| Man1: | Yes Bruce I am here. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | That was George Bush. You have to be on the call earlier to find out why that's so appropriate. So just for the record: We have Philip Shepherd, Marilyn Cade and Grant Forsyth. Ken Stubbs?, |
| Ken Stubbs: | Yes. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Kerry Carp? |
| Kerry Carp: | Yes |
| Bruce Tonkin: | June Seo, ok do we have any proxy for June, Glenn? |
| Glenn: | There's no proxy for June that I know of, perhaps Ken or Kerry have a proxy for her. |
| Ken: | No. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, Tony Harris? |
| Tony Holmes: | Bruce it's Tony Holmes, I have a Proxy for both Tony Harris and Greg Ruth. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | OK, thank you Tony. Robin Gross? |
| Robin Gross: | Yes I'm present. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Norbert Cline. |
| Glenn: | I have no proxy for Norbert Cline either, Bruce. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Milwaukee Chambers |
| Milwaukee Chambers: | Yes, I'm here. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ross Rader? |
| Ross Rader: | I'm here Bruce. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Tom Keller. |
| Tom Keller: | I'm on. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Bruce Tonkin is here. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Uta Decker? |
| Uta Decker: | Yes. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thank You Uta |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Kyoshi Suru? |
| Glenn: | I have no proxy for Kyoshi either. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, Lucy. |
| Lucy: | I'm present. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Maureen Coverly. |
| Maureen Coverly: | Yes I'm here Bruce thanks. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Avery Doria? |
| Avery Doria: | I'm here. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Sofia Beckervy. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Susan Sen? |
| Susan Sen: | Yes I'm here. |
| Bruce Tonkin: |
And Brett Froset. Brett Froset: I'm here, wide awake, eager to participate. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Great, glad to hear someone's wide awake. OK, and we also have Mike Pellage as an observer. |
| Glenn: | And Liz Williams and Olaf. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, Welcome Olaf, welcome Liz. And do we have Maria Farrell as well? |
| Glenn: |
She hasn't joined yet, but I'm sure she will be joining Ok, so we have quorum. The agenda today consists of approving the minutes of the last few meetings dating back to the ICANN meeting in Vancouver. A short update on making sure that each of the constituencies have started preparing their statements for the gTLD policy process. A short update on whois, then we have a presentation or a discussion with John Clinton and possibly Patrick Fulstrom on the ITF draft relating to IDNs. And then we've got an update on where we're going I guess from the start on the dotcom agreement and the next steps relating to the dotcom agreement. An update from Liz Williams on the GNSO review, and then any other business. Are there any changes anyone wants to make to the agenda? |
| Marilyn Cade: | Yes Bruce it's Marilyn, I had asked to have under Item 6, and I think that may be incorporated in to what you said under Item 6, which is "Next steps on policy issues related to proposed dotcom agreement? This would be where we go through the discussion on how to develop, how to identify the policy issues, how we develop an issues report etc. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Yeah, that's right, that'd be under item 6. Ok, any other changes. OK, So the first item then is the approval of the minutes. WE have the formal minutes of the meeting that was held on the Monday of the meeting in Vancouver. Then there was the meeting on the Friday which was the 2nd of December, then we had a council teleconference on December 21st, are there any further changes to those minutes. |
| Ken Stubbs: | Bruce I'd like to move for approval of the minutes. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thank You Ken. |
| Marilyn Cade: | Are we approving them all at once, or? |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I think that's easier yeah. |
| Marilyn Cade: | I second that then.. Oh wait, I can't, I wasn't there for one of them sorry. |
| Male voice: | You can still second, you just have to abstain from that meeting, "cause that's what I'm going to have to do as well. |
| Marilyn Cade: | OK. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, so what I'll do is I'll call for a vote. If you were there for all of them just say Aye, and then if you want to abstain, let us know which meeting you'd like us to abstain from, I think that's going to be the most efficient way of doing this. Ok, so all those in favor of approving the minutes for those meetings, please say Aye. [ayes], any against. Ok, now I'll take abstentions, so if there's any meeting you haven't attended or if you haven't reviewed the minutes, signal your abstentions now please. |
| Ken Stubbs: | Ken Stubbs for 21 December. |
| Echa: | I abstain for all. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Who was that sorry? |
| Echa: | Echa. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thank You, anyone else. |
| Marie: | Ahhh, 21 December, I came in on the tail end of that one, so I'm going to have to abstain. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thank You Marie. |
| African Voice: | I will abstain for all as well. |
| Bruce Tonkin: |
OK thank you, anyone else? Ok thank you, we'll note those minuets as passed. Item 2, the purpose of that really is just making sure that the constituencies have started work there. Under the by-laws each constituency should have advised at least Glenn the representative of that constituency who will be putting together the position statement. And naturally that also I would hope means that within the constituency that would going on developing that. What I might do is perhaps quickly run through each of the constituencies just to get a sense of what's happened. Perhaps if Phillip or Marilyn or Grant can comment on what's going on in the business constituency. Just progress so far. |
| Marilyn Cade: | And again Bruce, it's Marilyn, you're looking for us to tell you that we've appointed someone to be in charge within our constituency? |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Yeah, and you've started doing something [laughter] |
| Male voice: | We can confirm the first, but not the second. |
| Marilyn Cade: | So wait a minute, we can confirm the first in that we've been thinking Philip. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, so you've appointed someone in that constituency Marilyn? |
| Marilyn Cade: | Ahh Philip I think is going to go forward on this? |
| Philip Shepherd: | Correct. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, thank you. In the registries, Ken or Carrie, are you able to comment on progress? |
| Ken Stubbs: | Yeah, we're on the third draft of the commentaries right now, and about half of our members have already made their final comments and we're going through final edits. So we're working real hard to keep the timeline up for the next day or two for submission. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thank You Ken, and who will be the representative for coordination that? |
| Ken Stubbs: | Well evidently I got elected, because Glen noticed I [laughter]. There are four constituencies that have already had appointments for that basically. Ross for the registrars, myself for the registries, Philip for the Business and Commercial, and Caroline Shakoyne, welcome back Caroline, for the intellectual property interests. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thanks, that's something you've sent today Ken is it? Because I haven't |
| South African Female Voice: | That's for the new GTOD list, Bruce |
| Male Voice: | I have one little question, and maybe I'm a bit confused. I know the rest of the council members may not have seen this, but out of curiosity Glen, you also included some comments with regards to the bylaws. Is Caroline Shakoyne now on the council again? Is that why she's on the task force, or did the IP constituency appoint her as their representative, in lieu of? |
| Lucy: | This is Lucy, I can speak to that: We appointed Caroline as our point-person for the IPC. |
| Marilyn Cade: | And these people are serving as the raconteur, so we may very often have someone who's not [cuts out] |
| Male Voice: | I was just curious, I knew the IPC had recently had elections, I didn't know whether Caroline was- |
| Marilyn Cade: | No she's not a member of the council, but she's going to be gathering our information on our position. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | And it's correct that there's no requirement for that representative to be a council member. |
| American Male: | I wasn't questioning it, I was just. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Yeah, I was just clarifying that. Tony Holmes, can you update us on the ISP? |
| Tony Holmes: | Yes, we're on a first draft at the moment, Mark McFadden is pulling together the views. Bruce Thanks, Robin Gross or Milwaukee? |
| Milwaukee Chambers: | Yes, we haven't got any appointees so far, but we have one or two contributions about the issue. And I hope we will be holding the discussion further. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thank You, Ross Rader for the registrar? |
| Ross Rader: | We've appointed someone myself, convened this taskforce to help us get our drafting done. We've got a team of economists, all sorts of stuff being done. Actually, we've appointed me and we've got a conference, and that's all we've really done. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, thanks Ross. Well to Deka or Lucy? I guess you've got Caroline as your representative? |
| American Female: | Yes, we're actually working on a draft, we have a number of people from the IPC working on a draft, and I don't remember the exact date, but I think we have a deadline of this week for circulating a draft, so we are working diligently. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Great, thank you. And I guess for Marie and Avrey, we're not actually looking for a constituency position, but have any of you been doing any thinking or work on the issue at all? |
| American Female: | Yes, thinking, and there's a few conversations going on in a few of the society spaces. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thank You. Maureen or Sophia? |
| Maureen: | I have just been reviewing the terms of reference and some of the implications and just looking at the input that's come in. I expect to be in more of a responsive rather than contributing because I don't represent a constituency. So if that's appropriate that's how I would see my role. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, thank you Maureen. And Susanne's [cuts out] in terms of the GAC? Have you got anything you can add on that? |
| American Male: | Unfortunately not, my apologies, but as liaison I have not really gone out and solicited views. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | No I just wondered if there was any working going on in the GAC on the general topic. |
| American Female: | And I do apologize, this is about the GNSO review, or? |
| Bruce Tonkin: | No, new gTLDs. |
| American Female: | No, I can report that there was an agreement reached in the working group and approved at the plenary in Vancouver, that the GAC would seek to develop principles for the introduction of new gTLDs. There is a draft that has been circulated to the GAC membership for an initial set of comments due at the end of this month, with a fairly aggressive timeline, which I'll personally share with you I'm not sure can be maintained, but at least with the goal of having a draft by Wellington that had been fairly well vetted, and we would use that as the basis, I don't know if this is the appropriate time to make note of this, but we would hopefully be able to have a draft that we would use as the basis for a session with the GNSO council. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | And Suzanne is there any benefit in having, I guess a more informal teleconference prior to Wellington on the topic? |
| Suzanne: | Well we could certainly contemplate that. I would have no problem in taking that proposal to the working group. I think it all depends Bruce on what progress is made within the GAC. I'll be quite candid with you, we have another very high priority project that relates to the future structure of the GAC itself and that may overshadow, or that may take up a lot of people's time, although there was an agreement reached that the principles on new gTLDs was a fairly high priority as well. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Right ok, so certainly if the principals are starting to reach, or at least getting in to a stable draft form, that might be appropriate to just share the ideas with the council without commitment, in the sense that we recognize it hasn't been approved by the GAC, but I think just an early understanding of the thinking would be helpful. |
| Suzanne: | Well thank you, and I will make sure that the working group is aware of that. That there might be?? Depending on the progress that we are going to make, that there would be some interest in convening a conference call prior to a joint meeting in Wellington. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Good, ok and then we would also work towards, just in terms of I guess Dianne and Glen, but scheduling a joint meeting for Wellington just part of that meeting planning. |
| Suzanne: | Yeah, the GAC has a conference call by the way on Thursday, and I've already advised the secretariat that in addition to a working group meeting we would like a joint working group/GNSO council meeting. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Good, ok. |
| Caroline Shakoyne: | Bruce, it's Caroline. Can I just mention: Given our planned timing, it might be useful to come back to you Suzanne to see if we could do that the two days when we are going to be working, on the Saturday or the Sunday. I know the GAC is meeting on those days, but perhaps we could come back to you on that? Because it would be helpful for us to talk to you early. |
| Suzanne: | No, that was my thinking. The GAC typically uses those two days for working group meetings, so in fact the timing would be perfect. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | OK, thank you. Ok, INELAC, is there anything happening with INELAC? |
| Brett: | Yes, I'll be continuing the be the liaison to the GNSO on this one, but we have a four person taskforce that is going to assist me in the drafting of a response and that will include me, John Levin, Annette Demilberg and Wendy Selzer. We have also sent out requests for feedback to all of the at-large structures, and we approved a half a dozen at large structures about a week ago, I know that one of the recently approved at-large structures in which I'm involved is also preparing feedback. So we expect to get responses from all of our various membership organizations some time in the next couple of weeks Now I don't expect that what you will see is a position statement, because we are soliciting feedback from a variety of organizations who certainly will have different views. But what we anticipate is finding the consensus points where we can, forwarding them up the council, and also forwarding all the feedback that we get even if there are varying views, so that the membership organizations can provide that input to the council. We are initially starting to prepare some of our thoughts on a Wiki page, and we are also asking some of the at-large structures to contribute to that as well. So we will certainly have a large packet of information to forward to the council by the deadline, and we're going to continue to work with the at large structures even after that deadline to find consensus points where we can. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Right, thank you Brett. |
| Maureen: | Bruce it's Maureen, I hate to bring it back but I neglected to leap in at the right moment after Suzanne spoke. I wonder if I might go back to what she had to say? ok thanks. Just briefly: Suzanne you talked about some principles that you and the GAC are putting together and I would just like to suggest that if we could have a look at even a draft of those ideally as early as we can, even prior to the meeting, it would be really helpful because the principles tend to be more fundamental than the type of work we've engaged in with the terms of reference. So it would be very useful to just make sure that we're on a similar page and to identify areas where we might not be. And indeed our terms of reference kind of slide over in to the principles category in some areas as well, where we talk about ICANNs goals of expand use and availability, And then we talk of course about security and stability, all of which are broad enough items that they probably figure in your principles document as well. So it would be useful to see how you're coming at them so we can see where the consistencies are. |
| Suzanne: | Point well taken, I will definitely alert the working group to the strong interest on the part of the council in having access to a draft prior to the meeting. |
| Maureen: | Thanks. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Right, on Whois, is Maria Farrel's available, or is someone else just available to give us an update on what's going on there? |
| Maria: | Hi Bruce, yes I'm on the call. On whois we have just circulated to the taskforce last week the preliminary taskforce report on the purpose of whois, and I believe the taskforce is planning to vote on it tomorrow on its" conference call, and once it has done that, assuming it approves the report, we wail be posting the preliminary taskforce report on purpose to the ICANN website for 20 days of public comment. |
| American Female: | Excuse me, John Quincin joins. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Thank You, welcome John. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | So Maria, on the whois, what's happening in terms of the other terms of reference that the taskforce. Is work moving forward on those? |
| Maria: | It is, it's more consulting than taskforce, but the report to the board on the recommendation ion conflicts between whois and national laws is going to be published actually this evening, so that's moving forward, and the main focus on the taskforce has been on purpose, but we are going to be moving on to some of the other items tomorrow. |
| Bruce Tonkin: |
Good, thank you Maria. So are there any questions on Whois at all? Ok, that takes us to?? It sounds like somebody's trying to talk. |
| American Male: | We're getting some kind of bizarre noise there. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, moving forward to item four on the agenda, which is the IETF draft on IDN issues, we've invited John Quincin who is one of the authors of that draft to give us a bit of a high level view on I guess what the potential policy issues might be going forward for ICANN and particularly related to gTLDs. So John are you able to give us a bit of an overview on that document? |
| John: | Yeah I was hoping based on previous conversations that people on the council would have looked at this and I'd just be answering questions, but I can try to summarize the document. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | [drowned out] would be a good start, and then we can move on to questions. |
| John: | And I'm still hoping Patrick will be joining us, but we??ll see.] |
| Patrick: | I am on the call. |
| John: | Oh Ok, do you want to summarize it or should I summarize? |
| Patrick: | No please, go on. |
| John: | OK, an ad hoc committee appointed by the IAB has been trying to look at the general IDN situation for the last several months. The process is going slowly because the ad hoc committee is really diverse. The document is converging, but the version which is posted and referred to in your agenda is by no means the final version, it is likely to change significantly, and indeed we've got a working draft of the next revision in front of us, which represents some significant changes. It would be difficult or impossible for Patrick or I to try to predict right now what would be in the final version, as approved by the IAB. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Where are the changes typically happening? Because there's lots of stuff that's examples and things, so what areas do you think would change significantly? |
| John: | In terms of changes between v1 and v2, it's mostly tuning. There have been some significant objections raised by some members of the ad hoc to the text. In a few cases it has been changed, in some changes it has been or has been modified to note their objections. There's some additional references, some terminology has been retuned, some of the discussion about particular issues which show in particular languages by example, but those examples are important, have been clarified to indicate just exactly what the examples mean and what inferences are drawn from them. So far for v2 that's about it, but again in terms of what happens when the IAB gets their teeth in to v2 and starts making decisions about what to publish, I can't even predict. The general things that are showing up are partially things of which the council's presumably already quite aware. The standard provides and decides those are the only possible constraints, then it is very easy for someone who is either careless or operating with malice to cause a great deal of confusion, fraud and various other things. The incidents of the spring were symptoms of that which ICANN was warned about in plenary three or four years ago. The works in this ad hoc and in a variety of other groups has shown up more details, some of which were re-stirring the IDN session in Luxembourg and Vancouver, and which at this stage I think you're all aware. The difficulty as one tires to get more sophisticated about preventing confusion, is that virtually everyone looks at this stuff in the user community, and frankly in the registry and registrar community, has the tendency to look at these things as just strings and labels, and see words. And words in whatever languages they want to speak and whatever language they're most familiar with. And as soon as you start seeing words in these strings, you can get yourself in to trouble, because you can make assumptions about which characters and which scripts are [cuts out], which may or may not be true. Or you make assumptions about things that ought to be permitted, or you hear claims from various people about rights they have to have things permitted, which the DNS simply will not sustain. And that problem runs afoul of the fact that we've now got applications from implementers who feel immensely protective of their users, as arguably they should. But those applications developers are now applying their own rules to interpreting what names are valid and what names are not a valid, and the further that goes the more of a problem you've got of a registrar selling a name, and a registry registering that name which in practice cannot be resolved, because when that name is typed in to an application, the application designer says "really, that's just too dangerous? and refuses to resolve it. Or alternatively refuses to display it, which is a less severe problem, but form a user perspective not that less severe. So the report is looking at those issues and trying to explore them. It's making some recommendations about places where the IETF needs to look at modifying the protocol, because there's a general principle here that anything we don't actually restrict at the protocol is going to be used somewhere in the DNS, even if it's not used at the top level or second level. And recommendations to registries at all levels about particular types of issues they should look at. |
| American Female: | Can I ask a question: Has there been any IESG professionals to actually do any of the work that you're all staring to recommend? |
| John: | Are you asking if IESG has committed itself to doing the work? |
| American Female: | I guess that would be the second question. The one, have they started talking about it, will there be boxes on it, is it something that they've decided to engage in some way or other. |
| John: | There's been enough commitment to discussion with the application area directors about these issues, and the application area directors are definitely participating in these discussions, that I think it is reasonable to assume that there will be some IESG action. Has there been a formal IESG commitment to seek such action? No. That would be entirely inappropriate at this stage. The other answer to your question is some of the things which have occurred, come very very close to creating a strong case that IDNA as written is not properly interoperable, or is not implementable in such a way that application designers consider satisfactory, in which it then interoperates. And to the extent to which that is demonstrated to be true, the IESG has no choice. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I guess John the issue when I look at that is: When you look at the combination of the IDNA and then you look at the ICANN guidelines, to me there's al to of degrees of freedom as to what you're doing with particular characters, character equivalences tables etc. And that leads to tow issues; One is that different registries could deal with very similar languages differently. And that it just makes it very difficult for an application designer, because one of them is probably changing it all the time, and two; You've got all these variations depending on which TLD that you're dealing with. |
| John: | Well no, that problem isn't nearly as bad as it appears to be at first glance, let me try to explain why: And let me differentiate here between applications developers on the user application side, and application developers on the registrar side: On the registrar side there's some problems, and let me come back to that. But on the user's side, theoretically unless the application developer gets paranoid" well, let me not use that word. Unless the application developer decides that they have a higher obligation to protect their users above and beyond what the protocols specify, then all the application developer needs to do is follow the standard to look these up. Because no-one legitimate, no one in the context of the standard, no one in this ad hoc committee, no one else who" committed to global interoperability of DNS has suggested anything about per zone or per TLD rules that would change the lookup rules. So from the standpoint of an application designer designing an application that's going to look something up, everything is the same, and the only issue is whether when something is looked up, is it found or not. Because if the registry has applied restrictions per the ICANN guidelines, or per some other set of rules, those restrictions are all restrictions on what is registered, not on how the name [cuts out] internally. Even the JET guidelines for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, are simply rules about what gets registered. What those rules do is provide a mechanism for binding names together, so if there's a potentially confusing pair or triple of names, those rules will provide a formal way to determine what that confusing pair or triple is, and then provide a rule that says either (depending on the registry) says if one of them is registered, the other cannot be. Or if one of them is registered, the others can only be registered with the same registry. But again, there is nothing on the lookup side in any of these cases, which changes the interpretation of a name. Now we've got people out there who have proposed rather specific and standards violating DNS servers, that actually violate the standards by changing the lookup rules, and that's another matter entirely. That's a wonderful step towards fragmenting the internet, and good for very little else as far as the applications developer or the user is concerned. The difficult we have is that on the registrar side of this, there's a situation where different registries apply different rules. The registrars may have to know which registry they're dealing with and which zone they're dealing with in order to figure out which rules to apply, or in order to predict the registry behavior in terms of what will happen if a particular registration request comes in: But they've got that problem anyway. This is just one of those situations in which IDNs make everything worse by virtue of simply adding 10s of thousands of characters, depending on how you count 30-odd or 60-odd characters you've got now. |
| Ross Rader: | Jonathan, this is Ross Raider, I've also got a question, this is more specific to the draft though: In section 4, there's a whole bunch of what I've viewed as loose ends: things that haven't been specifically dealt with, things that still need to be dealt with. It's not clear to me who the expected recipients of those work items are. It seems that the policy implications and the technical implications haven't been sufficiently disentangled yet for someone like the council to come along and say, "We want to pick it up" or the IETF to say "we want to pick up this? Will there be any effort to clarify that? I think for our purposes it would be very beneficial of that to be made extremely explicit. |
| John: |
Well Patrick should address that a little bit, because he's got some insights in to discussion, whatever discussion has gone in the IAB" Which I have not. But the best answer is if somebody made me King I could tell you who should be doing each of these. But no-one is likely to do that, and my personal guess is that we might, depending on how the IAB feels about it, be able to make recommendations about this which are slightly stronger than the ones in the text which are here now, which are as you say at the level of "Well somebody better pick this up and deal with it? At the other extreme, however, especially as one moves more and more in to the policy level, we've got two almost orthogonal issues about how those policy situations could be handled. One of the issues is that this stuff affects the CC registry as much as it does the gTLDs registries. And insofar as anything is going to be worked out, at ICANN it has to operate at that very strange boundary, at which in principle if the GNSO reaches agreement, the board endorses it, you can mandate gTLD behavior, but ICANN can't mandate CCLP behavior, they can only persuade. So from that standpoint there's an argument, and I understand that ICANN guidelines are evolving a little bit in this direction, there's an argument that what really needs to be said here is: This is the problem, and therefore if you ignore this problem bad things will happen. And therefore sensible people ought to go off and think about these problems, ideally together but if necessary separately. But the other piece of that, and the orthogonal piece of the problem, is that there's been a theory out there for years, of which I'm not the only one who's espoused, that the bottom line on this stuff is that what really needs to happen is not policy in our traditional sense, but recognized agreements about what constitutes safe practices and what constitutes unsafe practices, followed by being [the recording stops here] Is that what really needs to happen is not policy in our traditional sense, but recognized agreements about what constitutes safe practice and what constitutes unsafe practices. Followed by being very clear that what a registry needs to do, whether gTLD or ccTLD, but what a registry needs to do is pick some policy, be extremely clear about what that policy is, and then take responsibility for it. Potentially in very serious ways, one can see a scenario with the ccTLDs for example, in which if the ccTLD were to adopt an extremely liberal policy about registrations which would probably cause people in that country to get in to a lot of trouble, those countries that have any notion of consumer protection in their political cultures, would presumably sooner or later come down on those registries in a fashion much less ambiguous and with far more authority than anything ICANN could possibly do, no matter how much policy they gain, GAC support or other things came along with those rules. So there's a certain extent here to which this is a little bit of a new area, for ICANN and for the community. It isn't even clear to me under the "If I were King" hypothesis to work some of these things out. [chatter] |
| John: | Let me ask for a moment if Patrick has anything he wants to add to that based on our discussions. |
| Patrick: | Well I was going to say some words about what the IAB is trying to do here. What we're trying to do in section four is to very explicitly list the various issues in a way which we have not really seen things being listed, and how this works. And we started this way, and not explicitly saying who each one of these concerns, who should take care of each one of these concerns, because many of them are actually overlapping, and many of them are things that both the IETF in their work and potentially ICANN in their policy work and potentially the application developers when they write applications, and the IPR community when they are looking at dispute resolution processes, each one has to take these things in to concern, because what the IAB is worried about is that each one of these organizations from our point of view has tried to solve their piece of the puzzle and then more or less take it for granted that everything else is taken care of by somebody else. So what we've seen from the IAB perspective is that we see a puzzle with 15 pieces in it, and not many of them fit, and in some cases they overlap, so you need to break the pieces to make them fit together. So we have started from an overall view and listing the various kind of issues here, and to be honest I don't know and I don't really see the IAB being the party that is very explicitly saying how to cut the cake here, because I think from an ID perspective, we think that the work we have tried to do in the ID and in the ad hoc committee we have seen as John said, was very difficult, because people can have so different views on what the international domain names actually is, and what the problem space is. We really hope, for example that IETF and ICANN, or similar pairs or even more organizations that work with overlapping or touching pieces of the puzzle can work together and then make sure that the total solution actually will work. So I cannot say that the IAB will do things much more specific than this, because that is not the goal of section 4. |
| John: | Let me add one more thing to that, and again it's a personal observation, which is that for precisely the reason Patrick mentions, we can list these things under separate sections, but it doesn't mean they're separable. And if one person or one organization comes along and says "I have the entire picture, and you should give responsibility for solving this to me? or even "I have the entire picture, and you should give responsibility for parceling it out to different organizations and then figuring out what to do with the boundaries, or figuring out how to make there be no boundaries to me??, that organization does not understand the problem and should not be trusted. |
| Patrick: | Bruce, this is Patrick again. Let me give you another example. Of inside the IETF. We have of course the potential of restarting/reissuing a new working group that worked with the IAB on domain names. And most of us believe that this is something that falls in to the DNS protocol, and use of the DNS, the more traditional use of DNS. But today the string schemer and various kinds of developers, and these kinds of schemas are also used in LDAP, who are using xFire and 9A certificates, are used in various kinds of places. Which means that even inside the IETF we have multiple working groups and even different areas that need to consider these kinds of things. And depending on what the area is and what the group is working with, for example if you like at xFire and 9O Kerberos case, they have various kinds of dependencies with ASN dot 1, and other kinds of old traditional OSI systems, that you don't have if you come from a traditional DNS registry/registrar side. And the cause of that, I feel that it's better to list all these issues because each group has to really reach through all of them and consider, and I think if it is the case that only one of these pieces is of concern to one group, even though the group detects that themselves, from reading all of them. So if it is the case that some of these things don't fall under what a certain group is working with, it's very easy to checkmark them and say "Yes we have looked at this, and we do know who is taking care of this other part" etc. And still section four is not very long. And I still feel as an ID member and of course the ID has not discussed that in detail, even though the IB has approved the draft number 0.0 to be published, as an individual I feel that section four is a very short text but a very important work, so everyone should look at that |
| American Male: | Bruce, can you put Carrie in the queue please? |
| Bruce Tonkin: | OK, I'll put you in the queue. I think Sophia you were first. Ok, Sophia's Number one in the queue, Carrie's Number 2. Sophia: Ok, thanks. Certainly the IDN issue is a very complex issue and based on the last meeting that we had on ICANNS role in the policy development, one of the things I was following up was that, and focusing on that area. We were trying to determine at the last meeting if there needs to be a test bed for the IDN TLD scenario, and most of the voices from the research group was that there was a real technical issue and that policies are not ready to be made or determined around it yet. And it's interesting to hear John just mention that some of the policies can even be left for the registrars to do, and then it's a question of what role ICANN can have in terms of the policy development process for the IDNs. So my understanding here is, at least from the people I have liaised with, is that the technology is there and working, and there perhaps needs not to be a test bed because each country has developed its" own IDNs and there's already a working case out there. SO I was just wondering what do you say about that John, what is ICANNs role in terms of the policy development and what you mentioned about each registrar doing it on its own, and what is really the technical issue that we're talking about, what are the objectives for the test bed that we're trying to achieve and so forth, by creating the test bed, that's one question I had. |
| Ken Stubbs: | This is Ken Stubbs, would you put me in the queue as well? |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok Ken, I've added you to the queue. John if you want to respond to Sophia? |
| John: |
Yeah, it's a little hard to respond, and again I can give you a personal opinion, but remember I personally did not recommend a test bed. I personally was not involved in the formation of the guidelines, except very peripherally and I am not on the President's IDN committee, which are the places where these initiatives seem to be coming from. Now, having said that there are several different sets of issues here: The first is that: In contrast with a year ago, a year ago we were operating on the assumption that's in the standard was that, if an IDN shows up in an application that's an IDN aware application, that that thing would be displayed in the characters that people would expect to see. If an IDN showed up which contained Cyrillic characters, those Cyrillic characters would show up on the user's screen. If an IDN contained Chinese characters, those characters would show up on a user's screen. The situation today is that that isn't true. Ignoring applications which are not IDN aware, we've got browser vendors saying "Well this registry is being careful enough about registrations to prevent confusion, and as a consequence we'll display their IDNs in native script form. But that registry is being sloppy and therefore we will not ever display IDNs anywhere in the tree underneath that top-level domain in native character form. Now as soon as that kind of stuff goes on we're in a rather strange situation in which whatever it is the standard says, until we can bring practice in to enough conformance that everybody is acceptable to those application developers, we have a very strange situation in which the application developers are evaluating the behavior of the registries, and deciding which names get displayed. And as I pointed out in the past, if you've got some poor user or some poor company that has been dealing with an ASCII transliteration of its name for years, and hating it every, to go to that user and say "Boy, do we have an improvement for you. We're going to take that ASCII transliteration, which we understand you hate, but which has the property that you and your users can most of the time remember it and figure out what it's supposed to be, and we are going to replace it with a string that looks like xn dash and a whole series of random characters. The likelihood that that user or company is going to be happy about that change and consider it an improvement is really quite low. So for that entirely pragmatic reason, everybody has an incentive to figure out how to make this stuff work. And from the perception of the browser vendors, from the perception of the security community, this has not been working. So something is going to need to be done here. The comment about the registries: The Chinese notes which were submitted before Vancouver state very strongly that ccTLDs in general have a much easier situation with this than the gTLDs do, but in the case of the registries, the question is how to make rules that keep oneself out of trouble. In the ccTLD case it gets easier because the typical ccTLD can make decisions about a relatively small number of scripture languages that it actually has to deal with, and can simply exclude everything else. With the gTLDs, my expectation is that ICANN will discover that discriminating in favor of one language or script, and against another one will be considered a very bad thing to do. Now how that policy issue evolves is sort of up to you folks, but as I say I predict that that kind of discrimination model, no matter how useful it is, is just not going to fly. Now the next issue is: Can different registries make different registration policies? Well the answer to that question is different registries have been making different registration policies for years and years. This is nothing new except that IDNs pose more opportunity for variation and more opportunity for confusion and more opportunity for complexity, which is what you'll hear every time IDNs show up in a DNS context. They introduce very few problems which are new, the only problems which they introduce are a matter of more opportunities, or more difficulties or more scale. In terms of the IDN dot ideas situation, that's really a very different and very complicated matter. As some of you know, I've objected even to using that terminology, because it implies something that nobody has any idea how to make a policy about, or how to enforce a policy about, which is that if there's a TLD in non ASCII characters, that the top level domain will be registered in non-ASCII characters, possibly even in the same script as the top level one is, assuming the top level one is in a homogenous script, which is about a whole series of assumptions nobody's dealt with. The original ICANN IDN committee suggested that the only way you were going to get new IDN TLDs was to apply for them as if they were new TLDs which just happened to have funny names. IF that kind of policy is turned out to be the one which ICANN adapts, then a number of these notions about IDN TLDs somehow bound to countries go away. If the notion of IDN TLDs bound to countries as really separate TLDs rather than as aliases is adopted, then we have a whole lot of different problems One of the advantages is that probably as we figure out the approval process for that situation, discover that we're not approving any more new TLDs of any flavor ever, except for those because the queue will have built up. And that queue will have built up I predict in part with entrepreneurs discovering that by going to some country and saying "You really don't need two domains, why don't you apply for an IDN TLD under your real country name, and we'll take over the two character one? will create a whole series of new country domains which will be being run as gTLDs with no real restrictions from anybody. And you as the GNSO council know what the implications of that are much better than I do. SO we've got a lot of implications here, a lot of new issues for policy. Do we need experiments? I've recommended that the first step in anybody proposing an experiment is to explain what they need that experiment for, and what they're going to learn. Because mechanically we know that IDNs work. Mechanically, we know that DNAME aliases work with some restrictions and questions about where they're implemented and what the implementation restrictions might mean in terms of the performance of the root servers and some other things. There are probably some experiments that need to be performed there, but in the end what I'd like to see is: If we're going to have experiments is that somebody comes in and says "Well we need to perform an experiment? is to complete the sentence! And the completion of the sentence is "an experiment to find out so-and-so and we expect to do X, and depending on the outcome of X, we expect to learn the following things. There are fewer things that are going to be learned by a lot of experiments than some of the people who have said the word experiments seem to think. But again, just my opinion American voice: Well you're not the only one with that opinion John. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | OK, next person is Carrie in the queue |
| Carrie: | Ok, there are two things. The one is, I suspect one of the reasons why we're having the kinds of problems we're having is that we haven't" quite figured out how to segment this entire complex of issues, and ensure that the proper groups are talking about the proper things, and that these groups are then speaking with each other in the proper manner. Since this is the GNSO council, the obvious question is what we ought to be doing, and the one thing that strikes me speaking as a representative of the registry constituency, is how do we see to it that the entire namespace is IDN'ified, in a manner that runs the full limit of demonstrating technical capability before we start addressing issues of competition, and there's something in the way all of this is developed that clearly does give the ccTLDs, especially those that don't care about global community, just a whopping advantage here, and how do we proceed in a manner that ensures that the gTLD, actually the entire GNSO frame of reference, is given its" full due in this. What do you suggest we focus on to ensure that the kinds of things that need to be said, that we are most capable of saying, actually do get said. |
| Marilyn Cade: | Could you put me in the queue, it's Marilyn. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ok, you're the queue after Ken. |
| John: | Ahh, I think one answer is that any of these problems get better if you can assume that everyone, or almost everyone is going to behave responsibly. That's always a difficult assumption given the history of the domain name business and the economic pressures, and sometimes advantages for not behaving responsibly, but as a general case once you've looked for ways to encourage people to behave in responsible ways, and ways to discourage behavior which encourages irresponsibility, my favorite example there is that when somebody stands up and says every country should have the right to apply for and get a second TLD, under some name which it picks, I get very anxious. There are a series of reasons why I get very anxious, but one of the reasons I get very anxious is because of the ease with which somebody who is not a responsible member of the community in terms of making the Internet work well, and globally and seamlessly in the ways in which you suggest, gets in there and starts going to countries who for one reason or another are not really interested in running top level domains, and starts making offers about running the second one for them |
| Carrie: | How does this map in to the GNSO? Specific GNSO areas of concern, other than biting our nails and becoming even more concerned about issues than we already are? |
| John: |
Well I think the first answer is that it's a general ICANN issue, and it's a general ICANN issue to which you should be extremely sensitive. Possibly more sensitive than people in the CC community who are arguing that each of them taken separately should be able to do their own thing, and nobody else should bother them. It's my belief that the extent to which one takes any of this and says we can isolate the CC issues, or we can isolate the GNSO issues, or we can isolate some other set of issues, wrong solutions will come out. We have to figure out entirely new ways of looking at a problem like this which really spans the entire DNS space. The second observation is something that everybody says and nobody seems to understand how to apply: Which is that there are some very very strong arguments for moving extremely conservatively here. It is much easier and much safer to say "You cannot register that name today, but come back to us in a year and see if we've sorted that thing out? Than it is to say, "Go ahead and register it, but a year from now we may revoke that name? The latter is never a very healthy situation So in situations where we don't know, it is better to be very very cautious, and that is an area in which the GNSO may need to take the lead in caution. When these trivial issues about look-alike characters are not the important one. The important ones are whether they synonym for a name registered in a particular TLD is the same as the name when the translation of that name is to another language, is the same as the name. I don't know if the IPR folks are having fits about that yet, but they certainly ought to be. I don't know what the answers are, but I think it's very very important that one begins to feel those things out. Is there a right to register a name in a given domain based upon a synonym of that name or a translation of that name in to some other string in the same domain. If we move in a direction in which there are alternate names?? |
| Bruce Tonkin: | John, can you just give a specific example of that case, you're saying it's important when you're talking about synonyms, can you just give an actual example to help clarify that? |
| John: | Sure. Let's assume I'm the registrant of generalmotors.com. Now the word general and the word motors are perfectly good English words, translatable in to any number of languages. Should it be possible in COM to register the Russian translation of the words general and motors catenated together and does that constitute something which you wan to handle by dispute resolution or some other way? |
| Marilyn Cade: | John, it's Marilyn. That's registering at the second level, yes? |
| John: | Yes. |
| Marilyn Cade: | I guess I was thinking a little differently, and that was the question I was going to ask. But it might be the question, for instance of should the present or future gTLD string be allowed to be registered in all of the different options in IDN? |
| John: | Well there are two or three separate problems there, let me see if I can identify them. The first one is this distinction which I think was talked about a good deal during the discussion in Vancouver. Which is that there's a difference between registering an alias for a name, a so-called DNAME synonym, versus registering a different domain with that name. And the difference is that if we put in a Chinese synonym for COM as a DNAME, pointing at the COM domain then the second levels that appear to the user with that synonym are going to be real registrations in COM, there's only one tree. And if one does that, there are a whole series of reasons why those synonyms are not a good idea, or don't solve the problem, but in terms of the particular issue of synonyms versus separate domains you're quite safe. The other question has to do with separate domains associated with the TLDs. And the thing you have to keep in mind with registering those separate domains is that they're really separate domains, in spite of what they're called. The second problem in terms of registering second domains of what their synonyms are in their separate languages, the problem is that with the exception of a very small number of TLDs of which museum is the striking example, travel may be next, none of those TLD names are names in any language, they're abbreviated strings. And if I decide to start translating COM in to Swahili, and I start translating.biz in to Swahili, it's not clear that I'm going to come up with two names that are distinct. And then we've got a conflict problem which also incidentally arises in the alias case. But we've got a conflict problem there in terms of opportunity to own that synonym, which gets us in to an entirely new can of worms at the top level. British Voice: John, just as a follow on to that. What you're saying is we can considerably simplify the issue if we don't look at DNAME aliases, but instead concentrate slowly on unique IDNs that would be effectively new domains? |
| John: | That was the conclusion of the Cato committee for exactly this reason. The Cato committee concluded that as soon as one started doing things that resembled synonyms for the existing names, and had some notions of binding in registration or in authority to the existing names, we would get ourselves in to endless trouble, and the two examples we've just talked about are the first two steps in an endless list. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Can I also just clarify? |
| John: | When you gave the example of the General Motors, that must be something that comes up in Trademark law, I assume. So if I have the trademark for General Motors in English, and then I'm in Russia and I use the Russian word from the same thing, is that being looked at from the History I suppose? Trademark law goes back a long time, how that has been addressed in that forum? |
| John: | I'd rather have one of the IPR people address that question than me, but let me give you a piece of an answer: This is one of the areas in which the traditions of the trademark field about having trademarks unless they're extremely well known confined to countries and areas of application don't work very well at the DNS. So once again, everything gets worse here. The more specific answer to your question about those translations get in to the issue of when is a mark not a mark? That may or may not be the same issue as when does something become confusing to a user or not, and I'd much rather have an IPR expert comment on that than me. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Right, but I guess the original concept of trademark law is to deal with the issue of confusion I think. |
| John: | Yeah, but the original concept of trademark law as I understand things as a layman has had a tendency to break down across national boundaries. |
| Lucy: | This is Lucy, and I can just support that view, that it does vary, and it varies according to national laws. There are some International treaties that might apply, but it does break down to national laws and it also breaks down to what particular mark you're talking about. Obviously well known and famous marks have a much broader scope of protection, and might actually be covered for translations as well, but that's not the case across the board. |
| Bruce Tonkin: |
Right, thank you Mike: And Bruce, this is Mike Pelage, if you want, there was actually a UDRP decision on the translation, if anybody wants to read it, it was called thelittleprince.com where lepetiteprince.com was held the equivalent, so if one wants to look at IP policy within the realm of domain names, that could give you a little guidance there. |
| John: | Mike the difficulty with using that as an analogy, although I think at one level it's very helpful, is that if you take the several steps away from Indo-European languages using Roman script and translate the little prince in to some language in which the characters look different, the appearance of the page looks different, the pronunciation is not recognizably the same thing, and go down that path, my guess is it becomes much less clear. And the question is whether any UDRP decision or policy we've ever had would apply in conflicts among top level domains is another very open question, which as far as I know no-one has pressed. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | OK, next in the queue was Ken. |
| Ken Stubbs: | I think Carrie pretty well covered the questions and concerns I was going to voice, so rather than lead us back 20 minutes, I'll just pass. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | OK, Marilyn. |
| Marilyn Cade: | I think I just wanted John to elaborate further, and I think he did. I would just make one comment, and maybe it builds on something Carrie said, and I think John was suggesting. I do think that this is probably the first of many lengthy discussions council needs to have on this topic. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Yeah, I think that's probably right and I think what we'll probably do is draw this discussion to a close in addressing further agenda items, but I agree with Marilyn, we need to have further discussions once people have certainly had some time to fully absorb and understand the document. I think it is an excellent contribution, and I agree with what Patrick has said, it's good to have as much as possible the different issues in one place so you can consider them together rather than where I've read these things in different forums, they tend to focus on specific items, I think that's a very useful contribution from both John and Patrick in taking the lead in putting this document together. And I think we need to read it and then I think the bigger issue is taking on board John's advice there. Let's say we're looking at introducing IDNs at the root, in fact we would start with very constrained ones to start with that minimize some of these issues that that we've been talking about here. So for instance you wouldn't start with a TLD with a hyphen in it, for example. There doesn't seem to be any burning need to go to some of the more complex cases. |
| John: |
I would make two other suggestions. The first is that this stuff really is complicated. It's complicated technically, and it's complicated culturally and linguistically. And I would urge the council to really educate yourself on those details, because they are important to understanding what's going on here, rather than making assumptions about how things probably ought to work, and assuming they work that way. A great many people have spent a lot of their time and a lot of time with other people making assumptions about how things work, and then making policy or even technical decisions based on those assumptions when the assumptions were themselves false. That just leads in to very expensive and tedious dead ends The second observation is to give you yet something else to worry about: There will be a new subsection of the notorious section four I believe in the next draft, which points back to the whois problem, which I think is worth mentioning simply because I came in just after that report, and as has been pointed out at several ICANN meetings, there are again complex interactions between the IDN issue and the issues about registering IDNs and the whois problem that I'm hoping will be addressed in serious ways. |
| Female Voice: | Sorry John, I didn't hear. There are complex interactions between? |
| John: | Between anything one does with IDNs and the general issue of databases in which one looks up ancillary information about registrants. Female voice: Right. |
| John: | We've talked about pieces of the issue before. What's happening here, this comes back to part of the point Patrick made, is this stuff is beginning to behave like a big system. Everything is connected to everything else, and you can't poke something without having something pop out somewhere else in the works, and we really need to being to understand this comprehensively and view it as a system, rather than view it as a text problem, or a cultural problem, or a language problem or an IPR problem. Because each of these things taken separately on the assumption that everything else will drop in to line, because that problem be treated as most important today, get us in to unbelievable difficulties, or gets us in to states in which things just don't hang together properly. And I think we all understand that in principle, but it's very easy to slip away from that practice. |
| Female Voice: | Sure, and Bruce I wouldn't say this as necessarily an area which Patrick, you and John would comment on, but that reinforces to me the need for the council to then recognize that there will be an implication for any consensus policies that exist, such as the UDRP, the Whois, many other consensus policies including new registry service consensus policies. |
| John Klensin: | Some of you will remember that I made the observation a couple of years ago, that if we were going to make good progress on the IDN, it was time to stop thinking about them as a separate topic and start thinking about them as an additional issue on every topic we talked about. I think to some extent, that's still true. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | So, it's a bit like security is transit in the ITF, that's something that's supposed to be considered on each policy? |
| John Klensin: | That's exactly right. |
| Maureen Cubberley: | Bruce, this is Maureen. That's a point I wanted to make. Just to follow up on what you've just said and what Marilyn said as well, if we can come at this from, and I apologize for not knowing who originally suggested what's the role of the GNSO in all of this, I think we've got in front of us a very detailed explanation of what's happening and in many cases, why it's happening and where the problems are. Maybe we need to back it up a step, and as GNSO Council look at the issue of IDNs as to what would be the best way for them to work and start there and factor in the complicating issues after that. But, in a true policy development process, notch it up a level or two to what we're trying to provide to ICANN as a whole and the ICANN Board specifically in terms of international policy that will work. I think we might need to look at some ideal principles around the way The IDN could best benefit the Internet as a whole and users of the Internet, then delve into some of the specifics and out of that, determine our role. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | That's a little bit what the GAC is doing with new TLDs, one of the principals, in other words. |
| Maureen Cubberley: | That's right. What would be best and truly, some things have already progressed too far down the road that they can be that way, but I think we should start there anyway. |
| Cary Karp: | Just as long as you don't get left behind in the smoke. |
| Maureen Cubberley: | Yes, agreed, Cary. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | That's the other challenge with anything we do. |
| Maureen Cubberley: | I know, it runs ahead of us. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | That's happened with Whois for example. |
| Maureen Cubberley: | Exactly, I agree. I don't know, but I think we might be getting ourselves [Line cuts out] |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I think at this point I'll thank John and Patrik for taking the time, I know you've got busy days, to speak to us on this issue and again, thank you for the contribution you both made in developing this paper. |
| John Klensin: | Thank you and good luck. I'm sure there will be future conversations. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I'm sure there will. Thank you. |
| Patrik Feltstrom: | I will be able to talk with you more from an IB perspective as soon as we in the ad hoc committee are done with the paper and hand it over to the IB, then we can have more discussions on those issues. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Great, thanks Patrik. |
| Patrik Feltstrom: | Okay. Thank you, bye. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Okay, back to the agenda, the next item is an update on the proposed dot com agreement. Is any member of the ICANN staff able to give us an update on the status of that agreement, like when it's due to be considered next by the Board, just a bit of a time line? Is Olof online? |
| Olof Nordling: | Yes, I'm online. I'm rather at a loss on giving you any update on the details. We would need to have, presumably, John in on the call. |
| Bret Fausett: | This is Bret. Is Michael Palage still on the call because I noticed that this subject was on the agenda for the Board's meeting last week, on the tenth. |
| Michael Palage: | Yes, I am here Bret. We did not get to that specific line item. We, unfortunately, got involved in some detail, re-delegation issues that took a large portion of the time. So, the Board did not discuss that, however, the staff has apprised they are continuing to engage in dialogue based upon the feedback that was received from the community in Vancouver. The Board has been given no specific timeline as to when we would be asked for any further action. |
| Bret Fausett: | Could I ask a follow up, Michael? |
| Michael Palage: | You can ask, I don't know if I'll be able to answer, but go ahead. |
| Ross Rader: | I've got a follow up for Olof as well, Bruce. I don't know if you want to take a queue or not, but I'd like to speak after Bret. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Okay, I'll put you in the queue Ross. |
| Bret Fausett: | Taking advice that was given in Vancouver and moving forward with it, I would say a significant percentage of the advice was walk away from the negotiations and fight the litigation and let this thing expire and renew it in due course. I'm curious as to whether the Board took away from Vancouver that we should tinker with the Verisign agreement and make it better or whether what they heard was, walk away from this? |
| Michael Palage: | Put it this way, I don't want to sit there and speak on behalf of the other Board members, but I feel confident that the statements that the Chair was making, that we were listening to what the community was saying. Again, I can't sit there and comment because the board has not been presented with anything as far as what is the next course of action. Again, we did not get to that specific line item on the agenda, as soon as it is brought before the Board, as is my usual course, I will notify the Council five days before, as soon as the agenda is made available, when the Board would take any notification discussion action, whatever it would be. That's about all I can do or say. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I think that's fair, I think Bret's question is the right question, but I don't think it's necessarily something Mike can answer. |
| Michael Palage: | It would not be appropriate of me to opine on behalf of the other directors. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Ross? |
| Ross Rader: | Olof, I'm going to put you on the spot here, so at least. I'll warn you about that up front. I think I heard you say you weren't really willing or ready to talk about this. Is that a fair characterization of your deferral? |
| Olof Nordling: | Not really. |
| Ross Rader: | I'm only asking because I wasn't quite paying attention. |
| Olof Nordling: | In the sense that I have got no answer. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I think it means, Ross, that Olof doesn't have the information. That's not Olof's area of responsibility. |
| Ross Rader: | That's fair. For the record, I'm not dissatisfied with Olof's position on this, I'm disappointed that staff, not Olof in particular, but the staff doesn't have any sort of an update for the Council on this subject, especially having heard directly from staff last week that negotiations are ongoing in a separate meeting. I would have liked to have heard more about those negotiations at this meeting and the fact that it's been on our agenda, we've made this known and then we're not getting this data, its just, perplexing would be the nicest word I could use. |
| Marilyn Cade: | Bruce, this is Marilyn. Can I speak? |
| Bret Fausett: | And this is Bret. I'd like to get back in the queue too. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Okay. Marilyn, then Bret. |
| Marilyn Cade: | In my proposal for addressing this, I thought we made a request for an update and I do respect that this would not be Olof's responsibility to provide the update. However, if we have to do something more than advise our staff that we are requesting an update and to advise the General Council or Kurt to officially meet with them, then can we just that responsibility and issue that invitation? I've noticed that generally it's much easier to change your own behavior than it is others'. Perhaps it would be our behavior that was to change. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Okay. Bret? |
| Bret Fausett: | I just wanted to respond to what Ross said, that he was apprised last week that negotiations were ongoing. A statement as broad as that bothers me greatly because, first of all, it assumes that a decision has been made to continue negotiations with Verisign when I'm not sure, according to Michael, that decision's even been made by the Board. I would like to know what is being discussed and what authority has been given to the negotiators from the ICANN side and by whom that authority was given? |
| Marilyn Cade: | I thought we actually knew some of that from this feedback. But, you're saying, Bret, that you think that too needs to be further clarified? |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I think the general problem is that this is agenda item five, it's agenda item six that's talking about what do we do about it next. If, for example, the agreement is going to be signed tomorrow, agenda item six is treated very differently to is the agreement going to be reviewed in six months' time or something. I think the trouble I have with this in terms of managing the policy side, is the Council in Vancouver said they thought there are some policy issues, like how agreements should be renewed, etc. At the same time, everything is just progressing, which may well be fair enough. There are proposals on the website for the renewal of a couple of the other registry agreements. All of these things are ongoing, so it's not just the dot com agreement, but it's also the other registries' agreements, some of which are coming up for renewal, possibly before dot com, I'm not sure what the dates are. Cary, can you clarify, dot museum, when's that expire? |
| Cary Karp: | The middle of October of this year. We are the first the first of the three sTLDs. So, in October or November, I think, the three class of 2000 sTLDs are all up. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | So, your agreement, you're almost a higher priority than the dot com agreement from that point of view. The current agreement goes out to 2007, I believe. |
| Cary Karp: | Yes, then it would be. It's interesting because I suspect it might have been one of the aspects of the proof of concept, The contracts themselves are of two entirely different flavors and as I understand it, ICANN is more interested in convergence on that point than is going to be all that easy to do given that discrepancy. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | ICANN posted on that the 21st of December, so I'm just checking the website. So, on the 21st of December, posted dot aero, dot coop and dot museum proposals for renewals. If, for example, we treat the policy issue of renewal, if we're going to take that on board, we'd have to move quickly on that. |
| Marilyn Cade: | I would like to ask you to clarify something. Just previous you said that this dot com agreement goes out to 2007, but, in fact, the proposal on the table changes that, which means there could be a contract signed on dot com, in theory, whenever the Board approves it, it could be -- |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I agree with that as well. I was just trying to get a sense of when agreements were expiring and need some action. |
| Michael Palage: | This is Mike. I think that one of the things, and this is me speaking, if you will, in individual Board capacity, one of the things that the Board, as a whole, learned or heard from the community following the dot net decision, preceding Luxembourg, was the need, if you will, for a notice period as far as comment goes. I believe this is one of the proposals from the GNSO, which I have been discussing with John, remember there was a proposal that said before any contract is signed, I believe they were talking a twenty-one day period or something along those lines, that was one of the recommendations that went from the Council to the Board last fall, around that time frame or maybe it was following the dot net, early fall? As far as the Council hearing tomorrow, "Oh, yes. We've signed a deal ", that is something that would, as a Board member, argue against. I think the Board, as a whole, particularly what Vint did as the Chair, is, we are trying to go out and make sure there are no surprises, that there is, if you will, proper consultation and outreach. I believe that is the action that Vint, as the Chair, has taken and I don't see any reason why he would divert from that particular course of action. |
| Ross Rader: | So, is that not to say that we should expect and will be given a further round of consultation and commentary on this new revised document that's being negotiated as we speak? |
| Marilyn Cade: | But, even if we are -- |
| Ross Rader: | Actually Marilyn, if you could let Mike answer the question? |
| Michael Palage: | As I said, that is something that I would advocate for, yes. That's something I would advocate for and again, I am not in a position to speak for the Board, but I believe the actions of the Chair to date has suggested that outreach and consultation is the best course of action to build confidence in the community. |
| Marilyn Cade: | However -- |
| Ross Rader: | So, it's a possibility then, but it's not something we can expect, it's not a guarantee that's currently on the table. |
| Michael Palage: | Here's what I will do, I will go to Vint as the Chair and I will ask him that specific question, in addition to John Jeffrey, and I will try, if you will, to get back to the Council regarding that specific question. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | What I can do, before you jump in, Marilyn, as Chair, perhaps as a follow up to this call, formally ask for a report from the General Council on the next steps. I think it's a lack of understanding with process, at least with the GNSO's policy development process, the PDP. The timelines may be uncertain, but at least, you know what's going to happen next. At the moment, we don't even know that. |
| Marilyn Cade: | Bruce, I would support your formally acting and I would prefer we do our request formally and the communication be formal and documented. Let's say, hypothetically, there is a twenty-one day comment period, which I would expect, for the proposed redrafted agreement, I do not think that answers the question that the Council has before it. We've identified certain areas where we think policy advice is needed and if we sit on our hands, twenty-one days is certainly not sufficient time for us to conduct policy development. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Yes, there's a difference between a public comment and a public policy approach to that. One approach is just like what they've got with the other agreements at the moment, it's just here's the revised agreement, let's post it for public comment. What you're talking about is something separate, you're saying the Council wishes to develop a policy on one or more topic areas and that you'd be requesting the Board to wait for that or even just give us a timeline to say if you have a policy in place by the 31st of March or something, it will be taken into account and if not, It's not. Even that kind of level of guidance would be useful. |
| Marilyn Cade: | I'm struck with the fact that we, as Council, have objected several times to having staff invent policy, develop policy via contract. I'm delighted that we recognized and put forward a resolution to the Board advising them that we saw policy issues embedded in the proposed dot com contract/litigation settlement. I'm delighted that Council has recognized that we need to comment on renewals for dot aero, dot coop and dot museum as well. I think that means that it's important for us to remember what our job is and what our role is, so I think we should be advising the Board of what we intend to do and ask them to be aware of the practicalities of the timeline. |
| Grant Forsyth: | Bruce, it's Grant here. Can I be in the queue? |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Yes, go ahead Grant. |
| Grant Forsyth: |
Just listening to this, I have two questions. One is, given what has been expressed by Council to the Board, and how the Board accepted that, as it did in Vancouver, my question, and I'm not quite sure whether it's directed to staff and it would appear the appropriate staff aren't on this call, so one of my questions I'll flag to Olof, can he identify which staff member should have been on this call, given the matters on the agenda? Secondly, given the matters the Council has raised and the point that Marilyn is making, particularly with regard to policy, what would be useful for the Board and staff with regards to our concerns on policy, would it be for the GNSO to develop some policy guidelines with regards to these contracts? Because if it is, it's useful for the Council to understand that prior to the Board making an agreement in the absence of whatever it is they thought the Council could assist them with. My concern on this is, as I say, we have expressed our view and it appears that action is continuing without any further reference or guidance or seeking of guidance from the Council and my concern is somewhere down the track, the Board will make a decision and we'll all lament the fact that Council didn't actually do what it didn't know it was being asked to do. So, I have two questions, one to Olof. Who is the staff member that we need to get this straight with? Is it Paul? And two, perhaps he, in his policy role, given what the Council has expressed with regard to policy, what advice would he give to Council regarding further input to the Board on the matters of policy? |
| Olof Nordling: | In response to your first question, I think I mentioned it earlier, that John Jeffrey would be, perhaps, the appropriate, or Paul for that matter, but most certainly, John Jeffrey would be able to say what discussions may be ongoing and within what timeframe. I don't have that information. |
| Marilyn Cade: | That's helpful, but would we need two people? I thought your question, Grant, went further than what is the present tack. |
| Grant Forsyth: | If I might perhaps just rephrase my question? I wanted to put both questions in the context of response and resolution that was passed by the Council. There were some specific matters and concerns raised, and in your particular field of interest within ICANN, I'm thinking here particularly policy. My question is, given the matters raised by the Council and the fact that they were accepted, I'm not passing any judgment as to what value the Board placed upon them, but they were accepted by the Board. Two questions here. Who on staff should we be talking to with regards to being kept up to date with regards to whatever input we can provide on policy? Specifically, given your role on policy, what advice would you give Council with regards to providing further advice to the Board, if that's desired, on these questions of policy? |
| Olof Nordling: | I think ultimately, when it comes to final points of view from the staff side, of course it's very much the CEO that comes out with responses. When it comes to advice to the Council on how to proceed, I see this as, I think I mentioned it before, my personal reaction when I saw the development of the differences in views, it's a bit like in a republic when you have a legislative branch and the executive branch and you happen to find yourself in a void where the executive branch has proceeded without there being legislative action from the legislative branch. So, any advice would be to very, very rapidly put forward the exact views from the legislative branch, if you call the GNSO that. I'm sorry for the analogy, but it just struck my mind. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Well, I think I understand your answer. The one useful thing I took of it was your last point, which was if there is action to be taken by Council, or further advice provided by Council, it would need to be done very quickly. I think you're right. My understanding was that if Wellington was going to be an opportunity for the Board to receive further advice and hold another forum and post-Wellington, give further consideration to the progression of it's discussions with Verisign. Now, my thought which I put out to Council to consider, I have to admit after some discussion with others on Council, was that given the concerns expressed by Council with regards to the development and implementation of policy and our concern that it seemed to be happening via contractors than via the normal processes of Council. I think it's beholding of Council to have a work item and a high priority work item to develop that view and into a matter, be it policy or further recommendations that can be provided to the Board in quite a developed state. We've expressed our concern by way of resolution, I think now we have to flesh that out in some more specifics. By my own thinking, the timing has to be to have it done such that it can be handed to the Board in Wellington. If I might just go two steps further with that suggestion and that is if you look at our normal PDP process, it is one that starts off with an issues report, I think that's an excellent place to start in this case as well. Normally, the issues report is one that is developed by staff, given what we just heard from Olof and not heard from any other staff member, I can see that there is a tension in their role and guidance, given where the staff sit. I sit there and I think the way around that therefore is for the Council to engage external experts to kick this thing off as we need to because the timeline, by way of developing an issues report. I'll put that out for Council to consider and comment on. |
| Marilyn Cade: | While we think about that, can I just ask Glen, can you pull up the PDP timeline and just run through that real quickly with us? I think it would be helpful for us to work backward. I think Grant; one slight modification I might offer would be that our goal ought to be to get our advice to the Board and the ICANN staff ahead of Wellington rather than at Wellington if at all possible. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | Marilyn, is that a question for Grant or a statement? |
| Marilyn Cade: | I was just asking, as I look at Wellington, I think in order to be taking the advice into account and it seems to me to be that it is advice about dot com, which is a priority, followed by advice about the other gTLDs that there seems to me to be a shorter fuse on dot com. Wellington happens the last week in March, we essentially have twelve weeks, if we count this week. |
| Bruce Tonkin: | I think at the end of the day, and this really just takes us into the next item in the agenda, which is what are we doing next, it's occurring to me and I'll take what Olof is inferring, at the end of the day, the staff will comply with the policy and policy needs to be recommended by the GNOS and the Board basically creates the policy by accepting or rejecting recommendations. Given the fact that we've heard ICANN is still in negotiations with Verisign, I assume this is partly driven by the litigation issue and the view if they can complete negotiations, they can remove the litigation issue. Secondly, we've also seen that ICANN is posting for public comment, renewing the other agreements. I think this is an ailment where if the Council is going to be seen to be doing its job, if we're going to take this on, it's only worthwhile taking on if we're going to give an answer, probably by Wellington because later than that and things are going to move faster than we are. So, what it really comes down to is the Council serious about doing policy, and does the Council or |