this with the .us TLD.

The .us TLD is currently governed with the assistance of a .usTLD Stakeholder Council: http://www.neustar.us/ustld-stakeholder-council/structure-and-history/ . The council has a charter,  operating procedures, a membership (which is appointed by the contractor!), and  operational parameters (see usTLD Administrative Component graphic below).



If it is the consensus that we are inappropriately outside the extant "consultation loop" I suggest that NARALO initiate a review to determine if the current process should be changed to more closely align with the tenets of the multistakeholder governance system that underpins the operation of ICANN and the Internet.

Sincerely,

Thomas Lowenhaupt


Basis for ICANN approval of 4 .nyc TLD registry agreement changes






Content-Type: image/png;
         name="CqUBoKoO57Ys6mRwGOc4PEv_FsQwDJoMfH-n9skqModIU8zCCOi6h1jfJBAz7q8BmxymzToDervRbdXUQh5zhTbRlftGScN3qDUjOu8jfRhDoTClAOnVZH3h_tq-xxsoeYWeO1bt"
Content-ID: <part9.A530C394.8ADF4F98@communisphere.com>
Content-Disposition: inline;
         filename*0="CqUBoKoO57Ys6mRwGOc4PEv_FsQwDJoMfH-n9skqModIU8zCCOi6h1jfJBAz";
         filename*1="7q8BmxymzToDervRbdXUQh5zhTbRlftGScN3qDUjOu8jfRhDoTClAOnVZH3h";
         filename*2="_tq-xxsoeYWeO1bt"
X-Microsoft-Exchange-Diagnostics:
         1;SN1PR0301MB2030;9:Ug/DpD5yV4BmxIyugixxRGSsv3hRKWl1cx4WR/W9B/DtnY/xrrrktnmxdbgHeoZ4NIEHvpIejuwurBKdd3ijsjFutMqZelfdip/H2/H9RXrkf/LjbaAg6dB8KKAqfPLzGJlR8Rg2C/NGCrUollB4EckY1E4jXhEip+BsLLKwU1c=


Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
X-Microsoft-Exchange-Diagnostics:
         1;SN1PR0301MB2030;9:Ug/DpD5yV4BmxIyugixxRGSsv3hRKWl1cx4WR/W9B/DtnY/xrrrktnmxdbgHeoZ4NIEHvpIejuwurBKdd3ijsjFutMqZelfdip/H2/H9RXrkf/LjbaAg6dB8KKAqfPLzGJlR8Rg2C/NGCrUollB4EckY1E4jXhEip+BsLLKwU1c=

------
NA-Discuss mailing list
NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org
https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss

Visit the NARALO online at http://www.naralo.org
------