No Such Weblog

GNSO chair Bruce Tonkin has posted updated terms of reference for the GNSO’s policy-development on a Procedure for use by ICANN in considering requests for consent and related contractual amendments to allow changes in the architecture or operation of a gTLD registry.Explicitly out of scope: Additional obligations on registry operators or gTLD sponsors beyond what is already specified in their existing agreements.Later: Susan Crawford is concerned and confused about this process, and asks about the relation between this process and consensus policy. How is “none” as an answer?

Germany’s movie industry has started an awareness campaign about our localized version of the DMCA; the message is that movie “pirates” are criminals. The campaign’s strategy is to insinuate that casual, non-commercial users of file sharing networks may face the maximum penalties available for commercial movie pirates.Out of the three main motives of the campaign, one is tellingly similar to the EFF’s Let the Music Play campaign (and, ultimately, backfires); one is obscene, alluding to music pirates possibly being raped by fellow prison inmates (and, ultimately, backfires); and one puts the Lord of the Rings into a wholly new perspective (and, ultimately, backfires too).One Ring Law to rule them all, One Ring Law to find them,One Ring Law to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

On its telephone conference tonight, the GNSO council has decided to launch the policy-development process on designing the parameters for a process to be used by ICANN when approving certain requests for changes to registries (adopted with two registry representatives voting no and one abstaining; on the council); the council will deal with this issue as a “committee of the whole” (adopted with one registry representative abstaining). The council will use the terms of reference drafted by Bruce Tonkin, as amended on the call. The amendmends made on the call also included a rephrasing of the issue statement itself. The general sense continues to be that the procedure to be designed is to be applied in those situations in which ICANN has to give agreement to some change under the current contracts. This process is not about changing the scope of the obligations that are contained in the current contracts.A procedural motion by the registries to defer the ultimate vote by two weeks, so the terms of reference could be refined to be acceptable to them, was rejected by the rest of the council.

ICANN staff has just sent an FAQ on the new registry services PDP to the GNSO Council. The document will be posted to the ICANN web site later today.At its conference call tonight, the council is going to discuss what its next steps in this process will be. Draft terms of reference here.

All three WHOIS Task Forces have elected their chairmen: Jeff Neuman (registries) will chair TF1 (restricting access for marketing purposes); Jordyn Buchanan (registries) chairs TF2 (data elements displayed and collected), and Brian Darville (IPC) will chair TF3 (accuracy).An open procedural question on all three task forces is whether task force members who participate as experts or liaisons (or in their capacity as nominating committee appointees on the council) will have voting rights on task forces. An opinion from the General Counsel is being expected on this.

George Kirikos reports that www.name has been the victim of a defacement tonight. Mirror here; comment unnecessary.

In thinking about the new registry services PDP that is now beginning in the GNSO, I’m trying to find use cases for the planned decision-making process, and to figure out why the process should produce what result — and how the rationale for the suggested decision can be cast into an objective criterium. I’m less interested, at this point, in arguments about the contractual standing that ICANN might have to deny or acknowledge any particular service.Two examples tonight: SiteFinder and WLS.I feel that SiteFinder is relatively easy — not so much because of stability considerations, but most importantly for two other reasons: (1) It moved decisions from the edge to the center, thereby negatively affecting competition. (2) It caused cost to the public, for the benefit of a single player, much like environmental pollution.WLS is a more difficult case. It grew out of a “tragedy of the commons” situation, as Rick Wesson observed accurately: Registrars were using up shared resources (transaction bandwidth) that came without a price tag to the point where these resources degraded, and “normal” registration was affected; using overflow pools and other limitations only moved the cattle to a different pastry. The WLS proposal appeared to introduce an approach to the registration of expiring names that would not lead registrars to engage in behavior that is detrimental to the public (although perfectly rational for the individual registrar!). The downside is that WLS gives precedence to a specific business model for registering expiring names. Different business models are essentially pushed out of the market.Had there been an alternative to WLS in order to stop the detrimental behavior? I believe yes — namely, changing the price structure for using registry resources in a way which rewards successful registrations, but financially punishes failed transactions and excessive use of bandwidth. In such an environment, publicly detrimental consumption of transaction bandwidth would be irrational (and ruinous); different providers of expired domain name registration could continue to compete on an equal footing, and with the business models they desire; many of the complexities of WLS would simply be unnecessary.Now, how should ICANN have dealt with the situation in the light of this argument (which, I believe, wasn’t made at the time — but I might be wrong)? My current inclination would be to say that ICANN should have denied WLS, and should have favored the decentral approach. If that’s indeed the right approach, then how can the argument be cast into a more generic form that would be useful for an evaluation process?Comments welcome!

Yesterday’s council call (besides re-electing Bruce Tonkin as GNSO Chair and voting on the number of representatives on the newly-created WHOIS task forces) mostly dealt with the new registry services issues report.Since the report had been released less than 24 hours before the call began, there was less discussion than I had anticipated, mostly dealing with clarifications and some procedural issues (and with the registries stating a number of concerns). It seems like there is general agreement (including ICANN staff that was present on the call) that the suggested PDP will not be about establishing a new consensus policy (that would then be binding for registries), but that it is about definining a process that is used by ICANN for reviewing proposals by the registries that require ICANN approval under the existing contractual terms.This understanding is also mirrored in the draft Terms of Reference that Bruce Tonkin has extracted from the issues report.The Council will vote on commencing the policy-development process on a conference call on 2 December, in order to give constituencies and council members time to review the issues report and refine the terms of reference.

Phone: *99***1#Username: anyPassword: t-d1

The idea to have a shadow board is currently floating through the ICANN blogosphere (icann.Blog; Chris Ambler; ICANNwatch).Such a shadow board would vote on the same topics as the real board, but would deliberate and discuss entirely in the open. My guess would be that, with many (not all!) of the important topics, this might be a far less interesting exercise than it may seem: Many of the juicy discussions about consensus policies, for instance, happen among the members of the GNSO council, in the GNSO’s task forces.Maybe a shadow council would actually be more interesting than a shadow board.