Month: October 2003

Katoh-san leaves board, Hagen Hultzsch joins. Deutsche Telekom. Splendid addition to the board.Convene new board for organizational meeting. Re-elect board, reconfirm officers. Agenda items for new board to complete. Election of new board chairman — proposed by board governance ctee: Cerf. Lyman Chapin moves. Pisanty seconds. Unanimously approved.Second recommendation: Pisanty vice-chairman of board. Cerf moves. Tricia Drakes seconds. Pisanty makes remarks about governance committee. Unanimously adopted. (Cerf does not let Pisanty abstain.)Election of corporate officers. Twomey, Pritz, Jeffreys, Schroeder. Unanimously accepted.Thanks for meeting assistance. Accepted by acclamation.Rememberance of Jon Postel who passed away in October 1998. Place letter from Postel’s family in record. Cerf reads letter.Meeting called to a close.

Redemption Grace Period for .info: No discussion. Palage abstains; all others in favor.GNSO deletes: No discussion. Approved unanimously.GNSO Council seats: GNSO Council has asked for three reps; evolution and reform process had two representatives by the end of this meeting. If no action, GNSO has to name two candidates for council. No discussion. All in favor.RegistryPro, second level registrations: No discussion, approved unanimously.New gTLDs. Lots of whereases that outline what is to be done; no chance to take notes on these. President directed to begin expeditious and targeted development of strategy and policy leading to a streamlined process for the introduction of new TLDs; president directed to seek community input on this strategy; report on new TLD policy should be completed by September 30, 2004; implementation begin before December 31, 2004. Palage abstains; all others in favor. Cerf: Is Palage channeling Karl or Andy? Palage: Conflict of interest.New sTLD RFP: Board was hesitant at last meeting about doing sTLD round at same time with “generic” process. Lots of community input both via e-mail and in Carthage. Board has concluded that it should proceed. Open opportunity to apply in sTLD space; not limited to failed Y2k applicants; not limited to non-profit sponsors. Resolution: Open RFP no later than 15 December 2003; “limited number.” Have not picked number. Want to keep this from being out-of-control landslide. Upon completion of sTLD selection process, agreement reflecting commercial and technical terms shall be negotiated. Selection process and implementation for sTLDs shall be evaluated and results utilized in new gTLD process. Cerf moves; Chapin seconds.Discussion: Even while new TLD process runs, there might be results from it that have implications for sTLD contracts. Reasons for moving forward quickly. Keep in mind protection of registrant. Vote. Palage abstains, all others approve.IDN Committee changes. Close existing IDN committee and President’s IDN Registry Implementation Committee. Continue to participate and provide guidance on community’s work with objective to achieve coordinated implementation of IDN. Brief discussion. Accepted unanimously.Thanks to Masanobu Katoh who leaves the board today. Cerf moves. 17 seconds. “All those in favor please clap.” Katoh: On way back from Berlin meeting, wrote “ICANN is a place of anarchists. It’s a wild west.” Improved tremendously now. Can focus on substantive issues. When running for election in 2000, five key issues: Continue work of ICANN to make it more stable. Promote multilingual communications. Establish local ICANN supporting organizations. Formalize multilingual DNS. Have closed two committees today, but work not yet done. Last issue: Review election system. Three years ago, said ICANN can be 21st ctry model for intl organization dealing with technology and new economy. Bottom-up. Private-sector leadership. Good coordination with government. Don’t be too bureaucratic. Believe in ICANN. Believe ICANN can be that model. Good luck.Palage: Katoh demonstrates what direct at-large voting can put on the board.Proposed process to keep track of IDN restriction tables. Klensin: Original model comes out of work by joint team consisting of jpnic, twnic, cnnic, hknic. Working on languages and scripts which derive from Chinese characters. … Tables designed to be applied by a registry for a language. There might be different tables for the same language, depending on which registry you are using. IDN c’tees have proposed that ICANN ask IANA to create registry of these tables, so they can easily be accessed. Qian: Minor correction: Not HKNIC, but KRNIC. Most difficult variant table is the Chinese. Jointly done by CNNIC, TWNIC, HKNIC, MONIC (?); SGNIC doing some work. Klensin: Apologies, not enough sleep. Magnificant set of jobs done on the Chinese tables. Great harmony with which group managed to work. Hope that smaller, but more overlapping scripts which occur in Western alphabetic languages do not cause great deal more problems and confusion than harmony demonstrated for chinese characters and languages. Twomey: Instructions for staff working on IANA functions will be done by Monday.Katoh: Short report of Conflict of Interest committee. Not proposal for resolution. Discussed current CoI policy. Propose to review policy to include board liaisons. First reminder: Disclosures of potential conflicts by supporting organizations. Disclosure of conflicts that SO Council members might have. Second reminder for board members: Provide annual statement regarding conflict of interest issues. Tricia Drakes: Constructive input, cooperation from the community. Engagement of all sectors. Still work to be done on ccNSO. Deliver. Constructive Input! Chance that Katoh-san’s expectations can be achieved.Roberto Gaetano: Couple of words. Underline two resolultions passed today. Importance of what has been achieved with these — talking about new gTLDs. Strategically progressing in careful analysis of the situation for the expansion of domain name space with study. Recognize need for quick action. Board at the same time showing strategic thought in terms of medium-, long-term strategy, also attention to basic needs and provide quick solution in short term.Meeting adjourned.

Bret Fausett, in his public comment yesterday, politely noted that reasonable people can disagree about the need for new TLDs. That’s certainly true.It’s not ICANN’s task, though, to answer that question. ICANN’s task is to set up a way for market participants to answer that question.

We’re now hearing the summary from the ccTLD meetings.Documents used for these meetings are available online, including Stephan Welzel’s analysis of legal issues regarding the ccNSO set-up. This presentation is particularly interesting to read in the light of the argument structure used in Paul Twomey’s recent letter to the GNSO on new registry services.

At the open microphone, Wolfgang Kleinwächter asks what has happened to the Privacy Committee that was initiated in Montreal. The initiative for the committee had come from Andy Müller-Maguhn at the time, who is now one of its three members.Twomey’s response: The committee has been asked to present a work program, but has not yet done so.

The results from yesterday’s Council meeting are now online: The text of the resolution regarding the sTLD RFP has been posted to the council list; the Terms of Reference for the three Task Forces that were kicked off yesterday are linked from the GNSO’s WHOIS Privacy issue page.The real-time captioning’s output is available from the ICANN web page, too. Kudos to ICANN staff for this!

Ivan Campos speaks; Alejandro Pisanty chairs the committee, but is not here.Review of the committee’s charter. Unanimous recommendation for a slate for chair and vice chair of the board: Vint Cerf as chairman, Alejandro Pisanty as vice chairman. Discussed IDN Committee evolution. Masanobu Katoh speaks about the IDN committee and recent IDN developments. Proposal: Terminate the existing two committees that deal with IDNs, and create some sort of discussion forum.

I’m taking a break from notetaking, while the ccNSO, GNSO, and ASO reports go through; there’s now open microphone time for comments regarding these reports.

Jonathan Cohen reports for the wipo2 working group. Small meeting in Carthage as only few members are here. Set up tight telephone conference schedule. Document sharing phase. Have produced book with the materials on this.Meetings every three weeks, first one on November 25th. Possibly meeting before Rome. Issue areas: Exclusionary lists, amending UDRP, independent UDRP, sunset provisions, treaty. Look at each of these under number of headings.Vint Cerf: Large issue universe.

Vittorio is giving the ALAC’s report. Key points: We start getting applications; we have sent Roberto Gaetano to the board. Organizing in regions starts moving. Recent statements and activities: Wildcard. New gTLDs: no harm principle. WHOIS: Raised data elements collected and displayed as issue with GNSO.Activities in Carthage: Sitefinder workshop on Monday, WSIS workshop.Slides here.