GNSO Council Rome Meeting Minutes

3 March 2004.

Proposed agenda and documents

List of attendees:
Philip Sheppard - Commercial & Business users C.
Marilyn Cade - Commercial & Business users C.
Grant Forsyth - Commercial & Business users C.
Greg Ruth - ISCPC
Antonio Harris - ISCPC
Tony Holmes - ISCPC
Thomas Keller- Registrars
Ross Rader - Registrars
Bruce Tonkin - Registrars
Ken Stubbs - gTLD registries
Jordyn Buchanan - gTLD registries - remote participation - proxy to Cary Karp
Cary Karp - gTLD registries
Lucy Nichols - Intellectual Property Interests C
Niklas Lagergren - Intellectual Property Interests C
Kiyoshi Tsuru - Intellectual Property Interests C.
Jisuk Woo - Non Commercial users C. - absent, apologies, proxy to Marc Schneiders
Marc Schneiders - Non Commercial users C.
Carlos Afonso - Non Commercial users C.
Alick Wilson
Demi Getschko
Amadeu Abril I Abril

19 Council Members

Thomas Roessler - ALAC Liaison

The WHOIS Task Force Chairs:
Brian Darville - WHOIS Task Force 3 Chair - remote participation

Barbara Roseman - ICANN Staff Manager
Glen de Saint G�ry - GNSO Secretariat

Real time captioning
Quorum present at 16:00 CET,

Bruce Tonkin chaired the meeting.

Item 1: Approval of minutes of last meeting
- 19 February 2004
- Actions arising

Ken Stubbs, seconded by Philip Sheppard moved the adoption of the 19 February minutes.
The date mentioned in the minutes 21 February to be clarified: Meeting date 19 February

The motion was carried. Amadeu Abril I Abril abstained.

Decision 1: Minutes of the teleconference held on February 19 adopted.

Item 2: Update on WHOIS task forces
Receive an update from the WHOIS task force chairs
- key outcomes from workshops
- assess current level of consensus
- possible recommendations

Jeff Neuman, Whois task force 1 chair, on restricting access, reported that there had been fruitful dialogue on the needs and justifications for Whois information, the differentiation between access via port 43 versus web-based access, registrars' mechanisms to put speed bumps into the process and tiered access and authentication.
The following procedural steps were the constituency positions due on March 19, the preliminary report with policy recommendations due on April 9 followed by a 20 day public comment period ending April 29 with the aim of completing the final report mid to late May.
Tom Keller, who chaired the Whois task force 2 on data collection and display in the absence of Jordyn Buchanan, reported that discussions had been useful, were transcribed and would be incorporated into the data gathering material.
Jordyn Buchanan, through remote participation, commented on the process to date saying that the task force was tracking on a similar schedule to the Whois task forces 1 and 3 and also experienced a lack of responses to the questionnaire. A separate questionnaire had been sent to the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) and the deadline for responses extended which would result in the preliminary report being 10 days behind schedule but that the overall work product would be complete for the GNSO Council to act upon in June and for the ICANN Board to act upon in July.
Ross Rader, who chaired the Whois task force 3 on data accuracy in the absence of Brian Darville, characterized the session as informative and productive from the task force point of view and useful for the community in attendance. The task force viewed it as a start in data collection as responses to the surveys been disappointing. He referred to the presentation by Bernard Turcotte, from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, that documented the practices and experiences with data verification in a ccTLD context.
Brian Darville, through remote participation, stated that the task force would work from the interim report, the workshop material and constituency statements so as to submit a preliminary report by April 9 aiming at the final report to be completed by May 20.
Bruce Tonkin urged the GNSO constituencies to respond using their expertise to develop position statements that addressed the task force terms of reference and from which consensus recommendations could be developed.
He further observed that it was important to be able to measure the success in policy development, and called on the constituencies to consider how they would measure improvement as this could establish benchmarks at the time of implementation, and after implementation, to gauge the success of the policy.
He emphasized that it was important not to try and solve all the problems, but rather to make changes which could be measured and so move forward making steady improvements.

Item 4: Update on PDP for approval process for gtld registry changes
Receive an update from the GNSO Committee chair
- key outcomes from workshops
- assess current level of consensus
- possible recommendations

Bruce Tonkin reported that input had been received from:
the public, a registry operator, a registrar, all the GNSO constituencies and the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC). The following issues were addressed in some of the statements:
- the decision points required in the approval process
- criteria that should be applied at the decision points
- the time lines
- keeping within the general principles consistent with the ICANN mission.
The committee's ongoing work would be to develop and aim for consensus on a flowchart of the approval process which would be the basis for the initial report that would go out for public comment.

Item 5: GNSO 2004 planning
- what are the measurable outcomes we are seeking from ICANN for 2004 given its current level of resourcing
- ie how do we measure success from policy work? (examples may include establishing a baseline for current number of transfer complaints to ICANN, and seeking to reduce that by some percentage, or establishing a baseline for WHOIS data accuracy, and seeking to improve that etc)
- what are the priority areas for further work
Note the following ranked list of priorities was discussed in the meeting of 29 October 2003: (1) registry services (2) WHOIS (3) new gtlds (4) enforcement (5) UDRP
Marc Schneiders has also suggested considering policy aspects associated with possible reassignment of the .net gtld.

Bruce Tonkin stated that the GNSO Council had to plan for the following six months and reminded the members that in October 2003 the priorities were:
Registry approval process, Whois, new gTLDs, enforcement aspects of contracts and the UDRP. In the mean time the reassignment of .net had to be considered.
The GNSO Council relied on the ICANN staff support to assist with policy development and implement the policies that were developed thus the accomplishment of the tasks before Council had to be consistent with the available ICANN staff resources.
Bruce Tonkin called upon Paul Verhoef to give a summary of the overall ICANN priorities to place in context issues that the GNSO wished to present.
Paul Verhoef, newly appointed Vice President of Policy Development Support, responsible for assisting the supporting organizations and committees in policy development stated that the resourcing issue was currently receiving attention. High on the priority list was the stability of the DNS and the associated IANA functions and security. Other priorities included the ccNSO about to start up and the ASO, both of which could benefit from the GNSO experiences, better and long term perspective communication with the community, litigation issues, the ongoing effort of management to internationalize, Brussels office being an example and the general process in the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) of which the DNS was also a part.
Questions included:
- what low-level details could be shared around some of the specific initiatives in stability and security.
- whether the required staff support for the GINS council and other policy councils could be engaged in the light of the litigation costs facing ICAO

Paul Verhoef felt he was not qualified to speak on security but responded that the IANA function was basic to the functional mechanism and output of the organization and created concern which should be addressed by structured communication.
The two positions for the GNSO Council were occupied and the Vice President of Business operations, and himself were concerned that ICANN's basic mandates were properly covered by staff while maintaining a fine balance in dealing with new demands.

Bruce Tonkin commented that there were a number of elements involved in policy implementation:
- What contracts need to change to make a new policy enforceable
- Enforcement as such
- Cost/revenue model to resource implementation, compliance and monitoring.
He emphasized the importance of continuation and change in the organization and that the threat of external organizations asserting the right to take over domain name policy should not be dealt with by ICANN staff alone but also by members of ICANN community and volunteers. The causes of litigation should be looked at in the light of improving processes and strengthening the organization.

New gTLDs
Important issues to consider over 12 month period, 2003 - 2004 were the two aspects of new top level domain names:
-moving forward with ASCII-based TLDs
-issues associated with introducing internationalized top level domain names.
Internationalized domain names were currently being introduced at a second level of some of the gTLDs, .com, .net and .info and in some of the ccTLDs. The present issue was the introduction of the international domain names at the top level, that is introducing them into the root zone file. The technical and policy issues, including the criteria that are being set forth for the introduction of new top level domains, are quite separate.

Enforcement
Enforcement mechanisms other than complete termination of the contract such as, nuanced mechanisms of enforcement at a high level would allow other policy development processes to be enforced without resorting to litigation. It was argued that enforcement was not a policy issue but an implementation issue, however a counter argument was made looking at two aspects:
- implementation of the termination of the contract may be enough to make tangible changes in some market participants behaviour
- in the contract there might be mechanisms on the policy side which should be implemented.
The registry contracts that have slas in them were given as an example. If the registries did not perform the slas, there was a financial penalty to pay to the registrars. This is very rarely brought into force because the registries do an excellent job and adhere to their obligations, possibly because there is a specific and concrete openly attached which motivates compliance and acts as an enforcement mechanism.

ICANN/GNSO Meeting format
It was suggested that the format of the GNSO meetings at the ICANN meetings be revised to keep apart constituency matters and allow for more intercommunity discussion. The cross constituency meeting and the workshops on Whois and Registry approval services were considered a positive step in that direction.

Test bed
The term "Test bed" appeared to create confusion, and two concepts were distinguished:
- market test that is performed on an extensive population
- technical test that is performed on a constrained population during a constrained test period.
The use of test beds in the case of International domain names had tended to merge the two separate concepts.

6. Any Other Business:

It was proposed that the GNSO Council reiterate its recommendations of July 24, 2002, to the ICANN Board on the Wait List Service (WLS):
-That ICANN Board move with all haste to implement and actively enforce the proposed redemption grace period for delete policies and practice
- That ICANN Board rejects Verisign's request
- That the ICANN Board rejects Verisign's request to trial the WLS for 12 months.
It was considered that the appropriate place for such a reiteration would be the public forum.

Marilyn Cade, seconded by Amadeu Abril I Abril proposed a resolution recognizing Elisabeth Porteneuve's contributions to the DNSO/GNSO council as the first secretariat and ccTLD represenative/liaison on the occasion of her job assignment change and the discontinuation of her role as cc liaison.

Resolution unanimously carried.

Decision 2: Elisabeth Porteneuve was thanked and recognized by the GNSO Council for her contributions to the DNSO/GNSO.

Bruce Tonkin declared GNSO meeting closed, thanked everybody for attending as well as Jordyn Buchanan and Brian Darville for their remote participation.

The meeting ended: 17:30 CET( local time)

• Next GNSO Council teleconference April 1, 2004. Time: tbd
  see: Calendar