ALAC Conference Call Minutes

Participants: Izumi Aizu, Vittorio Bertola, Pierre Dandjinou, Clement Dzidonu, Bret Fausett, Roberto Gaetano, Xue Hong, Erick Iriarte Ahon, John Levine, Jacqueline Morris, Annette Muehlberg, Jean Armour Polly, Sebastián Ricciardi, Siavash Shahshahani, Wendy Seltzer, Nick Ashton-Hart, Bruce Beckwith

Absent: Alice Wanjira-Munyua

Absent with reported conflict: No one.

At the start of the call, concern was expressed by members that the ICANN Board does not consult with the ALAC when the Board has important decisions before it (though discussed in regards to the JPA with the USG, it is a concern about other important Board actions as well). There was an acknowledgement that often the issues are confidential, such as the JPA, and that other groups and constituencies are not involved either.

Liaison reports follow.

Whois Task Force Liaison (Wendy Seltzer)

The Task Force’s plans are to continue work towards stated goals, with the assumption that the JPA has minimal impact. Expect a culmination of work in time for the Sao Paulo meetings. Seltzer and Polly to draft a suggested statement for the ALAC that “we are reassured by the ICANN CEO that the PDP process will continue even though the JPA could be interpreted differently.”

President’s Strategy Committee Liaison (PSC) (Pierre Dandjinou)

The PSC has had one meeting (in Paris) since Marrakech. A report from the meeting is still pending. Most of the meeting was a brain storming session. The report from the meeting is expected in the near future.

ICANN Board Liaison (Roberto Gaetano)

These are the subjects that the Board has debated in September.

• ALAC
Some attention has been given to issues regarding ALAC, and specifically the complaint received by the Ombudsman on failure of the ALS accreditation voting procedure. It has been stated that, although not all problems have been solved, since the complaint in fall 2005 progress has been made, in particular enhancing the voting procedure through a request to the Board to change the Bylaws. The Bylaws have been changed in Vancouver, and a vote has been held immediately thereafter for all pending applications. The Board has also been informed of the status of the RALO formation process, and the difficulties that ALAC has, being a body of volounteer, in operating satisfactorily with limited support by ICANN staff.

• DNS Marketplace
The discussion, that started already in the previous month mainly in relation to the renewal of the contract with .biz, .info and .org, continued in September. The subjects discussed were not only the lifting of the price cap, but the possibility for the registries to apply differential pricing, and generally speaking what were the pros and cons of ICANN intervening directly in what can be perceived as the role of a regulator. There is rough consensus on the principles of letting the market forces operate freely, and of limiting ICANN's intervention to a minimum, but substantial differences were expressed in the debate on which was this minimum. In summary, another confirmation that the devil is in the details.

• Future meetings
The Board has continued the discussion on the preparation of the October retreat, and the modality and contents of ICANN participation at the IGF in Athens. Moreover, logistic details and a general layout of the calendar for Sao Paulo has been discussed. The proposal of improving the meeting structure to allow more efficiency and better communication with the ICANN community has also been discussed. Finally, the Board has adopted the recommendation of the Meeting Committee for the March 2007 and June 2007 meetings, that will take place respectively in Lisboa (Portugal) and San Juan (Puerto Rico).

• Renewal of the MoU
The Board has been engaged in deep discussions about ways to manage the expiration of the MoU with USG at the end of September. While an extension of the MoU was one possibility, the Board has estimated that the time was ripe for a change of the relationship with the USG, and that different solutions should be explored. During the whole month of September intense negotiation has taken place between ICANN and USG, and a solution has been outlined based on a Joint Project Agreement between the two parties, completed by a declaration of principles consisting on the outline of the current responsibilities of ICANN and the way forward. This discussion has been quantitatively and qualitatively the most important activity of the Board, with analysis in detail of wording related to points like the relationship of ICANN with the ASO, RIRs and NRO, as well as the statu-quo and possible future evolution of the policy related to the WhoIs. On the latter in particular, the Board acknowledges to be bound as today to enforce the current practice, but it is in the nature of the bottom-up process to indicate possible modifications to the policy.

• Wildcard
After the discussion in previous weeks about the use of a wildcard by Cameroon (.cm), the new case in September was the request by .travel to implement a similar mechanism. It should be reminded that the main difference between the two cases is that, while .cm is a ccTLD that does not have any agreement with ICANN, .travel operates in the framework of a contract, and therefore has to agree with ICANN the possibility to offer this kind of service. The discussion included also the debate on whether there is a difference in the use of a wildcard by a sponsored TLD, given also the precedent of .museum, or whether a general ban of this use should be enforced, at least where enforceable, i.e. the gTLDs.

Please refer to the preliminary reports of the two teleconferences in September, published at http://www.icann.org/minutes/prelim-report-07sep06.htm and http://www.icann.org/minutes/prelim-report-25sep06.htm, for further details.

GNSO Liaison (Bret Fausett)

Work in the GNSO the last two months has centered on the following:

1. New gTLD Task Force (PDP Dec05). The New gTLD Task Force, which is composed of the entire GNSO Names Council, met during the last week of August to review its progress to date and reach tentative agreement on recommendations.

The Amsterdam working materials are linked here:
http://gnso.icann.org/announcements/announcement-22aug06.htm

Our Discussion is linked here:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-council/

Tentative recommendations are linked here:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-council/msg00216.html

The last link is the most relevant if you want to jump straight to the end. We plan to complete our work at the Sao Paulo meeting and present a resolution with recommendations to the ICANN Board at that time.

2. Registry Contractual Conditions Task Force (PDP Feb06). The Contractual Conditions task force has been working to develop recommendations on what ICANN's contractual relationship with its gTLD registry services provides should look like. Much of the last two months has been spent in discussions about what to with the proposed .BIZ, .INFO, and .ORG agreements that ICANN Staff negotiated while the current policy development process was underway. With the exception of the members of the Council selected by the registries, the GNSO Councilors were unanimously dismayed that ICANN Staff moved ahead with these draft contracts while the PDP work was underway.

At the most recent GNSO Council meeting, the Council passed the following resolution, which has been sent to the Board:

"The GNSO Council resolves:

To request the Board to delay any decision on the .biz .info and .org agreements until the ICANN Board meeting after the Sao Paolo ICANN meetings 2006 and to take into account the current outcome of the PDPFeb06 task force at that time."

The task force continues to work on a schedule that will complete the work by the next ICANN meeting.

Archives are here:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/pdp-pcceg-feb06/

3. London School of Economics Report on the GNSO. As many of you know, the London School of Economics was hired to conduct a thorough overview of the GNSO and, if necessary, propose changes to make it work better. That report is under discussion in the GNSO. Earlier this week, we received a report from the LSE, which has been archived on the GNSO web site as an MP3 file:

http://gnso-audio.icann.org/LSE-GNSO-20061003.mp3

The presentation and Q&A session lasted about an hour.

IDN Committee Liaison (Hong Xue)

The committee has been working on a new version of the technical test plans since mid-August.

1) Sao Paolo Goals: We talked about trying to reach a demo of the laboratory test in Sao Paolo. According to the current timeline this is not feasible. The laboratory test will be conducted in late January 2007.

2) General Timeline: All tests are scheduled to be finalized per early 2008,

3) Hiring: we are looking at hiring two DNS expert consultants.

4) Laboratory Test Participation: The test is focused on DNS elements only and is planned to demonstrate that the limited-root test is viable and will not cause DNS security and stability issues (as it includes inserting IDN strings in the root zone). The test is a technical test only. The test details will be developed by the consultants, reviewed by this Committee and parts of the technical community (especially including RSSAC and the root operators) and also made publicly available so that anyone who wish to replicate the test may do so. The test will be conducted in a Laboratory that will be hired by ICANN to perform the test after which the results will be analyzed and publicly made available.

5) Limited-Access Root Test: It was agreed on the call that the limited-access root-zone test should be including participation of application providers and interested registry operators. This is a technical test, not a policy test. Also, participation in this test has nothing to do with allocation of IDN TLDs in a production environment - decisions around this will be made in a different forum - this project is to discuss the technical issues only.

6) DNAME / Aliasing : ICANN will make a call for information and ask those in the community with DNAME experience that they don't mind sharing to make this available publicly.

7) Policy Matters: many have an interest in the policy development processes. The GNSO has not formally initiated the Policy Development Process but will be discussing more aspects of process, in particular related to coordination between the ccNSO and GAC activities.

The call then continued with a review of current issues affecting Internet users and the ALAC.

Domain Monetization.

The committee members unanimously determined that an issues report should be requested. It is the understanding of the members (which was verified by a quick review of the ICANN bylaws during the call) that by asking for an issues report, ICANN staff is then required to develop the report and provide it to the GNSO with a recommendation on whether a PDP should be started. It was also agreed that the ALAC would request participation in the “Domain Name Market Place Update” presentation during the Public Forum on 4 December in Sao Paulo. Seltzer is to draft a request for the issues report, with Fausett to communicate the purpose for the request to the GNSO members.

ALAC Budget

Discussion about the current year budget and expenses to date. A question still exists about whether the cost for the independent review is included in the posted ALAC budget or if it is addressed by another budget category (non-ALAC).

Self Review

Fourteen of the fifteen members have completed the self-review, therefore it was agreed that the self review will be made publicly available.

Nominating Committee (NomCom)

The ALAC chair was asked by the NomCom chair to designate five candidates to be appointed to the NomCom at the Sao Paulo meeting (to replace the five current ALAC appointed NomCom members). Of specific focus was whether an ALAC member may be appointed to the NomCom once they resign from the ALAC. There was a recommendation that the four existing one-year ALAC NomCom appointees be reappointed – this was unanimously agreed by the ALAC members. Only the Latin America/Caribbean representative will need to be chosen (since the existing NomCom appointee is finishing his second year on the NomCom). The ALS members of the RALO will be asked to vote on their choice.

.MOBI Advisory Board Members

The .MOBI registry has two advisory board members who are ALAC members. Current members are Bertola and Levine. The ALAC is being asked to nominate one of the members and to suggest another name for the seat of “individual users representative”, which will be appointed by the current advisory board. It was unanimously agreed that both current members would be renominated by the ALAC.

Recent ALS Certification Vote

Concern was expressed that the recent ALS applicant rejections did not comply with the recommendations of the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman had suggested that there should be a reason given to an applicant if they were not certified. There was also a concern expressed that the emails that were sent to the applicants informing them of the vote outcome were not reviewed by the ALAC members prior to being sent to the applicants. It was agreed that the ALAC should take a more active role in defining the ALS application review and processing. Polly’s recommended process will be used as a template for future application processing.

Staff Transition

The consultant that has been assisting the ALAC in an ICANN staff role since June will be transitioning those responsibilities to ICANN permanent staff (yet to be identified) by the end of October. ALAC members had questions about who the new ICANN staff might be. Nick Ashton-Hart stated that he doesn’t believe that the new staff member(s) have been identified, though during his interview for the position, he was told that the ICANN Board and the ALAC would likely have some involvement in the staffing decision.

Next ALS Vote

The vote for the next 14 applicants will be held shortly. It was decided that regional recommendations would be needed to be completed in the next week. The announcement of the vote will be sent in approximately ten days.

Regional RALO Roadmaps

Latin America/Caribbean: Intent is to have the MoU and bylaws in place by Sao Paulo. European: EURALO wiki pages have been updated with bylaw edits.
Africa: MoU and bylaws have been distributed.

A suggestion was made to add links to all of the RALO documents/wikis to the http://www.icannalac.org/site.

Membership Criteria

There are two versions of participation criteria that have been agreed to by the members. One in Vancouver, one during the self-review. A synopsis needs to be developed in order to define one consolidated position. Morris volunteered to put this document together.

ICANN Sao Paulo Meeting Preparation

The suggestion was made that the members review the posted schedule for Sao Paulo (http://www.icann.org/meetings/saopaulo/#ScheduleandAgenda) to determine how best to represent Internet user interests during the meeting. It was also suggested that there might be opportunities for the Latin America/Caribbean RALO formation to be announced in one of the public forums. Lastly, it was discussed that the ALAC needs to assemble a futbol (soccer) team.

Travel Reimbursements

Victoria Tricamo (victoria.tricamo@icann.org) should be contacted in the event that expense reimbursements have not yet been received.

The next conference call is scheduled for 06 November.

All calls begin at 13:30 UTC.