GNSO Working Session Saturday, 24 October 2009 Afternoon Session >>AVRI DORIA: Okay. We should probably start this. I know people are getting coffee and drinks still. But I see not every constituency left somebody. But some of them are out there drinking coffee, so.... But there are not that many new people in here. >>MARIKA KONINGS: No one. >>AVRI DORIA: Rosemary's outside, and Debbie's outside. Everybody wants to go have an STI. Actually, those are STDs, but, anyway.... >> (inaudible). >>AVRI DORIA: You wouldn't? Okay. >>MARIKA KONINGS: Yeah, but there's no one there. >>AVRI DORIA: Okay. So we've got people. One more person, waiting -- Jeff? Jeff is upstairs. He said he'd come back down. He's really quite concerned, quite concerned with all of this. So, okay. So let's start. I've got the -- the order of these up there, which is -- where is that? That's there. We'll start out with inter-registrar transfer policies, then go to post-expiry domain name recovery. Then the RAA drafting teams A and B. Then the registration abuse policies working group. So these are the working groups that are working either on PDPs or other policy questions. And then there will be updates in terms of the work teams that are going on. This is basically the structural stuff, the operation steering committee and the PPSC, the -- >> Policy process. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. I'm losing it. I am losing it. I have to hold on for another two days before I forget all these acronyms. So, basically, we'll go through those afterwards. So we'll start out -- and I have the slides here for inter-registry. Is that the case? >>MARIKA KONINGS: Yep. >>AVRI DORIA: There's PDP, pender, wrap. That's a different one. Okay. But I don't have that fitting yet. Sorry about this. Start whenever you want. I can't put it into slideshow mode from up there. But I can -- >>MARIKA KONINGS: Okay. >>AVRI DORIA: Okay. So Michele. >>MICHELE NEYLON: Good afternoon. Is this thing working properly? Can you hear me? If I speak very -- really lean over and speak straight into it, Michele here just giving an update on the IRTP part B PDP WG update. Okay, enough acronyms there to cause several people to have heart failure. And, basically, the IRTP is the interregistrar transfer policy. It's the policy that dictates how domains can be transferred between ICANN-accredited registrars. If you look at the first slide there, it just gives you a bit of background for those of you who may not be familiar with the policy. The interregistrar transfer policy consensus policy adopted in 2004, the idea being that it would streamline the process for registrants to transfer domain names between registrars. Part of the review, the working group identified issues for improvement and clarification. And we're now further into this in part B. The part B seems to be primarily to do with issues regarding security. Based on the SSAC's reports on -- well, issues basically involving domain hijacking and the like. So the questions that were asked are whether a process for urgent return/resolution of a domain name should be developed, whether additional provisions for undoing inappropriate transfers are needed, then further things to do with special provisions regarding changes of registrants and whether the registrar lock status needs to be revised. Don't know how much more detail you want me to go into on this. So the working group has been formed, and we've been looking at these various questions that we've been asked. We had a public comment period and received -- we didn't receive a huge number of comments back, but we're currently working our way through those. We also had some feedback from some of the constituencies just to see where they fitted in with what we're looking at and to see if they felt that they needed to take a specific role or not. So far, to date, we've been trying to thrash out some of the finer details, also to see -- to make sure -- clear the difference between a transfer between registrars and, say, a transfer just between registrants within the same registrar, that kind of thing. That's been it pretty much so far. Don't know if anybody has any specific questions. >>AVRI DORIA: Does anybody have any questions? I see one. Jaime, you have your light on, not because you want to ask a question? No. Okay. Yes, Marilyn. >>MARILYN CADE: I'm trying to formulate my question. Marilyn Cade. So the -- sorry. Post delegation transfer process, yes? No. >>MICHELE NEYLON: Yes. Well, it's the transfer process once the domain has been fully registered and you've gone past your initial 60- day period, all that. >>MARILYN CADE: Right. >>MICHELE NEYLON: So if I register a domain with registrar A in January and, say, in June I decide to transfer to registrar B, this is the policy that covers how that should work and how the losing registrar, what they have to do, what the gaining registrar has to do, what happens in between regarding the registrant, and if that policy needs to be looked at. The SSAC identified a number of cases where -- let's say for argument's sake that you were doing business with -- with me, and we were getting along swimmingly and everything was fantastic and great. And then we had a massive falling out. And let's say that you decided to grab the domain name and run for the hills. But I, of course, still had interests in the domain name. So we're having a lovely dispute about this domain name. >>MARILYN CADE: Sorry. Can you just -- I being the registrant, have interest in the name. >>MICHELE NEYLON: Yes. >>MARILYN CADE: The registrar has no interest in the name. >>MICHELE NEYLON: No, the registrar is -- the registrars were sitting in the background. We have to deal with what we have to deal with. But the stuff theta SSAC security people were looking at was cases where, say, for example, there was a dispute between business parties, which was the example I was trying to give you. So let's say the two of us set up a business in the morning. >>MARILYN CADE: Okay. Sorry. >>MICHELE NEYLON: And then somewhere further down the line, our business relations turn sour, but maybe one of us might try to run off with the domain name. That would be one case. Or another case might be where somebody were to gain control of the registrant's account with a registrar and do certain things to the domain name. Basically, domain hijacking, theft, and other forms of abuse. Part of the thinking thing that we're looking at is if the existing policies and processes regarding getting the domain back to the rightful holders, owners, registrants, whichever term you want to use and are comfortable with, whether that needs to be revised. >>MARILYN CADE: Okay. So those are two examples. The other example is, I registered a name in January and I'm totally dissatisfied with the service provided by the registrar, and I choose to move. That's covered as well? >>MICHELE NEYLON: Yes. >>MARILYN CADE: Okay. So let me go back to the -- maybe the scenario B, which was domain name hijacking. >>MICHELE NEYLON: Okay. >>MARILYN CADE: Or some other exploitive use of the name that takes place. For -- that I, as the registrant, for some reason or another, I as the registrant -- and I still know who the registrant is. There's -- So the first example you gave was, there may be a dispute about who the authoritative decision-maker is. The name was held by a family, and they get a divorce, or blah, blah, blah. Okay. So we're setting that one aside for a minute. And the second one you gave had to do with domain name hijacking. >>MICHELE NEYLON: Mm-hmm. >>MARILYN CADE: Okay. The third, which is the example of I'm just totally dissatisfied with my registrar of record. Okay, in the processes in all three of those, do you address how the fee implication -- the payment of fees impact the registrant? So in the third example, I paid a registrant -- a $8 in January. I'm now unhappy, and -- in June, and I choose to transfer. And so my assumption would be that I pay a new registration fee. Is that -- do you address registration fees in this? >>MICHELE NEYLON: It's outside the remit. Because if -- Under this -- it's a valid question. But if you register a domain with registrar A in January, and you pay whatever fee, the registrar will pay their corresponding fee to Chester registry operator is involved. >>MARILYN CADE: Right. >>MICHELE NEYLON: So let's say hypothetically that the first registration period is for, let's say, 12 months. It's a nice, round, simple number. So your registration period runs from January 2009 to January 2010. If you then change registrar in June of 2009, then an extra year is added on to the registration, normally. >>MARILYN CADE: There's no change at the registry level, because I'm not changing TLDs; right? It's still in the same TLD. >>MICHELE NEYLON: Yeah, but there's a transfer fee that I -- I, as the registrar, will pay the registry the transfer fee for the inbound transfer to me. >>MARILYN CADE: But you're saying that the fee issues are out of scope for this working group. >>MICHELE NEYLON: It's out of scope because it's not -- >>MARILYN CADE: Because it's already established? >>MICHELE NEYLON: It's already established. It's not something for debate. It's -- if we were to get -- if we were to start debating fees, it would be -- >>MARILYN CADE: Right, right. That's what I was trying to understand. >>MICHELE NEYLON: Fair enough. Sorry. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Were there any other questions? If not, thank you. And we'll move on to the next one, which is -- I've got to get the agenda back up so I remember, because I don't remember -- the next one is post-expiry domain name recovery. And that's Alan. But I understand you're doing it for Alan. Okay. Let me get those slides up. Petner. >>MARIKA KONINGS: I think unless Alan has just come back. He had to go to the other meeting. So he asked me, as the staff person supporting this -- >> Barry Cobb joins. >>MARIKA KONINGS: -- to provide an update. Hi, Barry. So for those of you that are not familiar with activities of this working group, this was actually an issue that was broad to the GNSO Council by the At-Large Advisory Committee, as they had a number of questions related to what happens after a domain name expires and what happens, as well, before that, do registrants get enough notifications? Is there enough opportunity for them to recover their domain names? Should they have any rights to recover domain names once they've let their registration agreement expire? Should there be a possibility to transfer a domain name once it enters into IRGP? So those are some of the questions that the ALAC brought to the GNSO. As a result of -- of discussion on that and development of an issues report in relation to those questions, the council did decide to initiate a policy development process in May 2009. And shortly following that, a working group started deliberating these questions. And I'll just show you which those specific questions are that they're looking at. So it's -- Avri, if you can -- >>AVRI DORIA: Sorry. I was not paying attention. >>MARIKA KONINGS: To the next slide. So as mentioned before, it looks at questions like, is there enough opportunity for registrants to redeem their expired domain names. Are provisions in registration agreements are they clear and conspicuous enough, do registrants happen once their domain name expires. Is there adequate notice to alert registrants of upcoming registrations? And should there be any additional measures that show to registrants that their domain name has expired? For example, know that your domain goes on black or there's a notice on the Web site. There are no specific provisions that currently apply to that. And the question of transfer during the redemption/grace period. It might be worth mentioning for those new to this that there is an existing expired domain deletion policy that is a consensus policy that was adopted quite some years ago. So the group will be looking as well at what provisions exist within that context and whether they should be updated or changed or other elements need to be added to that in the context of these questions. So the working group started off with looking at some of the definitions in relation to these discussions. For example, one issue that they've looked at is, how do you define the registrant in this context? 'Cause you have a registrant prior to expiration, but in certain cases, once a domain name has expired, the registrant contact details might be changed to those of the registrar or third party. So talking about the registrant might imply different parties. So to make sure that the group would have a clear understanding of what was under discussion, they worked on some definitional issues at the start of that. We had quite some discussion as well around issues such as evidence and harm. You know, what harm is caused. How big of an issue is this? Is it worth developing new policy or implementing new obligations on registrars if this only occurs once, you know, every so many million registrants? But on the other side, of course, for the one person that it does have, it might have a very serious impact. So we had a lot of discussion around that. And one of the things this group is trying to do is gather further information, evidence on these issues. What is the role of resellers? How do they fit into the picture? And how do any of these obligations affect them? They worked on development of a public comment announcement. And we have already run the public comment period. It is one of the requirements at the start of a policy development process, to have a public comment period on the initiation or decision of the initiation of a PDP, and the working group decided to take that opportunity to invite the broader community to provide some input and information on these charter questions. And a constituency template was provided as well and developed to allow for constituencies to provide input on the different questions. So this is a PDP, as well, that closely relates to existing policy requirements. So there was a request to also have participation from the ICANN Compliance Team to provide information on how these current rules and obligations are enforced. So they have already, as a result of this work, conducted a number of audits on issues such as do registrars post the details of renewal and expiration-related provisions on their Web sites so that registrants have a way to find information on what happens. Do they post the costs of recovery during the redemption grace period on their Web site, which is also a requirement under the existing EDDP. So those are some of the issues that they have been working on. And I think as a result of that, as well, have created more awareness around existing requirements. And hopefully as a result of those audits, compliance -- the compliance rate will go up as well in relation to those specific issues. As I mentioned before, a lot of discussion revolved around the question of data and information. What are current practices? How do the different registrars deal with expiration? We're conducting now a registrar survey that's basically looking at the top ten of registrars, trying to gather further information on registrar practices relating to domain name expiration renewal and post-expiration recovery. Trying to see whether there is any consistency, similar approaches in dealing with these issues. So that's something the group will be looking on on Monday when they have their open meeting at some of the initial results of that survey, and they will need to decide whether -- what kind of information that survey has provided them or will provide them in deliberating these issues and whether any further information is required in order to make an informed decision. In addition, they developed a matrix for review of the public comments, which we received quite a number of them. Interesting to note, on most of the questions, both sides of the spectrum were represented. So people saying yes or no or something in between. So I think on most of the questions, the conclusions from the working group is we really need to discuss all of these questions in further detail. There's obviously not a clear yes/no answer that comes from the community or from within the working group. So what are the next steps? There will be a public meeting on Monday at 1:30 in Sapphire 4. The objective is to have an open working group meeting, so one issue on the agenda is the review of the initial registrar survey results. There will be also opportunity for members of the community to provide input or ask questions. Going forward, the group will continue its deliberations on the charter questions, and that should result in the development of an initial report, which then will follow again with a public comment period, and then ending hopefully with the final report that will present the recommendations and conclusions of the working group. I have provided some things here as well. These slides will be posted after this meeting, so I have provided some links as well for those of you that are interested to learn more about this issue. On the Wiki, which is the joint work space of this working group, you can find information on when meetings are taking place, what issues are being discussed, different draft documents. So it provides a bit of a repository of what's going on. And as a background, the issues report that was developed at the start of this, of this initiative, provides the background to these questions and tries to paint the picture of the situation. And that document has also been translated in a number of different languages. So they are available for review there. So are there any questions? >>TONY HOLMES: Just one. You said the slides would be posted. Are they posted on the Wiki site or on the GNSO site? >>MARIKA KONINGS: I need to check with Glen. I think they are going to be on the GNSO site as materials from this meeting. I am happy to post them as well on the Wiki, but I think the GNSO site is probably easier. >>TONY HOLMES: That would be better, yes. I was thinking also about previous ones, and I assume -- >>MARIKA KONINGS: Yes, I will send them all to Glen and ask them to post them on the GNSO Web site. >>AVRI DORIA: The only question of Wiki or the other one is they can probably be put directly by you on the Wiki, so if people wanted them, they would already be there, whereas getting them on the formal site, I don't know if that takes a few more days. >>MARIKA KONINGS: No, I think Glen mentioned that she could do that quite quickly. So I will check with her, and if not -- >>TONY HOLMES: If they can all go in one place, that's easier. >>AVRI DORIA: Yes, Steve. >>STEVE METALITZ: How responsive have the registrars been to your survey? >>MARIKA KONINGS: Very much so. Very responsive. I have to say we were first talking about maybe just sending it out in bulk to all the registrars and just waiting and twisting our fingers and seeing when they would come back. But we decided that as a lot of this information is supposed to be available online and agreements that staff would have a first go at looking at the top ten registrars as that would cover quite a substantial amount of registrations, go through the agreements and any documents easily available on the Web site to extract answers to the difference questions. And for those that information could not be found, to go back to the respective registrars and ask them for input. I mean, for the top four, it helped that of three of those, three of those participate in the working group. So they were aware, and, you know, provided very quickly their input. For the fourth one that wasn't, I think they did get a heads up from Mason through the registrar constituency that they might be contacted. And they were extremely helpful and responsive and have provided input to all the questions we have asked. So.... >>AVRI DORIA: Any other questions? Yes. Please, Rosemary. >>ROSEMARY SINCLAIR: Thanks, Avri. My questions are really coming from a base of absolutely no knowledge so if you will bear with me. When you say "public comment," do you actually mean general public or within -- within ICANN, more, public? >>MARIKA KONINGS: Public comments means general public. But in reality, of course, we post it on the Web site, we try to get it out to the different mailing lists. We try to do our best to get it out as widely as possible. But often, it does result that it's many insiders responding. But anyone can provide comments during the public comment period. >>ROSEMARY SINCLAIR: Okay. And it strikes me that when we're talking about registrants, the people that I'm thinking about at the moment wouldn't even realize that they are "registrants." So the response from registrants is probably from what I just loosely call "professional registrants" rather than how we would say it, Joe Public type registrants. Would that be a fair assessment of the input that you have had from the registrants? >>MARIKA KONINGS: I would need to look back at the list of people that provided feedback. I mean, for some it's difficult to say, because some don't necessarily put their affiliation or, you know, job. They will just sign with their name. So it's difficult to assess. And, yes, some of them I think are either working at registrars or domainers or have more -- larger portfolio. But I did have the impression that there were some that were individuals that had had specific issues. There was one particular case where someone had a specific issue with a registrar and just wanted to provide that information, as we did ask for specific data or information on issues people had encountered in relation to post expiration. And that wasn't, I think, as far as I know, an individual that had a problem with his domain name and what happened after it expired. >>AVRI DORIA: I expect the outreach goes a little bit wider. In terms of, for example, within ALAC you have many of these regional organizations and such, and they do do a certain amount of outreach. So it's still going to be people that care. So maybe it's not professional registrants, but amateur registrants. >>ROSEMARY SINCLAIR: Yes, yes. >>AVRI DORIA: As opposed to just people that have -- you know, the mom and pop registrants, as it were. But there is further outreach than just the closed community. >>ROSEMARY SINCLAIR: Can I ask one more, Avri? When you are looking at the registrar processes for advising registrants about expiry periods so on and so forth, is there consideration given of whether those descriptions actually work in a kind of, what we would say, plain English sense? That it's common enough language for your mom and pop registrants to understand, you know, what they need to think about, what they need to do? >>MARIKA KONINGS: Well, under the EDDP, there is a requirement that renewal and expiration-related provisions need to be communicated. But it doesn't go into detail as to how that needs to be communicated or what level of detail. Of course the challenge there is, and speaking -- having red through these different agreements and different documents, if you look at the registration agreement, it's a legal document. And I guess it's often there that lawyers provide advice on how these things need to be written from a legal point of view and not necessarily from a registrant's point of view. I think to that end, many of the registrars that I was looking at have provided, like, FAQs or separate documents that try to explain that in more easily understandable language. But as I said, we only covered at this stage the first four registrars out of the top ten. So I don't know if that's a consistent approach. And it might be something that the working group might make recommendations. And again, I don't think that would be anything binding, but it could be something for the working group to look at and say, look, it's very important that, yes, you have the agreement where you put your legal language in that your lawyers advise you on how to write about these things, but just strongly encourage you to provide as well that information in more easily understandable ways so it's clear for registrants what happens once a domain name expires. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: In my experience, most registrars want their customers to be happy. And the registrants are their ultimate customer. So they make sure that they understand this as best they can. Now, the best customer service person will know that no matter how hard you try, there's always someone who doesn't know what their rights are. And so that's where the redemption grace period came in, was to offer a fail-safe for the folks that didn't necessarily understand because either they couldn't or they didn't take the opportunity to learn. So there are processes. But I mean, at the end of the day, ICANN cannot mandate to these folks how to reach out to your customers any better than they believe their own pecuniary interests require that they do in order to keep happy -- because unhappy registrants will go to a registrar that they can understand their terms and systems. So I think the market drives a lot of this stuff. And as you said, most registrars have an FAQ. I don't know how many people go to them, but they do say "what happens if," "how long is." They answer these questions. And most of them are no more than a couple of sentences and an answer. So it's not real complex. Now, the agreement itself is fairly complex. >>ROSEMARY SINCLAIR: Yes. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: But the FAQs aren't. >>ROSEMARY SINCLAIR: No, no. My interest was just in making sure that the market for sharing information that we know works when you get right to the end of the chain, that there is an opportunity for that information to be shared with others. Thank you. >>MARIKA KONINGS: One of the issues that -- you know, you might be interested in reading the executive summary of the issues report that outlines some of those issues in question, because one of the things we identified there as well, even though there is an obligation to provide that information once a registrant wants to register a domain name, we said as well, at the time of registration, it's not really the focus, probably, of the registrant to think about expiration or what happens once they don't renew it. Because once they buy it, you would think it's in their interest just to have that, you know, for a couple of years, and it's not necessarily the focus of attention or -- I don't know if it would have an impact on when they decide on a registrar that they really look in detail at those policies and make a decision based on that. Because at that moment in time, it's probably not their main focus or most important criteria for deciding on where to take their domain name. Mason. >>MASON COLE: So I can speak in this instance as chair of the registrars group. I think it may be helpful to understand how important it is for registrars to acquire customer relationships and how -- how carefully we try to protect those relationships. I think J. Scott's point was exactly on target. The registrar marketplace is brutally competitive, and if a customer -- we spend a great deal of time, effort, money, energy, acquiring customer relationships, educating those customers about how to care for a domain name, how to have a productive relationship with their registrar. And if they don't care for some aspect of the relationship, there's more than 900 other registrars that they can go choose to do business with. So it's very important for almost every registrar to take extraordinary care of an expensively acquired and difficult to get customer relationship. So in terms of explaining the rules of a domain name registration, presenting those rules up front, making sure that they know how to be good stewards of their domain names, and take care of those and not unintentionally lose them, it's important for to us do that. >>AVRI DORIA: Sorry. Doing too many things at the same time. Okay. Is there -- Were there any other questions? In which case, thank you. And the next one is the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, and that's Steve. And you don't have slides. >>STEVE METALITZ: I do not have slides, at least not that I know of. But.... Thank you. This one is a little bit different from the previous two because it's not a policy development process, so there are certain steps that you saw in the last one that are not present in this -- on this issue. Also, we're at a very early stage on this one, so some of the steps, such as public comment, will come in later. This grows out of a -- This drafting team grows out of a motion that was adopted by the GNSO Council in March of 2009, at the time that a new version of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, which is the basic document really defining the rights and responsibilities of registrars and of registrants, even though it takes the form of a registration -- Registrar Accreditation Agreement between ICANN and registrars. At the time that the last amendments to that were adopted, there was a lot of concern about some amendments that were not adopted, and also concerns about whether the rights of registrants were being adequately explained. So the council, in giving its approval to the - - to that round of amendments, also set in motion work on two things. One is a -- which are both encompassed within this drafting team. One was a statement of registrant rights under the current agreement. And that is a joint project between the GNSO and the At- Large Advisory Committee -- or, rather -- and the at-large groups. And the second was to identify topics for the next round of revisions of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement and recommend a way forward on that. So that motion was adopted in March of 2009, and because of various intervening steps, which I won't go into here, it wasn't until September of 2009 that the council actually approved the charter for this group. So that's -- We really have only been under way now for less than two months. The group -- The drafting team has been divided into two subteams, or, rather, the drafting team members are signing up with one or the other of two subteams. Subteam A is working jointly with the ALAC on the statement of registrant rights. And that subteam is headed by Beau Brendler, who is not here yet but who will be here later, a couple of days from now here in Seoul. And Subteam B is dedicated to identifying topics for future amendments of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. And I'm the head of that subteam. Subteam A, as I mentioned, its work product will be a descriptive statement of registrants' rights. It's intended to be a plain- language version of the rights that are found in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement now. And I know the staff had done a first draft of that, and I think that's going to be the starting point for the work of that subteam. But I don't have any details on any other activities that that subteam has had. The work of Subteam B, really we have three tasks. One is to list the topics for possible amendment of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. We see that as kind of a job of accumulation of ideas. The second is to identify which of those topics, if any, that might have some implications for consensus policies and might need to go through some type of policy development process. And the third is to recommend the next steps. We're -- And all that will be embodied in a report that will be -- draft report that will be made available for public comment, and then after that public comment period and any changes that are necessitated by that, will then be provided to the council. We're still on the first of these three topics, of these three tasks, which is to list the topics for possible Registrar Accreditation Agreement amendments. We've asked the drafting team members to submit their list by November 9th, and then shortly thereafter we'll meet to go through and weed out duplicates. And we are really, again, trying to accumulate a list here. We have learned that we will have contributions, and I am very glad that we will have contributions from at least two other sources. One is we will have some suggestions from law enforcement groups from at least several different countries who will be making a presentation here at the Seoul meeting, which will touch on that. And then we will also be getting some suggestions from the ICANN staff, including but not limited to the Compliance Team, which has a lot of experience in enforcing the existing Registrar Accreditation Agreement and has some ideas about changes that should be made to improve enforceability and make for a clearer agreement. So we're very much looking forward to those contributions from law enforcement and ICANN staff but also from the drafting team and anybody else. There will be a session here in Seoul at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday in the Sapphire 4 room. It's mostly just to acquaint the community that this is going on, and to encourage them to share their ideas. And as I mentioned, in Subteam B, following -- once we have gotten through all three of these tasks, there will be a draft report and a final report. And that will be the life cycle of this drafting people. So with apologies for not having slides that might have made this a little clearer, that's the brief report on what's happening with the RAA drafting teams. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Open up to questions. One thing I wanted to explain, just for someone who is -- anyone who is interested in why something would be called a working group and something would be called a drafting team, working groups are basically things where there is already a policy development process that's ongoing, and the work has been chartered based upon a PDP. Whereas the -- There's still a little bit of muddiness in this structural naming. In this case, there isn't a policy development process. This is very much pre-policy development process to try and figure out whether there's going to be something to take to either a policy development process or another contractual negotiation process. So that's why the -- And some of the names between working teams, working groups, and drafting teams, is a little fuzzy, but it's been developing over a year, and I think it's getting less fuzzy as time goes on. But I might be wrong, but I just wanted to give that. Any questions on -- Yes, Jaime. >>JAIME WAGNER: Steve, I don't know -- Well, I'm newcomer. I tried, in Sydney, to -- recommendation that I think is very close to your group, part B. And it concerned the problem of one of the overarching issues that was being discussed at Sydney was the prospect for malicious behavior. And I thought that this was the one that had the least -- the most importance and the least progress since Mexico. And I suggested that -- well, Rod Rasmussen presented something that showed that registrar security or technical weakness was the main concern in this respect. And I asked to put something in the RAA and also in the DAG concerning some requirements from registrars, technical requirements, that were not -- as long as I could see, were not in the current version of the document. >>STEVE METALITZ: Well, that absolutely would be an appropriate topic for us to include in our list. And maybe we could pursue that off-line, just how we would -- how you would express that. I do think that some of what's coming from the staff will address some of that concern. And I think some of what's coming from law enforcement will address that concern, because their -- that's what's motivating them, is the deficiencies in the current Registrar Accreditation Agreement from the point of view of law enforcement against malicious behavior. But I would certainly welcome your thoughts on that, too. And at this point, we are accumulating topics, and I think that's a very good one to include. >>AVRI DORIA: Any other questions? Okay. If not, go on to the next one -- Thank you, Steve -- and that's the registration abuse policies working group. Is Mike coming or are you -- I don't see Mike, but let me find it. I have slides; right? >>MARIKA KONINGS: Yes, there should be slides. Unfortunately, Greg Aaron, the chair of this working group, couldn't make it to Seoul so he asked me to provide an update to the council on the progress of this working group. >>AVRI DORIA: And the slides are about to show up. Really, really. >>MARIKA KONINGS: So first, again, to provide you with a little bit of background and history on this working group, there was an issue that was brought to the council with questions relating to, you know, there doesn't seem to be a uniform approach related to registration abuse and how registries and registrars deal with those issues. There were questions surrounding what should ICANN's role be in this regard. I also question, would more uniformity have an effect? Would that be helpful or wouldn't that play a role? So the council requested staff to develop an issues report on this issue in September 2008. And we basically found that there's, indeed, no uniform approach by registries and registrars in how they address abuse. There's no clear definition of what constitutes abuse. And you look as well at the issues, what is registration abuse, what might fall within ICANN's remit. And abuse that falls outside of ICANN remit, which is this domain name use abuse. We did find that many registry agreements do foresee registries to be able to take down or terminate domain names in cases of abuse. But there are also a number that actually don't have any actual provisions. But the question was, as well, it doesn't mean that they don't do anything. We basically found that from -- from the initial research and just looking at the agreements, it wasn't -- wasn't easy to distill or we weren't able to identify whether that made a difference or whether it just meant not having any provisions means doing nothing or, you know, we could neither assess whether -- which provisions would be more effective or which weren't. So the recommendation that staff made at that time was, we really need to do a bit more research and get a little bit of a better understanding of these questions before we actually go into a policy development process. So as a result, the council agreed with that recommendation, and we launched what we're referring to now, and which is not a real official ICANN term, at least not defined in the bylaws -- is a pre- policy development working group to work out these issues. So they were formed in February 2009. So this is the background. I think I already covered most of these questions. Most importantly probably the second and third bullet that one of the objectives of this group is to look at all these different questions and distill from that information what issues, if any, would be suitable for GNSO policy development. The GNSO Council has committed that they will not take a decision on whether or not to initiate a PDP once this group has presented its findings and recommendations. So the group had a requirement in its charter to provide an update to the council after 90 days of activities. I think some had hoped that maybe by that time the group would have had -- would have concluded its work. But as, you know, there are many questions that needed to be dealt with and at the same time as well many other ICANN initiatives going on, you know, it's taken this group a bit more time to work through these issues. So in the status update, they provided at that stage some feedback on the things they had done. They had organized a workshop with the broader community to get some input on these issues. Representatives from the stability -- Security and Stability Advisory Committee are participating and collaborating on this discussion, 'cause, of course, there are many issues that they look at as well and that affect their activities. And the group had, as well, extensive discussion on the scope and definition related to registration abuse, what is registration abuse compared to domain use abuse? And how do you define "abuse" as a term? And so since then, the working group has continued with its meeting on a biweekly basis. So some of the things this working group has already done. They have developed a working definition of "abuse," which I think they will need to go back to at the end of the discussions see if that same -- that's still the same definition they want to as well put forward for consideration. And they've developed a list of all kinds of different abuses, breaking them down into preregistration abuse, registration abuse, post registration abuse, domain name use abuse, and basically trying to be as complete as possible in listing all the kinds of abuses this group could come up with as a starting point for discussions. So as mentioned, had extensive discussions as well on the scope question, as mentioned, registration abuse, abuse that specifically relates to use and abuse of the DNS can fall within ICANN's remit under specific provisions that, you know, might make consensus policies in that area possible. But as soon as you look at domain name use issues, that really goes beyond ICANN's scope. And there might be less options for ICANN to really have an impact or do something in that area, at least not from a contractual perspective. So as well, there were a number of questions that needed to be addressed and worked through. A number of subteams have been formed that have been working on some of the definitional questions, looking at these different abuses and actually trying to define what does, for example, the cybersquatting mean. I think here it all sounds quite straightforward and, you know, is there not a standard definition. But we quickly found that on many of these issues, people had a very different understanding and interpretation of what would fall within a certain category of abuse. So as -- it's taken quite some time working through these different issues to define them as well as discussing what could be potential recommendations that might be put forward at the end of the day. In addition, an important part or important effort going on in this group as well is further research. So a subteam has been created, and we've had some great volunteers putting in a lot of time and effort going through different registrar agreements and looking at different provisions, looking at what kind of abuses do those agreements address, what do they cover? As well, the spread, you know, is there a difference between continents, you know, are registrars in the U.S. more active or do they see more (inaudible) by having specific provision? Is it different in other parts of the world? Having done that work, this group will now need to look at the question, so what does that actually mean? You know, it's nice to see that many have provisions. But what does it mean in practice? Does it mean that they're -- you know, they have better means to address abuse or not? Would uniformity have any impact? Would that be helpful to have some kind of baseline provisions that everyone will need to apply? Or is it better to give registrars some discretion so they have the flexibility to address abuse? Because there are some concerns as well if you would really, you know, put in black and white what you can and can't do that it might unnecessarily restrict certain interventions or certain ways to address abuse. And, of course, it is as well an area that is developing. If you would really prescribe, you can act in cases of, you know, cybersquatting, front-running and spam, it might mean if something new comes on the table, that you don't have any provisions to deal with that. So those are some of the questions. Do you want to hold the question until the end or you have a clarifying? >>MARILYN CADE: I just want to ask, when you go back to questions at the end, you'll be able to go back to the slides? >>MARIKA KONINGS: Avri, yes. >>AVRI DORIA: Yes, I can go back to the slides. >>MARIKA KONINGS: So then, you know, looking at the work to come, I already mentioned on the uniformity of contracts questions, you know, they will be looking at, like, is uniformity desirable? What are the possible impacts of having, you know, standard provisions? They got another piece of work added to their charter because of the work that was undertaken by the Fast Flux working group. They asked a specific question on whether this group could look at, as well, Fast Flux in their list of categories and make sure that that would be addressed and look at which policies might empower registries and registrars to deal with Fast Flus-related abuse. Then there are still a number of topics that are on the long list of abuses that this group will need to define and discuss and work their way through, basically. So it's pay-per-click, fake renewal notices, domain name kiting. Then there's a question as well of some WHOIS- related topics possibly. So then the idea would be for this group to go back and look at all the discussions they had and all the recommendations they came up with and try to identify for those different specific issues whether they would recommend the development or the initiation of a policy development process, whether further work would need to be taken on voluntary best practices, or contract changes, which normally would be part of a PDP process, but, you know, possibly if -- if they will be in time, maybe there's some topics that they would like to put forward to a group like the RAA Working Group, for example. So some of the challenges that this group has encountered or to deal with. One has been the WHOIS question. The group quickly discovered that many of these abuses at some point interact or relate or are enhanced by WHOIS abuse or WHOIS inaccuracy. So there were some questions, you know, can this group or should this group or will this group make any recommendations in relation to WHOIS-related issues? And there's a difference of opinion. Some, I think, say it's not part of the charter, 'cause there are already other initiatives going on that look at WHOIS, while others say that although this group probably won't make any, you know, big proposals on how WHOIS should be reformed, but they shouldn't be refrained from pointing out which areas specifically enhance abuse and which this group would recommend that, you know, council look specifically at. So that's still an open question. And I think the chair of the working group is working with the chair of the GNSO Council and the vice chair to see how -- to get beyond that and have the group move forward on that question. So then again, the question related to domain name registration use and -- registration abuse and use abuse. Where do you draw the line is a question related to scope, intent, legal issues. It's not an easy discussion. Some challenges as well that the working group charter is very broad. So as mentioned before, a lot of discussions, for example, on issues such as cybersquatting has taken up a number of meetings just because there is a very different view of opinion as to what cybersquatting actually means and how it fits into this group and what kind of recommendation might be potentially linked to that. So as well, as you can imagine, with different constituencies represented there, there are very different views on, as well, what role ICANN should take or what responsibilities registries or registrars should have or shouldn't have. So this -- you know, as a result, it has been difficult to, you know, give a very clear time line. And that's taken the working group quite some time to get to this point where we are now. But, hopefully, we'll make some progress and be able to present the community with an initial report at some point in the near future. So in going forward, for those of you interested in the activities of this working group, there will be an open meeting on Wednesday in Sapphire 4 at 2:00. So expect the working group will continue meeting as it has been every two weeks. As well, there are a number of subteams that are meeting as well in those weeks. So this is all work in progress. As mentioned, Greg Aaron from Afilias is the chair of that, and Mike Rodenbaugh is the council liaison on this group. So questions? >>MARILYN CADE: I have a number. But I will -- Let me start with two. I'd like to, without going into a complete regurgitation of the issue, have a better understanding of there being a lack of clarity on what cybersquatting is. Are we saying that we have not yet had a chance to survey any existing national laws that relate to a definition of cybersquatting? Or that the -- some in the ICANN community are of the view that -- that we would develop a policy definition of cybersquatting? I'd just like to understand that first. >>MARIKA KONINGS: Well, the group started off with a definition of the UDRP that, you know, I think is widely accepted. But then some members provided, I think, the ACPA provisions or certain ACPA provisions should be added to that. Is it ACPA? Am I saying that right? The anti- -- what is it? Yeah. >> (inaudible). >>MARIKA KONINGS: Yeah, the ACPA. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: Anti-cybersquating Consumer Protection Act. >>MARIKA KONINGS: But there was disagreement with some in the group whether that should be added or not. There were some specific elements in there that some didn't like and others did like. So we had very lengthy debates going back and forth on that one. And then, indeed, the question arose as well, like, well, if we're only working with the UDRP definition, you know, can this group make any changes? Because if we, you know, define it differently, would that have any impact on UDRP? Or any kind of, you know, policy work? Or -- So the group had a lot of discussion around those issues. And they're still -- I mean, part of it as well, the subteam was formed to look at some of those issues and, you know, didn't deliver necessarily the outcome in a timely manner. So we had to have those discussions over and over again. >>MARILYN CADE: Let me make a comment. The ACP- -- the definition of cybersquatting established in the ACPA is a matter of a number of bilateral agreements with a number of countries. And it would probably be helpful to understand that. Because there may be people proposing there's no need to recognize that definition when in fact their country is bound by such a definition. It oughtn't to be too hard to find out what those countries are. And it might just be a helpful fact toyed to have. So that would be one point I would make. The second point I would make is, I wanted to make a comment on a discussion that you laid out that there's a discussion about whether there's a need for uniformity. And my question in this case probably goes to specific reference to be taken back to specific ICANN staff. And that is in the compliance group. Because one of the things that I am seeing as a concern is, when there are -- when we govern by contract -- which is what we do at ICANN -- there is also a need to be able to have those contractual terms enforced and conformed with. So if this working group is actually seriously considering variable conditions rather than consistency and uniformity, I think there could be significant implications for compliance and enforcement. >>MARIKA KONINGS: Just to clarify one thing. You know, as said, this group is a pre-PDP working group. So the only thing this group might come back with is, you know, we recommend the council to initiate a PDP on, you know, looking at uniformity in contract. So that working group, indeed, then there would definitely be a requirement to have or a indeed to have compliance participate in those discussions, like I think we already do in some of the other PDP working groups, to ensure that whatever comes out of that group is enforceable and workable, and they have as well a way to share their views on how they can do their job better to that working group. So, again, I just want to make sure that everyone understands that what are this working group puts forward, it's not going to be any recommendations for changes to contracts or new consensus policies or, you know, any specific acts. At this stage, it will be more recommendations for what further work needs to be done. And, for example, one of the questions has come up in relation to the cybersquatting is, like, one of the recommendations might be a review of the UDRP, for example, as one of the potential things that's on that list as one of the recommendations. But, again, that doesn't mean that a PDP will be initiated. That's -- you know, the whole list of issues that they will come back with and potentially recommendations will be for the council to consider, according to the appropriate process of, you know, issues report, council decision, and, you know, further steps. So -- >>AVRI DORIA: Yes, Ray. >>RAY FASSETT: Thank you. Ray Fassett. One of the puzzling things I've had on this particular work that's been going on is the inability to have a definition of what domain name abuse is, and yet there's work going on on the concept of let's try and solve it. Okay, it makes sense. There's a lot of bad actors out there. So I have a couple of questions on this. One is, what is the significance of the fact it's been identified that there's -- again, it's not defined, but there's domain name abuse as it pertains to the use of a domain. And then there's domain name abuse as it pertains to the registration of a domain. What's the significance of delineating those two points? >>MARIKA KONINGS: Well, in the RAA, if you look at the provisions that deal with the topics that can be considered for consensus policies -- I have to preface it with saying I'm not a lawyer, and I want a lawyer if I'm saying anything wrong to correct me -- but one of the specific topics that is identified there is related to resolution of conflicts related to registration abuse. So it's it very specifically identifies that as an area in which potential consensus policies can be developed. It also specified that no -- it cannot be done for issues that purely relate to domain name use abuse. So from that perspective, it's very significant as those issues that are identified as being registration abuse, I think that's why the definitional debate has taken quite some time, has, in the end, an impact on what kind of issues might be addressed through consensus policy or contractual changes that, of course, could have a significant impact on registries and registrars. >>RAY FASSETT: So my follow-up recommendation would be, when you get to that point of being able to say domain name abuse is, it would really -- we really need two. We need "Domain name registration abuse is," "Domain name use abuse is." So we would need -- for clarity, we would need to understand those two definitions, not really one definition. That's my feedback. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: And that cybersquatting is merely one form of registration abuses. I think that's where all the nomenclature gets confused, is because everyone tries to stuff everything that happens with the registration of a domain name under cybersquatting. And cybersquatting has developed over the last nine years to have a very specific meaning which doesn't subsume some of the things that creative bad actors have done in the space that are outside of that. So I think we just need to understand that cybersquatting is a subset of registration abuses. >>RAY FASSETT: Well, no. See, that's what this team has to look at. You know, is cybersquatting a -- an abuse of the registration process? Or is it an abuse of the use of a domain name? That's why this is really very crucial to understand. Because one, as we just understood, the significance is consensus policy as it pertains to contracts. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: Well, as it's defined under the UDRP, it is a registration abuse. Not a use abuse. It's, "Why did you register it?" Now, use comes into play into that determination. >>RAY FASSETT: I'm not a lawyer. We would have to get clarification on that, I think. >>AVRI DORIA: Sounds like good discussions to take back into that group as opposed to trying to be that group at the moment. >>MARILYN CADE: Can I ask a clarification, though? Ray -- Ray, I thought there was another point inherent -- I thought there was another point inherent in what J. Scott said, and that is also recognizing that there are a number of -- regardless of what you put into each category, that cybersquatting is not the only kind of abuse that exists. >>RAY FASSETT: Right, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was my -- you're saying the same thing (inaudible). >>AVRI DORIA: Okay. Thank -- and part of the complexity of the conversation we just saw is part of the explanation for why this group has been working long -- We have another question. Okay. Yes, please. >>JAMES BLADEL: Hi. This is James Bladel from Go Daddy. And I'm a member of that group as well. And I just wanted to point out one other thing for Marika, in understanding the delineation between registers abuse and use abuse helps us to draw some boundaries around the question of intent and understanding what can be detected at the time of registration and mitigated through different registration policies, versus those types of abuses that would perhaps be through a compromised domain name or through a domain name that was allowed to be dormant. So I think that there's an important question that this group is wrestling with of intent and how to detect intent and how to mitigate it when it's understood. And I think that's part of understanding that delineation between registration abuse and use abuse. Thanks. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. >>ANDREI KOLESNIKOV: I'm new to GNSO, Andrei Kolesnikov. Just a very short question. Among this list of the abuse items, has the group considered the child pornography placement? I mean, cybersquatting, all this stuff. But what about the common evil? I mean, the child pornography? >>MARIKA KONINGS: I am quickly looking at the list. But I don't think they've listed that, because that's clearly a use issue. >>ANDREI KOLESNIKOV: Yeah, it's a use of the domain. >>MARIKA KONINGS: So I think the group already has enough difficulty in defining the specific registration or defining those that might be linked to registration or why there is doubt. But I think this is one of the areas where a clear use issue, so I don't think this group will be dealing with this issue. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: It's purview of governments. >>ANDREI KOLESNIKOV: Well, that's -- we just -- why I'm asking is because -- just based on the practice, if you found in the -- our country's own this kind of site, we just turn it off. >>AVRI DORIA: Yeah, you have one country. Okay. Thank you. I'd really like to move all the rest of the conversation to the working group, because -- but thanks. >>MARIKA KONINGS: There is the open meeting on Wednesday. >>AVRI DORIA: There is the open meeting on Wednesday. So that's good. It's just -- it's really a lot of things to talk about. Okay. But we don't have much time. And I did want to cover the work -- >>J. SCOTT EVANS: I'm the only one -- >>AVRI DORIA: Yeah, go first. Do you have slides? >>J. SCOTT EVANS: Yeah. >>AVRI DORIA: Okay -- >>MARIKA KONINGS: I sent them as well, in a separate e-mail. >>AVRI DORIA: So, yes, I'll get your slides. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: Since I'm the only one here. Well, Mason's here. >>AVRI DORIA: So everyone's here except for Chuck, in other words. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: No. Jeff's not here, either. (inaudible). >>AVRI DORIA: But we all will be ending at 3:30. So -- >>J. SCOTT EVANS: Mine is not even going to take five minutes. >>AVRI DORIA: Why don't you start, the PPSC working group. >>J. SCOTT EVANS: Yeah, PPSC working group, just to let you know what's going on, we are the working group -- we're the work -- working group work team. And what we are trying to -- what we have -- are charged with doing is coming up with sort of a road map for how this new process is going to transition. We've developed two -- you want to go to the next slide. Here's where we got -- so we're the working group model. So we've done task forces. Now we're going into a working group model. And what we're doing is we're trying to define how this is going to work and transition to it. So what we've done is, we are preparing two documents at this point which we are considering that we may put into one document. But, basically, these are documents that are going to operate as a guide for chartering organizations that are chartering working groups. So it sort of tells you all the considerations that you need to do in a chartering organization to charter a working group and then provides a template to fill out so that you just fill it out, and it charter -- and it provides the charter. And it gives you the things that you need to consider. The other thing is a working group operating model, or operating manual, that will be used to guide members of a working group, especially chairs of a working group, on what the various roles are, what the normative behaviors are within the group. If you have a problem within a group, who you would appeal to and how those are handled. And it's just basically a roadmap. And so, basically, what we have done so far is we have finished the majority of the work on the charter document, and there are about three sections that are interdependent on work coming from other groups that we have held off on because we need to incorporate the work that's being done by other groups. And we are hopefully going to, tomorrow, finishing working through and finish up the first draft of the working group operating model, the manual. And again, we understand that there are certain things like how a decision is taken that we will have to incorporate once that is fleshed out by the groups that are working on those particular documents. So there is some cross-referencing that we are waiting on. But our goal is to finish up this year. Our goal is to get finished with the draft tomorrow so that we can then wait on those other sections that we can put in. If you will see, there's one more slide, if you pop through. We have got a timeline here. You see we have -- we are hoping to finish up by the 25th of October. We're hoping that we can then consolidate into a single document, and then we are going to look to cross- reference with the other groups so that we can flesh out those particular sections that are specific and dependent on other work. We are probably going to put this out for public comment once we have got the cross-referencing dropped into the document. And our target is to get finished by the first of this year -- end of this year and get it to the council by February of next year. I just want to take this opportunity to thank both Ken and Marika who have done a wonderful job of keeping us on track and assisting us with making sure everything gets recorded and put in, and we're moving forward and have made the progress we have because they have been so good at what they have done. So we really appreciate the staff's help. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Any quick questions? We're going to go through these more quickly. But are there any questions at this point? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So the next one, we don't.... Olga Cavalli is here. Okay. So we will do constituency and operations work team. Do I have slides on that? >>OLGA CAVALLI: No. Thank you, Avri. Okay. I want to update you about the constituency operations team activities. We are under the OSC, one of the three working teams under the OSC, Operations Steering Committee. We have two main tasks to develop. One is to enhance existing constituencies by developing recommendations on constituency participation rules, operating principles, and database of members. And we have another task, which is develop a global outreach program to broaden participation in current constituencies. What we have been doing since our kickoff meeting in March and during the ICANN meeting in Mexico, we have 12 members of our working team. We divided our first task in four subtasks, and we created sub working teams for each subtask. I will quickly read the main purpose of the subtask. The one is development recommendations for a set of participation rules and operating procedures for constituencies. Subtask two is develop recommendations for clear operating principles for each constituency to ensure that all constituencies function in a representative, open, and transparent and democratic manner. Subtask three is to develop recommendations for creating and maintaining a database for all constituency members and others not formally a part of any constituency that is up-to-date and publicly accessible. And subtask four is develop a tool kit of in-kind staff support and/or other services for all constituencies. We haven't -- been working in task one, not yet in task two. We are hoping to have an outcome document for task one perhaps in -- during the next month. In relation with subtask four, we already submitted to the OSC for being considered in the meeting tomorrow the document as outcome for this subtask, which is develop a tool kit of in-kind staff support and all services for all constituencies. As the document was already reviewed by the working team and ready, we thought we could perhaps send it as a separate document that could be useful for being considered by other working teams so far with this work that has been done. The other subtask documents, we hope to finish them by -- in the next month, and then we will move to the task two. We have been very active in the working team. It's a working team had a has a lot of activity. And we have a lot of discussions among us, so it has taken some time for us to reach rough consensus in some issues, but we are moving forward, luckily. And we hope soon to start working with task two. I don't know if you want me to go in detail about any of the three sub working teams and sub working draft documents. Let me know. And I would really like to thank Julie Hedlund, she is over there, from staff, and Robert Hoggarth, I don't know if he is here, from ICANN staff, and also Glen and Gisella. They are great assisting us in setting our conference calls. We meet every two weeks and sometimes we have met every one week, every week, because we have been working a lot. If you have questions, let me know. >>AVRI DORIA: Any questions? Thank you, Olga Cavalli. The next one will be the GCOT, and that's Ray, and we will start with this slide; right? >>RAY FASSETT: Yes. Thanks, Avri. Ray Fassett. This is the GCOT which stands for the GNSO Council Operations work Team. Came through as part of the Board Governance Committee recommendations on GNSO reform that resulted in the Operations Steering Committee that then resulted in this work team being put together. And what's up here are the members of this work team, including those from ICANN staff support and from GNSO support. So we can go to the next. Okay. So again, working from the Board Governance Committee, very extensive document they prepared. They had certain issues they wanted this work team to look at. At a very high level, it was about establishing the role of the council -- you know, the council members, the GNSO Council, as a strategic manager of the policy process. So that was our sort of higher directive. And then from there was prioritizing our work, which was approving the charter. Working with the GNSO Council rules of procedure was identified as, early on, something we needed to get working on quickly. On two fronts there. One, of course we all know the new bicameral structure, so incorporating the rules of procedure for that, which of course was brand-new, would have to be incorporated. But also the fact that much of the rules of procedure that the GNSO had been operating under had not been updated since the DNSO which predated the GNSO, and the GNSO came about as part of ICANN's reform process, but we're still working under some of the procedures of the old DNSO. And why it was time sensitive is because the new rules of procedure would be needed in time for this meeting in order to seat the new council. If you recall, I think there was actually an original plan to seat the new council like in June, but it got pushed back, so October was really important to many, including the ICANN board, to get the new council seated. So in order to accomplish that goal, these rules of procedure need to be updated and put in place. So other things we worked on were the Statement of Interest and Declaration of Interest forms. Okay. Next slide. Okay. So we were formed as part of New Mexico [sic] meeting, ICANN New Mexico. That was back in February. We have held roughly 17 meetings over approximately 30 weeks. All meetings were MP3 recorded. There is a Wiki page that also has the transcripts. We also had originally a biweekly schedule, but as we were reaching the deadline of this meeting, we switched, beginning the first week of August through mid-September, to a weekly schedule. So major challenges that we were facing were the bylaws, the ICANN bylaws were being updated in parallel with us, with our work team working on the rules of procedure, updating the rules of procedure document, and there was definitely overlap going on as to what was going to show up in the new bylaws with respect to what the rules of - - the old rules of procedure had already in there and we were working on. So what we didn't want to be doing is spending a lot of work team effort on areas that were going to be covered in the bylaws, but we didn't know exactly which areas those were going to be. So it made things very tricky for a while. If you can think of a cat chasing a tail, that's -- you know, I felt like that as the chair of this work team at times. But we worked through it. And then another challenge was just getting up to speed as a work team on what is the bicameral structure, the two houses, the stakeholder groups. Even here today, we have interchanging terminology going on. Constituencies, stakeholder groups. Which is it? So even those kinds of things, getting up to speed on what all the terminology was. And then, of course, how does it flow all the way through the rules of procedure as it pertains, for example, to the voting structure. Okay. Next. Okay so the work team was able to deliver an updated rules of procedure by prioritizing its work on what absolutely needed to be updated in order to seat the council. So as we have been talking all day in other various venues, is that the rules of procedure are not fully completed. They are just the areas that needed to be completed to seat the council have been put forth, approved by the council for public comment, and now are in a ready state for the council to approve on Wednesday as part of being seated. And then another deliverable we had was we did development Statement of Interest and declaration of interest forms that have been submitted for ICANN counsel review and feedback. Okay. Next. Okay. So what are some of the open points on the operating procedures? We have had a lot of discussion on how to recognize abstentions in the voting process. You notice each one of these has a question mark because the work team is going to continue on looking at these questions. I should note that the charter of this work team has been extended through -- I believe it's the first meeting -- first ICANN meeting in 2010. So another question that popped up during the review and that we didn't really spend any time on thinking about was how to dismiss a chair and under what conditions? There could -- under extreme conditions, what is the process? There isn't one in there now so we need to figure that out. Should absentee voting be expanded? Right now absentee voting in the rules of procedure are very narrow. There are four instances or so where you can actually use absentee voting. Should those be expanded? And there's also been ongoing discussion about the requirement that is in there now about a chair candidate having to be a member of the council. So these are just a few of the open points that we have. Okay. So I won't read all these, but the Board Governance Committee document was very thorough, very involved. They spent a lot of time in their work, and these are some of the things that are under our -- the umbrella of the GCOT for us to continue to work on in the future. Okay. So last slide here. I want to stress there is open enrollment. I think one of the things I liked from earlier discussions today is I think people are seeing the impact of some of the work that we have been doing on these rules of procedure. And we need to encourage more people to get involved with this work team. And if anyone is interested in getting involved with this work team, please send an e-mail to Julie Hedlund there. You can see her e-mail address. And then many of those items that were on the prior slide with the question marks are going to be discussed tomorrow at 2:00 in Sapphire 4. And of course everybody is welcome, and we hope to see you there. That's it. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Any questions? >>OLGA CAVALLI: I have a comment. Thank you, Avri. I just forgot to tell you that our working team is meeting tomorrow, Sunday, at 9:00 a.m. in Belle-Vue meeting room. So if anyone wants to join, is welcome. >>AVRI DORIA: Okay. Thank you. Yes, Ron. >>RON ANDRUFF: I am sure that Ray, in doing his report, just omitted this but we would also like to add our congratulations and thanks to Ken Bour, to Rob Hoggarth as well as to Julie. Again, the staff have been exemplary. They have really done a phenomenal job for us, so I wanted to put that on the record. I am sure that was just an oversight. >>RAY FASSETT: They were on the first slide, too. >>AVRI DORIA: Yeah, they were on the first slide, but they were just listed as opposed to thanked. And I just want to add a point. When I -- And this is perhaps something that needs to be checked between the operating procedures that went out for review and maintaining I still read them as not making a definitive statement on the chair. I'm not a part of your group, and it just -- when I read it, I still don't see it saying that. When I read the one that went out for review, I just don't see it saying that. >>RAY FASSETT: I will take that off-line. I will look at that again with you. >>RON ANDRUFF: It's one of those things that's so messed up that -- >>AVRI DORIA: Yeah. I'm not saying that -- >>RON ANDRUFF: A good comment. >>AVRI DORIA: And the next one we had was -- we are out of order now, but the next one is the communications coordination work team. Mason, do I have slides for these? >>MASON COLE: No, you don't. >>AVRI DORIA: Okay; good. >>MASON COLE: In fact, this won't take very long. So we -- the communications work team took the initial approach of looking at what the board asked specifically for the community to do to try to improve communications and coordination between the GNSO itself and the community and between the GNSO and the board. So we used that as a framework, but we didn't limit ourselves to that framework. So without trying to overreach into areas where, really, in reality we were just creating work for the community when it has very little capacity to absorb any more work, we wanted to look at the areas where there would be the most impact in the least amount of time in terms of improving communications between the GNSO and the rest of the community. And our guiding thesis really was, as Internet usage becomes more and more adopted around the world and more stakeholders become available to the ICANN process, how can ICANN and the GNSO communicate with those people and -- effectively and bring them into the ICANN process in a way that is productive. So we came up with a number of recommendations which we have now in a draft document that will be available to the OSC hopefully by the end of this week. If not, very shortly after that. But it's fairly comprehensive, and there are two main thrusts of our recommendations. One is the careful and thoughtful use of technology tools to help bridge the gap between the GNSO and the rest of the community. I think anybody who has seen the GNSO Web site over the course of the past couple of years, it certainly is no insult toward anyone in particular at all, but there is a lot of opportunity for improvement in the GNSO Web site as a way to make available everything the GNSO is doing on behalf of the community. So working pretty -- in a pretty detailed way with ICANN staff, we have come up with a list of recommendations about how to make that Web site much more productive, much more robust, without being any more confusing. Because, let's face it, if you get involved early in the ICANN process, it takes quite a while for you to get up to speed on the language of ICANN and understanding all the ins and outs of terminology and processes and everything else. The other area of recommendations are some of the more intangibles. Things like how can the GNSO itself and the ICANN board communicate between themselves more productively, how can we increase the use of translation services in a way that is more productive toward non- English speakers in particular, but without increasing the workload of ICANN staff. Even things like how can we increase the tone of civility between communications among communities within ICANN. So it's been a very productive and useful exchange. And so in the spirit of thanking those who have been the most productive on our team, I too will thank the staff, including Julie and Ken and Rob Hoggarth as well, all of whom made themselves available anytime, day or night, when we needed them to be and corralled all the resources we needed in order to make our team productive. There you go. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Any questions? Okay. No. Thank you. Next one is Jeff. >>JEFF NEUMAN: Okay. I'm going to talk about the policy development process work team, which is one of the two work teams within the Policy Process Steering Committee. So we have gone from the OSC, which were the last three work teams, to the PPSC. So as you see up there, the objective is we are responsible for developing a new policy development process that incorporates a working group approach and makes it more effective and responsive to ICANN's policy development needs. So the primary tasks are to, one, appropriate principles, rules and procedures applicable to a new policy development process; and, two, an implementation and transition plan. So we can go on to the next one. So taking into account that a new PDP -- there are a bunch of recommendations in the Board Governance Committee report, and so these five we picked out as kind of the most prominent ones that we have been talking about throughout the work of the work team. And so, one is to make sure the new PDP is better aligned with the contractual requirements of the ICANN's consensus policies. Two, to emphasize pre-PDP launch work to narrowly define issues even before they get to a formal policy development process. Three is to have more flexibility, not be so rigid with timelines and things that are currently in the bylaws, in one of the exhibits, I think it's Exhibit A to the GNSO -- what's that? Annex A. Annex A, sorry. There are very strict timelines in there which I don't think we have ever really met. Not once. So to have a more flexible process. Also one that provides for periodic assessment and contains rules and processes and procedures that are more effective and efficient leading to an informed policy development process. So if we go on to the next slide I believe is the one that has the specific phases. Yeah. So we broke down our work. It's really a large topic and when we brainstormed, we came up with pages of notes as to different questions that people raised. So we broke it down essentially into five stages, and then on the next slide -- don't go to the next slide yet, but it's five stages and then a bunch of overarching issues that apply to each of the different stages. And so the different stages, the first someone the planning and initiation of an issues report. There's a lot of work that happens just to get an issue raised within the council, and as you will see from once the work product gets out there, that a lot of the emphasis is on flexibility, is on options as opposed to making things mandatory. It's not saying, okay, before you raise an issue with the council you have to do A, B, C and D. It's more to provide a menu of options, some being best practices, some being purely optional that you can go through in order to get to that issues report stage. The next one is the GNSO Council proposal review and initiation of the PDP. One thing that's important is -- and probably should have renamed this slide because that leads to the confusion. The overall - - the current bylaws have the same term, PDP, used for raising issues as well as going through the entire policy development process. So when you say the term PDP, it's kind of confusing. So we divided it into stages, whereas the first part is the planning and basically raising an issue. The second one is for initiating the formal policy development process and the steps that have to be taken, or some steps that have to be taken, some steps that are best practices, and some steps that will be optional. The third one is the PDP working group procedure. So once the council decides to form a working group, you will hear from J. Scott, he will be here I think to talk about the PDP work team. He already did. So he went earlier. So not to cause confusion, they are working on, as you heard, the issues that they are working on. We are kind of working on everything around that, meaning that things like when should public comment periods occur, what are the mandatory public comment periods versus what are other possible public comment periods that could happen during the process. So it's kind of taking the working group and not what happens internally within the working group but essentially what's happening externally to that working group and certain rules and procedures that they will have to do as part of the whole policy development process. The fourth stage is the voting and implementation, which is really around, okay, now that the working group for that particular policy development process is done, they have their work-product, how does that get to the council, what does the council have to do at that point, what are the options for the council, can they send it back, things like that that some of them are currently in the bylaws, some are not. And it's just better spelling out the process now that we have had a number of years dealing with the policy development process. And finally, one thing that's never been addressed in the bylaws, and frankly is rarely addressed by the council until fairly recently is, okay, now that we have a new policy, what do we do with it? There should be a mechanism to assess the effectiveness of the policy, and then look at compliance. So, someone, does the policy that we have come up with address the problem that we initially set forth? And, two, are people complying with the restrictions or whatever obligations, whatever the working group came up with? So those are the five stages. The next slide will probably -- I forget the order here. So the approach that we have taken again is to break down each of the stages into questions or issues that people have brought up through different brainstorming sessions. Then we essentially, as a work team, we have weekly calls, or at least every other week. It's been more frequent before the ICANN meeting. But we walk through the issues, we talk about the questions that have been raised and then we prepare an online survey to get a more -- it's not formal feedback. We don't really vote within our work team. But it's just to get a feeling for where everyone stands now that we have discussed the issues, where does everyone stand on the issues. We take that input from the survey and we incorporate it in a draft report that goes out for comment within the work team. And then essentially, eventually we will have a final report and present those to the PPSC, which will then make its findings or evaluation which will eventually go to the council. So I think the next slide has where we are with each of the stages, if I am remembering correctly. Yes. So breaking that down, we have gone through the first stage where we talked about the issues, we have had a survey, we have actually done a draft report on that within the internal group. The second one on the proposal review and formal initiation of the PDP, we have gotten through the first three faces where we have done the online survey and now we expect a draft report to come out shortly, but certainly by the end of November. With respect to phase three, dealing with working groups, you can see over there we're halfway done, and the survey should be up fairly shortly, and is actually something we are going to be talking about at tomorrow's meeting. I know Ray talked about his meeting being tomorrow at 2:00. Ours also happens to be tomorrow at 2:00 so if you are interested in the policy development process, I encourage you to go to -- I forgot which room. It's probably this one, if the other one is in Sapphire. >>RAY FASSETT: Sapphire 4, isn't it? [ Laughter ] >>JEFF NEUMAN: They are both in the same room? Okay. In this room here. At 2:15. So you have maybe 15 minutes to join Ray's and then run down. I'm kidding. And so the fourth stage of voting and implementation, we expect to start really breaking that down, having our discussions in November focused around that particular stage with an online survey in December. I haven't really put the other ones on there. If you go to the next slide, some of the issues -- okay. I will go back. Challenges, yeah. Go to the challenges slide and then I will.... Is that it's a very complex topic. It's one that's got a lot of -- I don't want to say controversy, but certainly there's a lot riding on policy development. After all, that's what we do in the GNSO is try to come up with best practices or, you know, if you are a registry or registrar, oftentimes they can lead to formal consensus policies which are binding on the registries and registrars. So, you know, there's a lot of emotion with this issue. There's certainly a lot of sensitivity. So I think we have moved well. It may seem to others that it's more slower -- or it's moving at a more slow pace than some of the other groups, but I really think that some of the issues are really broad. And so I think for the work team that's gotten together, I think we've actually made pretty good progress. We have had -- suffered -- We don't have the greatest participation on all the calls from all the constituencies. We're -- it's gotten better the last few weeks after some reminders have gone out. But it's -- we know we do meet on a fairly frequent basis, and we're trying to get more input. So any of the new council members that would like to join in, we certainly welcome participation. It's usually on -- every other Thursday at 14:00 UTC time is the -- is the scheduled time. So that's been convenient for most of the people that attend. I'm looking at -- I know that you're in Australia, so I'm not sure that that's the most convenient time. But we'll have to work on that, stint with how the council's working on it as well. Again, there is -- there are some issues that we've kind of saved for the end, which are the -- some of the overarching issues, which is actually back a slide. You don't have to go back. I can just say what they are. Or you can. Some of the overarching issues that frequently come up when we discuss any of the issues is timing. One of the things it's in the current bylaws is, you have to have an issues report after 15 days after the issue's raised. And then council has to vote on it within "X" number of days. And then you have to have a draft report within a certain amount of days after that. It's very rigid. So one of the things that certainly come out of the work team is that we need more flexibility. But you also have to balance that with the need of, you don't want an issue to drag on forever. So how do you come up with certain timing to make sure every step is actually covered, but not have it so rigid that you can't -- it's unrealistic, but make sure that you do move the issue forward. The second issue we've come up is translation, which Mason also talked about. If you're going to put something out for public comment, you need to give time for translation, or which parts are to go out to be translated, whether it's just executive summaries, whether it's the whole entire paper that's put out. Those issues come up at every single stage of the policy development process, whether it's raising an issue or voting on an issue at the council level or implementation. So that issue has come up consistently. And then one I think we've made more progress on is defining certain terms as opposed to, you know, like I said before, where the PDP meant everything throughout the entire process, now we're trying to say a PDP is really only this. So I think those are the overarching issues that need to be dealt with. And -- at every level. If you want to go ahead two slides. Again, further information. We have a Wiki that's up there. That's the link for the Wiki, the work space. And certainly encourage more people to attend our meetings and participate. It's really something that's very much long term in nature and will affect everything the council does on a going-forward basis in this new bicameral structure. >>AVRI DORIA: Okay. Quickly, any questions? No questions -- oh, yes, question. >>TONY HOLMES: Avri, I haven't got a question as to Jeff, but a question to you, which may seem a little bit unfair. But -- or Chuck probably. >>AVRI DORIA: Can I -- you can ask either of us. >>TONY HOLMES: And that is that the problem, I think, that a number of people have stressed here is engagement in these working groups, the participation has been not thank good. But the results of this, it all goes to the steering committee. And I assume that the process then is that if the steering group review the inputs they get, they'll pass them to the council, and then the council will vote on what's put forward. But is the intention that that is all going to occur at one time? Or are they going to be dealt with piecemeal as they come through? Which is the way that's being dealt with? >>AVRI DORIA: Yeah. >>CHUCK GOMES: It's a very good question, Tony. And, actually, in the OSC, we're going to actually deal with that question on a specific case, first of all, tomorrow, because there's been some controversy within one of the working teams in the OSC as to whether one part of the recommendation should go forward without the others and so forth. So we're actually going to talk about that in the OSC meeting tomorrow, first of all, dealing with the specific case for the constituency operations work team. But I expect that we'll consider that on a broader basis. One of the things I've been thinking about, if all of these things come through all together, it makes it all the harder to implement them, because there's so much all at once. So something can be said with parts that aren't interdependent with the others moving ahead with. But we're going to talk about that tomorrow. I don't know if that helps a little bit. >>TONY HOLMES: Yes, it does. And the other point you touched on is the issue that I was going to follow up with, which is the dependencies with that. I think it's fine doing that, provided you certainly pull out where the dependencies are. And I don't think we've done that piece of work yet. >>CHUCK GOMES: In some case it won't work to separate them because of the dependencies. But to the extent that they can, it probably helps a little bit in terms of implementation. But, again, I haven't talked to the rest of the OSC members on the three work teams that are the ones underneath us. So we have that to work with still. >>TONY HOLMES: Okay. >>MARIKA KONINGS: I know for the working group work team, they have placed certain placeholders where they know as well they might need to make some changes or provided different sections once the PDP work team has done its task. But I think the idea at this stage is, they just put placeholders in for there, but move forward with the rest on which they have agreement and doesn't directly affect or interact with the PDP work team. I think it would be helpful if the council would, indeed, prefer that, for example, because things are related, for example, the working group work team and the PDP, if they would like to see that in one package that they indicate that to the team so they know, you know, 'cause they are a bit apart in their time lines at this stage, I think. >>TONY HOLMES: The only other point is that with the new council, although that's obviously sitting from here, until this new process is agreed, they work by the old rules still; is that right? >>AVRI DORIA: Yes. >>TONY HOLMES: Okay. >>AVRI DORIA: The PDP part of Annex A was updated temporarily for the new thresholds, given the bicameral nature. But it was understood that once the PDP group finished, then -- then there would be another update. >>TONY HOLMES: Okay. >>AVRI DORIA: So it's not quite the old rules. >>CHUCK GOMES: Then another example, and Mason, I think, already could have had it for the communications work team, of a piece of work that's actually going on even towards implementation right now is the Web site issue and the improvement of the Web site. Because that really isn't tied too closely to the specific recommendations that are made in the other work teams, but at the same time, something that would sure help us a lot if it was fixed. >>AVRI DORIA: And things like the working groups and charters, for example, and guidance for working group charters, that doesn't necessarily need to wait for other things. If -- you know, if the guidance for working groups can be updated and the council agrees to do that, then that might be something that's helpful. Since we've been going to working groups and evolving the process for working groups over the year, that's another thing that could come through separately without affecting other things. >>TONY HOLMES: There going to be a public comment period on each one? >>AVRI DORIA: I think so, yes. >>MARIKA KONINGS: Speaking for the PDP work team, I think they have been discussing on having a public comment period before sending recommendations to the PPSC. And I think for the working group work team, that's something that needs to be discussed. I think they hadn't really considered it. We did raise it now as part of the presentation. But I think it's on their agenda to discuss whether that should happen before sending it to the PPSC or after it has gone to the PPSC. >>TONY HOLMES: And also with that, whether it should be the same approach for all or whether it can be done differently, where it fits in the process. >>MARIKA KONINGS: You mean as in timing or whether when they do it -- >>TONY HOLMES: I -- Whether it goes out before it goes to the steering committee or after. >>MARIKA KONINGS: I mean, maybe it's something for the steering committee. I don't think it was part of the charter. >>AVRI DORIA: That sounds like a good question for the steering committee. >>TONY HOLMES: Yeah. It could get changed twice otherwise. >>AVRI DORIA: That seems a reasonable question for the steering committee to answer for both of them. I'd like to end this meeting now where we've run 35 minutes over on it, take a quick 15-minute break, give the scribes a chance to take a 15-minute break, et cetera, and then, hopefully, that won't cut too much into the WHOIS. But if that one extends a little longer, then that's the way the world goes. But thank you very much for the updates. And I hope it proved useful to people. So thank you. And talk to you again in 15. And I'll try to really start in 15. (Break.) >>LIZ GASSTER: Would anyone like to hear about WHOIS studies? I'm really looking forward to telling you about WHOIS studies. I can hardly contain myself. I know you have. I know you have. >>MARILYN CADE: Liz, I would personally like to tell you I am extremely excited about hearing as WHOIS studies, because I was the first chair of the first WHOIS task force, and I am delighted to hear the update. >>AVRI DORIA: So it's you that set us on this path? >>LIZ GASSTER: We won't ask how long ago that was. Okay. My name's Liz Gasster. I'm a senior policy counselor at ICANN in the policy group. I'm going to give little update on WHOIS studies, and then I'm going to turn the microphone and the slides over to Dave Piscitello to my right. And he's going to give you a more detailed update on one particular study. I just wanted to draw your attention before I begin to -- there's who handouts outside the door. One is a cross-reference that -- to the original study numbers that the GNSO Council asked us to look at. It's just a chart like the one I'm holding up right here. There's a second document that's also out front that is printed on two sides that actually lists all of the original hypotheses by the new groupings that I created. So if -- for those of you who were involved in the initial process or offered study suggestions and are trying to figure out how to cross-reference them with where we are today, these are the two documents that will help you do that. Those of you who are newer probably don't care about this historical relic. But it is helpful to be able to track that. So my presentation actually begins with some background, just to set the stage and for anyone who maybe isn't familiar with WHOIS. WHOIS provides public access to contact information for registered name holders. The requirements are spelled out in ICANN's agreements with registrars and registries. There's a set of required data that is different depending on whether you're providing thick WHOIS or thin WHOIS. The requirements for thick WHOIS are printed on the slide. Name servers and DNS configuration data, registrar, start date, expiration date, registrant contact information, including technical contact and administrative contact. And then for thin WHOIS, only data sufficient to identify the sponsoring registrar, status of the registration, the creation and expiration dates for each registration. The next slide is just a sample WHOIS record. It happens to be the WHOIS record for ICANN's domain name. The format of these WHOIS record can vary depending on the provider. But I thought it would be useful to just have one illustration there that shows the information that's provided. Why are WHOIS studies important? Many of you probably know that WHOIS policy issues have been debated for many years. There are many differing interests with very valid viewpoints. Some of them are enumerated here. For example, law enforcement, intellectual property owners and others want easy access to contact information in WHOIS that is as accurate as possible. Many individual, including privacy advocates, are concerned about privacy protection and potential abuse of their public information if it is public. Governments are concerned that their legal regimes should be followed. Providers are certainly reluctant to absorb more costs. Registrars earn revenue from privacy services, so their business models that are affected. Over the years, there have been relatively few policy changes to WHOIS. There have been a couple of significant policy changes. The prohibition against use of WHOIS data for marketing purposes, a conflicts procedure that allows registries and registrars in countries that have differing privacy regimes to accommodate those privacy regimes and still be in conformance with their ICANN contracts. But overall, there has not been -- although there's been much debate, there have not been significant changes to WHOIS policy. The goal of these WHOIS studies is to kind of fill that gap. There is no PDP, policy development process, under way right now. But the GNSO Council is hoping that study data will provide an objective factual basis for future policy-making. This decision to consider studies was made back in October of 2007. And since then, we have solicited topic areas for study from the public and from the Government Advisory Committee, which provided a lengthy set of recommendations. There are a variety of topic areas that have been selected by the council that are targeted at informing key policy issues of concern, providing factual information, such as possible causality in increasing spam and other harmful acts, useful information about registrants, and use of proxy and privacy services, et cetera. Also technical consideration of alternatives, especially in light of the growing number of international registrations. So in deciding to ask staff to look at the costs and feasibility of WHOIS studies, the council was really thinking about how factual information might help provide a useful foundation for further policy- making. The GNSO Council has identified several broad WHOIS study areas. Four of the five of these the council asked staff to take a look at in March of this year. And the fifth one there on the list was something that the council asked us to do in May of this year. So you have two different resolutions that are really incorporated into this project. The five areas are: Misuse of public WHOIS data. So this has to do with people accessing public WHOIS data for harmful purposes. The second area looks at registrant identification, identifying registrants, understanding who registrants are. We previously called this study "misrepresentation." And I've since renamed it "registrant identification," because it's actually more accurate. There's Seville different hypotheses that have been grouped together in this set of studies, some of which are really value neutral, just trying to understand how many registrants are legal persons, how many registrants are natural persons, how many registrants are using the registration for commercial purpose versus a noncommercial purpose. Those are sort of neutral study categorization, I would say, of registrants. But in this bucket also have some hypotheses that specifically asked us to look at the obscuring of accurate WHOIS information by registrants. So we felt misrepresentation, which is what I had originally called this grouping, ultimately became too narrow. There's a third set of study hypotheses focused on WHOIS proxy and privacy services. There's a fourth recommendation that looked -- was proposing a study of non-ASCII character sets in WHOIS and specifically how non-ASCII character sets are displayed in different client-side software. And then, lastly, this resolution passed by the council in May asking staff to compile a list of potential WHOIS service requirements based on current requirements for WHOIS and previous policy discussions that have included various recommendations for changes to WHOIS. So this is the set of WHOIS studies that we're looking at. And there are the specific hypotheses that, again -- are included in each of these are in the handout that's available outside the door. So a little more detail on the misuse studies. This category is -- of studies will examine the extent of misuse of public WHOIS data to generate spam or for other illegal or undesirable activities. We're proposing, actually, two different studies. And this was really reflected in the original proposals. One that we're calling a descriptive study that essentially surveys a number of entities, first of all, registrants, asking registrants who have experienced harm that they believe occurred using WHOIS contact data. It would also involve surveying registrars about WHOIS -- how WHOIS can be queried, and also to survey a number of other entities about reported incidents, for example, cybercrime, research, and law enforcement organizations that might have records of incidents where WHOIS data, public WHOIS data was extracted for harmful purposes. That's a very different approach from the second study that we're proposing in this grouping, which proposes to measure a variety of harmful acts, basically, experimental, by classifying messages that are sent to test domains registered by a representative sample of registrars. This study would compare harmful acts associated with public versus nonpublic addresses and examine the impact of public WHOIS and also antiharvesting measures. An RFP -- So, basically, the staff decided that for the first three sets of studies, that the council had asked us to identify the costs and feasibility of performing each of these studies. And, in our view, that would have been something very difficult for us to do as staff. So we are taking the approach, essentially, of soliciting from independent researchers what they think the costs and feasibility would be on this -- these studies -- happens to be misuse -- but for the first three sets of studies. Steve, you had a question. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: Thanks, Liz. Just with respect to the second one there, would the representative sample of registrars imply it wouldn't be all registrars? >>LIZ GASSTER: Right. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: So request. Be sure that the sample includes many who use CAPTCHA and many who don't. You've got to have both of those in, just like the SSAC did, so that the results will come back and say that, wow, it looks like harvesting occurs a lot more where there's no CAPTCHA. And CAPTCHA's not the only mechanism. This doesn't affect the RFP, it just affects how you select the two samples. Thank you. >>LIZ GASSTER: Thanks. This RFP was released on the 27th of September. It is posted on ICANN's Web site. Responses are due in 60 days. And I haven't received any yet. So a bit premature. >>DAVE PISCITELLO: You should get two soon. >>LIZ GASSTER: Okay. Just to talk a little bit about these misuse studies, what we tried to do also is -- and I've got a little bit of language here about just kind of assessing at a broad level what we think the implications and challenges might be associated with these studies. This isn't hard and fast until we get feedback back from researchers. But just in the work that we've done to generate the terms of reference for the RFP, it's just our observation that -- so with regard to these misuse studies, we have two different types of studies -- the experimental and the descriptive -- that there may be sort of inherent limitations to each that could be compensated by the other. One is that it would be difficult to measure the percentage of all query -- virtually possible to measure the percentage of all queries that lead to misuse. It'll be difficult to track harmful acts. Was it the WHOIS data that was exploited that resulted in the harmful act or some other data that was obtained in some way? >>STEVE DEL BIANCO: Appreciate trying to overcome the limitations. But the hypothesis you're testing on this one doesn't require to say what percentage of queries are bad. The hypothesis was that public access to WHOIS is responsible for a material number. We deliberately didn't phrase it to be some percentage of queries, knowing that would be impossible. So the idea is to get to the materiality, how often bad stuff happens from data in WHOIS. You don't really need the denominator. >>LIZ GASSTER: But it might need some sense of the denominator in order to figure out what's material. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: It would help. But it's not the kind of a limitation in the method that would require spending extra money or extra time. >>LIZ GASSTER: Yeah, and, you know, it may be just not the right word to "say limitations." It may make more sense just to say "challenges" or "implications," basically. But good point. It may be difficult to reliably assess antiharvesting measures. We'll see. These are just observations we're making initially. Not to discourage in any way conducting the study; just to try to provide some insight in the process into what some of the -- both benefits and challenges may be. And, of course, it may be difficult to trigger or measure harmful acts in experiments. So there's also this registrant identification study. This was what I previously had termed "misrepresentation." This is also using an RFP approach. And it was just posted yesterday. Responses will be due on the 22nd of December. Again, I -- this looks at how registrants are identified in WHOIS. It'll study the extent to which domains are used by legal persons or for commercial purposes that may not be clearly identified as such in WHOIS. And also to try to correlate those registrations to use of privacy and proxy services. So, you know, the approach here is to review a sample of domains looking for names or organizations that are either patently false, appear to identify a natural person, an organization engaged in noncommercial activities, or a privacy or proxy service for further analysis. Results will quantify domains registered to natural versus legal persons and domains used for commercial versus noncommercial purpose distributed by gTLD, geographic region, and by proxy or privacy service use. And the failure to clearly identify the registrant as a legal person. That's just the things that this study is going to be looking at. Some challenges. Did you have a -- >>STEVE DELBIANCO: Thanks, Liz. At the House judiciary hearing, I remember Doug Brent talking about the fact that he was quite proud of the reduction in WHOIS accuracy concerns. But this is completely different. This is a representative sample. So it's not driven by only WHOIS records about which we received complaints. So I wanted to clarify that that's all well and good, how good are we with following up with complaints that we get. But this has nothing to do with complaints. I think the way you phrased it is right. We're going to pay somebody to do a sample of names and not rely on complaints to come in first. >>LIZ GASSTER: That's right. It's different from the you.... Okay. So challenges here. The study can only provide empirical data. There will still be debate about what uses are impermissible versus permissible, and we ran into this just in developing the terms of reference for the RFP and discussing it with various people in the community. It will be difficult to identify licensees of domains registered by proxy services. There may be -- If there are lark numbers of ambiguous owners, it's not clear that there will be, but if there are, it could skew the results. And there may be disagreement about commercial use, something I also ran into in discussing the study generally with the community. But again, you know, we'll see. So the last area that we are going to be soliciting RFPs to get costs and feasibility on is WHOIS proxy and privacy services. This is actually different from the preceding study which is just looking at identification and who might be using proxy and privacy services. This is taking a look at the extent to which proxy and privacy services are abused to obscure the source of illegal or harmful communication or activity and delay source identification, responding to requests. We do plan to pursue a similar RFP approach, but the drafting of the terms of reference for those studies has not begun yet. Hopefully, we will complete that by the end of the year. So this is the third area. The fourth area that I mentioned, this display of non-ASCII character sets, there was a proposal that recommended examining various client interfaces to assess the implications for accuracy and readability of WHOIS contact information. There is a new SSAC-GNSO technical working group that is forming, that was formed at the request of the ICANN board back in June in Sydney. It was asked or will be asked to consider display specifications for internationalized registration data. This group has not been convened yet. We're inviting participants now. But staff, when we looked at this study area number four, were hesitant to embark on this study until this group was up and running and had a chance to consider the study area because we think that it will largely just confirm what we know already about the differences in client interfaces and the differences in the display of data that exists, depending on what software is used and the interface that's used. And not necessarily will take us further than where we are today. That's just staff's initial assessment of this area, and we wanted to invite the working group to take a further look to see whether there were additional information that the study would yield that would be useful to them. But it is also possible that this working group tasking may preempt the need to do this study. So that's on hold at the moment. Steve. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: In Mexico City, I remember going to the microphone suggesting that this one was going to be particularly important because of the consideration at the time of perhaps getting a thick WHOIS requirement on new TLDs, particularly new IDN TLDs. That was one reason. Now, knowing that that has been deferred a bit, I understand the need to delay. But here is the dilemma. ccTLD IDNs are on a fast track, and it ought to be clear to everybody now that train is going to leave on the fast track long before gTLDs get out. So this suddenly becomes more relevant than ever to the IDN ccTLDs, some of whom do run a WHOIS. So I realize that this IRD working group is going to come up with the specifics, but can we take the work that you have done so far and encapsulate it even into a note to the fast-track implementation team that as the ccTLD operators are implementing WHOIS for IDN character sets, that they need to put disclaimers on their sites. Because some client software is going to screw up the display in editing an entry of IDN character sets for WHOIS. So we do have a user community, the ccNSO ccTLD operators, and we have other user communities, law enforcement and brand and consumer protection bureaus. All those user communities could potentially be looking at IDN WHOIS data in ccTLDs by the end of the year, or early next year. Sorry? >>DAVE PISCITELLO: One thing we do have to be careful about is a number of TLD operators actually offer IDN second-level labels. And many of them have already implemented WHOIS with a Unicode 16 or a Unicode 8 base encoding for their data. For example, if you go to dot DE and you look at the way that they will accept and display, they already have enhanced Latin as the baseline for the way that they do WHOIS. So one of the goals of the IRD working group is to sort of take the stimulus from the SSAC document 37 as well as the stimulus from the GNSO and move that forward and very progressively along with the ccTLD operators. And frankly, they have been extremely cooperative in the sort of preliminary work that we have done and will present later on this week. So I'm pretty optimistic that, given what I have seen so far and what they are doing, that there might be a relatively straightforward solution. Now, being optimistic is always a dangerous thing, but it's -- let's hope it's -- >>STEVE DELBIANCO: That's excellent. One follow-up. Do any of the current ccTLD operators that display, because storage is separate than display, that display IDN character sets for WHOIS data fields, are any of them in a left-to-right script today? >>DAVE PISCITELLO: None of them are in a left-to-right script that actually responded to me. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: It's fun to be the first train out of the station but pioneers are the first to -- they always get the arrows in the back. So there are going to be a lot of lessons learned on this and we can't go into it saying we never knew this was going to be a problem, because we have got ample warning that we are going to need to deal with it. >>LIZ GASSTER: So the only thing -- You made a specific request just before about sending a note. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: And find a way -- We are about to launch the fast track for IDN ccTLDs. Let's be sure that we have coalesced what you have learned, what the SSAC has learned, and the lessons learned from dot DE and the others and pull it together, assimilate that. Staff could do that and say here is what we know so far about the challenges, problems, and solutions of storing IDNs for WHOIS data. And maybe you have already done it, Liz. And if so, great. I'm accommodating your request to put this one on hold -- I was sort of accommodating your request to put this one on hold but just don't park it. Before you park this one, snapshot what we know. Hand it, in as helpful a way as we can, not only to the staff for Draft Applicant Guidebook on the G side but also the CC side. >>DAVE PISCITELLO: Can I ask one question? Is there anything that we didn't expose in SSAC SAC 37 that you think we might know from staff experience? >>STEVE DELBIANCO: I haven't studied that carefully enough to know. >>DAVE PISCITELLO: I think one of the things we might want to do is get together privately after you had an opportunity to take a look at that and see if it actually characterizes the concern. >>LIZ GASSTER: That's a good idea, Dave. The fifth area, WHOIS service requirements. This was the separate request for staff to collect and organize a comprehensive set of requirements for WHOIS service policy tools. Dave is going to cover the work that we have done in this area in his presentation. So I'm not going to go into detail on that. But I just wanted to briefly kind of just give this plug of where we are. Next steps and ways to get involved. Certainly there is an internationalized registration data workshop this Wednesday at 3:00 p.m., which I would, local time, encourage you to participate in. And hopefully we will have some of those ccTLD operators offering some of their experiences as well. As I said, also participation is just being solicited on this working group, so if you are interested, and particularly if you have special expertise, we would welcome your participation. And please let Julie Hedlund or Glen know if you are interested in participating. My plan is to release information on these study RFPs as soon as we have it. So I'll be sharing that with the council when it's available. But I think it's going to be an iterative process over several months with information coming out seriatim. So I will pass that along as it is available. And then the GNSO Council and staff, once the information is available on cost and feasibility, particularly related to the three areas where we are soliciting RFPs, once we have that information back, the council and the staff will then consider which studies to actually proceed forward with, if any. >>AVRI DORIA: Eric, were you trying to ask a question? >>ERIC BRUNNER WILLIAMS: Thank you. Actually, it's a suggestion for Liz. C-Tech day is Monday, and I would toss that over the fence right there to get your largest CC response right away. >>LIZ GASSTER: I see. Great. Here is a bunch of resources on all the information I have provided today. Are there any other questions for me before I turn it over to Dave? Thank you. >>DAVE PISCITELLO: Thank you, Liz. I'm going to give a progress report on one of the studies that Liz discussed, and this one in particular is focusing on service requirements. To quickly summarize what it is that we're doing, I have taken the long resolution and simply highlighted the main points and purpose of the study, which are to collect and organize a comprehensive set of requirements for the WHOIS service policy tools. And the second point is to emphasize that what we, as staff, are preparing is a strawman proposal. Let me begin with the goals of this particular study. We're trying to collect and organize a set of requirements for the community to consider. And the requirements will span three mainly areas. We'll look at the current service features, and in particular look at them in the harsh light of many years of experience and determining whether or not some of the service areas need improvement. The second is to go back into the vast body of work that has accumulated over the years on policy proposals related to WHOIS and determine whether any of those may deserve to be reconsidered in light of what we have learned over the past decade plus. And then the third is to consider features that have been recommended by various ICANN service organizations, advisory committees, and the community at large. Ultimately, what we hope to prepare by February is a strawman proposal for community consultation. In considering the current service requirements, we'll look at the RAA and the registry agreements. And for example, take a hard look at the various forms of access to WHOIS information today. Either via query-based access from a Web page, port 43 WHOIS service, third- party bulk access and the like. When we go back and look at past policy initiatives, one of the things we are trying to do is flail through the past 30 meetings plus, look at the different efforts, look at the reports from the GNSO and other communities with respect to WHOIS improvements over the years. Some of those go back as early as 1993. Some of those are more recent. Recommendations from the community will actually come from a variety of sources. Obviously, recommendations that have been presented to the GNSO over the past years. The ALAC, GAC, ccNSO and SSAC have actually made comments on a number of occasions. In particular, SSAC has been very active in this area. Looking at the joint -- the JPA that have been out in the past and the affirmation of commitments, we just are trying to make certain we covered all bases there. And then there have been a number of comments resulting from new gTLD consultations that may merit some consideration in the study and we are looking there. And obviously this list isn't exhaustive. Being involved in security, one of the things that I run up against constantly are people who are asking me, you know, can we improve WHOIS in this manner, could WHOIS have this kind of information. And so I think they are also going to weigh in in respect to trying to come up with as big a catalogue of potential features as we can accurately compose that represents what the community is seeking. So some of the sample study areas to consider -- and I will have a separate slide for each of these -- are the quality of domain registration data; WHOIS service uniformity, and in particular, there has been a considerable interest in understanding whether there is a possibility of having standard formats for queries, responses, and error codes. Another area that is interesting from both the technology point of view and an application point of view is looking at what we call registration data completeness and trying to assure that the data are available to accommodate and enable any of the policy decisions that we may make over the next few years. And then finally, and obviously, you know, very important is to consider issues that might relate to internationalizing WHOIS. So here again, standards for submission and display of registration data using characters from local languages and scripts. So let's look at what I mean and what we're studying as staff when I say "quality of registration data." There are a variety of ways, as a technologist, to look at data. And you don't necessarily have to be a database analyst to appreciate these. It is important that data are accurate; that registration data provide correct contact information. To the extent that we can make that a very, very high attribute of WHOIS, we would do the industry a great deal of service. Authenticity is another characteristic of registration data. Do the data accurately identify the registrant? Applicability is one that's probably a soft characteristic. Here what we're trying to understand is whether or not the data that we collect are useful or relevant to the user or querying applications. Completeness. We have a set of data that we have used for many, many years to some levels of success. And in some cases, they are not as good and as complete as we might want. So one of the things that we are exploring is whether the currently collected data are sufficient. And currency is actually a database attribute. And this is are the collected registration data current? Are these data maintained in an appropriate cycle so you do have the most accurate picture of the registrant as possible. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: One quick question, Dave. Is this where you would look at not only the completeness of the data but whether it's redundant and have three sets of contacts -- >>DAVE PISCITELLO: That's actually one of the characteristics that we are considering. SAC 40, the recent document we published, talks about the opportunity for registrars to think about ways to help registrants recognize the perils they put themselves in when they simply replicate data across registrant, technical, admin contact. And maybe there are some service features that registrants can offer that would say the registration data can't be submitted because you have an administrative contact and a technical contact that are identical. And please change that. >>MARILYN CADE: Dave, it's Marilyn Cade. I have a question about so in -- you said about your last point, you would be asking whether registrars could make that information available, but are you also looking at whether that kind of information would be made available in a neutral and public way? Not just by registrars but maybe, you know, sort of a standard requirement of information that is uniformly provided to all registrants and is available in multiple -- in multiple places? Like on the ICANN Web site as well as through a registrar announcement, in order to have consistency of communication with registrants? Are you gathering that kind of.... >>DAVE PISCITELLO: We're not really looking at whether information would be published on the ICANN Web site at this point. What we're really focusing on is a data schema that would be perhaps more mature, more robust, or a more 21st century, you know, version of the data that we've been using for 25 some-odd years. >>LIZ GASSTER: I have a question. Marilyn, was that ever discussed as a policy-like proposal? >>MARILYN CADE: It was. The idea that there should be standard information that was neutrally provided to registrants -- >>LIZ GASSTER: On the ICANN -- >>MARILYN CADE: -- in a standard format, both by all accredited registrars, but also available as a -- you know, an informational piece of information on the page. At the time, the registrars considered that they could create a competitive advantage by the communication mechanism, the communications that they -- not "mechanisms," that's the wrong word. But the way -- how they communicated with the registrants. But it was discussed. >>DAVE PISCITELLO: Continuing on, WHOIS service uniformity is becoming an increasingly important consideration. Most of us are familiar with the fact that WHOIS services sort of evolved from a protocol that only required ASCII7 character sets followed by a character return and line feed. And there's a lot you can do with that. And whole operating systems have command lines that simply allow you to enter freeform ASCII. There are a lot of things that you can't do very well with that. One of the problems is that when you have that freeform, the queries and responses and the error codes are -- you know, WHOIS application are service provider dependent. The syntactic, semantic, and content differences exist across registrars, across TLD operators. And this sort of lack of uniformity is something that human beings can adjust to, but automation cannot. So when you are -- you're in the business of trying to utilize WHOIS to its maximum value, whether you're doing it for -- to track down phishers or spammers or child pornographers or whether you're doing it because there's a business application that makes perfectly good sense and is a useful way to go and parse the data that are publicly available, it's important to try to minimize that variability. And one of the things that a formal data schema would provide us would be something that would allow people to understand what data are present, what the type of the data are. It would also, perhaps, allow us to tag the data in various character sets. And that is particularly valuable. I think I've already talked about completeness. I just want to briefly add that what we want to do is make certain that we have all the data we need to actually, you know, implement the service features that we identify as useful and required. The way that we're working on this, you know, in staff is to take a look at a data schema that allows strong typing of data. We're using XML. And that's how we'll sort of represent it. We'll obviously provide a human-interpreted description of the data as well. But one of the things we want to try to do is maintain three attributes, in particular. One, that the data schema is extensible. Another is that it's protocol-agnostic, that irrespective of whether we choose to stay with the current WHOIS protocol or we choose to use IRIS, CRISP, or we choose to use some other application protocol in the future, we can accommodate those protocols, because we have -- we've just gone and done our homework, and we understand what the data look like. And, again, a priority here is to accommodate automation. Because this is a very, very hamstringing situation, in particular, in things like internationalized registration data. You know, one of the things that a lot of the applications that are ought made today are running into is the challenge of now recognizing IDN labels and being able to parse those and fit them into the current method of automation. I think we've talked quite a bit about this. One of the important things to recognize is that there aren't any standards today for internationalizing registration data. The IETF in the IDN standards did not -- not only did not identify any submission and display requirements, but specifically said, "We're not going to go into this." So it is left up to ICANN and the broader community involving the ccTLD operators and government -- the GAC, in particular, to help us understand how we're going to avoid a Babel effect. I just listed some of the concerns that we have here. WHOIS applications don't necessarily support domain names and U-labels. They may not necessarily today accept or display characters from any set other than US-ASCII7 for registration data such as contact information or DNS name servers and the like. And some of them will use local encodings rather than Unicode. This is a particularly thorny problem, because now we're even out of the recognized international character sets. And that means that, you know, some local terminal or some local display has to be set to the proper encoding at that specific operating system level in order to actually function properly. Let me go through a little bit of the methodology -- I'm sorry. >>MARILYN CADE: Would you just go back to that point for a minute. My name is Marilyn Cade. I am aware that there are certain other U.N. specialized agencies that might think that they have a role to play in establishing this set of standards. It's, in my view, extremely important that ICANN drive a collaborative effort in this area in order to avoid there being confusion and encroachment. So is that -- >>DAVE PISCITELLO: I mean, I -- as a technol- -- I'm looking at this from a technology perspective. And as a technologist, I want a solution that's not only tractable, but acceptable. Because it makes no sense for us to have a solution that half the world decides is correct and half rejects. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: (inaudible). >>MARILYN CADE: And sometimes politics trumps technology. >>DAVE PISCITELLO: Nah. Never saw that happen in -- Okay. So let me go through and just reinforce some points here. As we said, we're gathering the service requirements from a very large body of WHOIS work. And we're also consulting works where WHOIS is relevant. Very, very important, because this is such an area of sensitivity, is that staff is not gathering policy requirements and we're not recommending policy. What our goal is, is to assure that the data and supporting technology exist to enable policies developed by consensus policy process. Just to give you a sort of partial list of some of the sources for the inventory requirements, there's a fair number of SSAC works that we have taken into consideration that cover data confidentiality and integrity, that cover data schema or a need for it, can consider what in the security community is called the quad-A security framework involving authentication, authorization, auditing, and accuracy. We've, you know -- yeah, also considered the fact that the new gTLD application guidebook is recommending a thick WHOIS. There are some recent RSEP service submissions that are very interesting, for example, VeriSign proposed a whowas service. And they have also proposed a multifactor authentication model. And as you look at these, you realize there are probably implications on the way that you would actually compose data for registration records. >>MARILYN CADE: Sorry, sorry. Just quickly. What's a whowas service? >>DAVE PISCITELLO: A whowas service actually identifies the history of the domain. So as an example, there are a couple of public portals where you can go and you can, for a fee, acquire the list of registrants and the list of name servers that hosted the domain and the like. And VeriSign's proposed to offer that kind of service. So it is go up to the ICANN page, I think it's ICANN/registry/RSEP/,you'll see all the current RSEP proposals. Just to sum up the presentation and to give you an idea of where we stand, we've put together some good initial work. We're going to continue to review the current WHOIS requirements and policy proposals over the next month and a half. In December, we'll complete the strawman proposal. In January, we'll begin a consultation with the various SOs and ACs and incorporate their input. And then we hope to have a draft report ready by February. Thank you. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Any quick questions? We're running a little over. But, yes, Eric. >>ERIC BRUNNER-WILLIAMS: This is Eric Brunner-Williams from CORE. Why did the lights go out? So I can't read my notes? In 2001, Dave crocker and I did a WHOIS fix working group off where we explored using much of what has just been discussed in terms of tagging the output. But the statement was made that the IDNA Working Group didn't want to go here. And that's, of course, true. But there has been no request from ICANN to the IETF applications area to reconstitute a WHOIS activity or a WHOIS fix activity. I'd like to suggest that that's an alternative to ICANN doing it itself. Thank you. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Was there another question/comment? In which case, thank you very much. >>DAVE PISCITELLO: Sure. >>AVRI DORIA: And we'll be starting almost immediately, the next meeting, Olga will be chairing it. And that's the travel team. Thank you. Kevin said he'd be right back. (Break.) >>OLGA CAVALLI: Yes, it's a small meeting. Should we start? Is Stacy coming? Should we wait for her? >>KEVIN WILSON: I wouldn't. Let's just go ahead and start. >>OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much, Kevin. I know you have a very busy agenda and we are finishing our long day. So the idea of this meeting was first, thank you for your flexibility in allowing for some retiring councillors in being present in this meeting. This was very important for the GNSO. So we appreciate all the efforts that you have done for achieving that. And the main -- the main reason for the meeting is to see are we going to move forward with the new council structure in two different houses, and with stakeholder groups, with new constituencies that may come and start participating in the GNSO, and some practical issues that are related with how are the constituencies going to appoint the people that is going to be funded. It's only the council that can be funded or if they can say, perhaps not a council member but another participant. And also some practical questions about how do the council members that are funded receive per diems? How soon you need the information from the constituencies to let you do all the process so we can organize our internal work and communications. This is more or less all the questions that we have and the idea of the meeting. So thank you again for being with us. Hi, Stephane. Please join us. I was just thanking Kevin for allowing retiring councillors being in the meeting. Also, are there still funds from GNSO, funds available or not? If you can give us an update of how to move forward from now on. >>KEVIN WILSON: Sure. Do I have the ability to project? Is it like very easy to project? Do you have a -- or not. >>OLGA CAVALLI: Yes. >>STEPHANE VAN GELDER: Plug in there. >>KEVIN WILSON: I will just go over there. Thank you, Olga. First of all, would anybody like to make a guess on how many people, how many community members we're supporting in traveling to the Seoul meeting? A lot. Yeah, it's over 130, plus the board, plus the staff, and we have a lot of staff here. And because of the AGM, just like the GNSO, we have the same thing with the board. So we're -- probably the first time ever I am feeling pressure as the CFO with budget constraints. And I appreciate the thank you, because the pressures are growing. And at some point, someone is going to start listening to the CFO and realize we have to say no to some of the requests. So I just wanted to kind of present that first, that it's really important that we really scrutinize the budget aspects of the travel support. What I'm looking for now is I wanted to show a couple of things. Is that going to project up there? So I wanted to share a couple of things. First of all, the big number that -- the 130 community members. I don't know, have you all seen the way our budget -- it's kind of interesting. I don't have access to my screen here, so I have to do it from up there, and my vision is not good. So I'm looking for financial -- there it is. Have you seen the disclosure on the travel support that we do now? >>OLGA CAVALLI: No, not myself. >>KEVIN WILSON: So this will be good news for you. On the financial page -- I can't quite read. Does that say travel support? >> Yes. >>KEVIN WILSON: Good. Thank you for translating for me. Oops, I am going to lose power. Well, on that page, there is -- sorry about that. I ran out of juice. On that page is the details, and it shows person by person, name by name, level of support, which meeting, for each meeting, for each group. Do you have a power cord? And I just wanted to share that with you. So there's a lot of disclosure, and we have received some positive feedback. Some of you on the GNSO Council have seen that and given us positive feedback. So we will continue to do that. And I think that's my strongest method of cost control right now, is that you will see the different - - groups see how much support the other groups have. And so that's a natural balancing. I have done that. Yes, if you had a power supply, that would be great. >> Power supply? >>KEVIN WILSON: I just ran out of juice. That's okay. We don't need that. Anyway, that was one about the disclosure. So I am putting out there I would like to continue getting ideas on how we can ensure that we are spending the budget appropriately. So those of you who have ideas on how to cost contain, please let us know. The second general area is right now, there's an open and transparent process by which each S.O. and AC is allotted travel support. So the GNSO is allotted now from the community feedback that happened after Mexico City and before Sydney, increased it to -- I think it is 23? Is it 23 per meeting? Glen, did I get that right? >>GLEN DE SAINT GÉRY: 24. >>KEVIN WILSON: So that number went from 13 to about 23 or 24, and then the ccNSO likewise has 12 or 13. So the process by which those -- the S.O.s and ACs are supported is open and transparent, and there's a community comment period, and all of the groups and any member of the community can do that. What I would like to do and am encouraging is that the process within that become more open and transparent as well. So my understanding is that the GNSO, for example, allocated their travel support for each of the six Constituencies, capital C Constituencies; is that right? And so the process by which those are selected. And then the thing I am confused about, and maybe you will clarify, is how, with the new GNSO restructuring, how that will change, if it will change, and how that will change. So I think we need to be open and transparent on that, on the selection process. I know that the end result of that; -- i.e, the names -- are submitted to Glen who gives it to our travel team and then we implement the travel support. But I think it's important to each of the groups that we have an open and transparent process of selection. That's kind of a personal position that I have. Aim little bit uncomfortable at -- I'm not uncomfortable with the lack of openness and transparency. I am more comfortable at the higher level of openness and transparency and I would like to encourage that throughout the process. Okay. Tim. >>TIM RUIZ: I think that the issue of stakeholder group or constituency, that's a good question, because I think it's pretty clear now that councillor seats won't necessarily be tied to constituencies. They will be more associated with the stakeholder group. So that's probably a question -- I don't know if we have really addressed it as the travel team or even as the council, exactly how that will work, given that there is a desire that the funds not necessarily be restricted to councillors. So if we don't do that, then we still have that issue of constituency or stakeholder group and how we divvy that up. >>KEVIN WILSON: Yeah. So I guess that's one of many, many issues that needs to be resolved and clarified. And I think it's in all of our best interests to do that. And it's sort of -- this is a good year to make progress on that. The issue -- Olga Cavalli, you mentioned that the DNSO restricted funds. I don't need to explain that; right? Everyone knows what that is? That's true? So that is pretty much spent. I tasked and requested strongly to Avri that we use that up so we won't have the accounting challenge with that, with the fact that it is technically a restricted donor contribution from many years ago, and so we had long hours of discussion with the auditors every year on why we have to disclose it, but then it would be written off for immateriality. Or not written off, but not disclosed because of immateriality. That's now down to -- I think I just saw in the last set of financials like $4,000, so there must be some group that hasn't taken advantage of that. So let's hopefully use those up before the Nairobi meeting if they are not used up for the Seoul meeting. So that's -- I think the registry constituency has some funds that they have rolled over. Is that true? And so we have an opportunity there to use those. And then the rest is what's already in the travel guidelines. We're -- "we" meaning finance staff. It hasn't been executed at the community level yet, because the strategic plan hasn't been adopted. But as soon as the strategic plan is adopted, as you know, then we immediately go into our one-year operating plan development for the FY '11 year. And presumably we would also have the travel support guidelines. So we would like to get your wisdom on that process so we can create the FY '11 travel support guidelines. Hopefully, even more closely married with -- we had made good progress last year, but it would be nice, in my opinion, if they were actually part of the same document. Part of the whole budget discussion is, one of the questions is travel support, and not a parallel path like it's been the past couple of years. So that's another point. Is there anything else on travel support? Don't let me forget about the exception request. But Stephane, go ahead. >>STEPHANE VAN GELDER: Thank you. I wanted to just make sure -- I'm sorry if I was a little late so maybe you already addressed this. Can you clarify whether the old and new councillors were funded for this meeting? And if the old councillors were funded, who took that decision? I mean, it wasn't a council decision, was it? So how -- where did the funds come from? >>KEVIN WILSON: The short answer is the travel guidelines are very explicit about providing support for 23 GNSO and 13 for ccNSO, et cetera. The -- Anything other than that was treated as an exception request. And the process for an exception request is it is whittled over to the CFO's level, and I play Solomon sort of, but not really because I have consulted numb the community and obviously the policy staff and others. But I would basically add up all those exception requests. There's many exception requests. Hopefully, everyone is pleased. Many exception requests actually cost -- are revenue -- are cost positive to us. People want to come earlier, and it happens because of the nature of the airfares that we actually spent less money on that. There are some of them that were more. Some were significantly more and we generally would say no to those. The example that you gave where we had extra GNSO supported people, that obviously would cost more. And, Glen, do you know off the top of your head, there were actually less requests than we originally had estimated. >>GLEN DE SAINT GÉRY: Yes. >>KEVIN WILSON: So you made it really easy for us by just not asking for it. >>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER: So are you saying the old councillors did not ask for funding? Sorry. I'm not clear. >>KEVIN WILSON: So what I was going to do -- I'm glad I found the power cord, because I'm going to ask the delay here while I answer the question explicitly. On the finance page, there's a question called "general financial information," just what you want to do to learn the ICANN Web site. Travel support guidelines. And then if I can come down here, there's a comment on general. Here's the actual guidelines. I drive people to this section. This is the annual, the fiscal year travel guidelines. There's a travel summary which for each meeting has the introduction. And that's what many of you wanted to see in order to book the travel and to she the specific rules about per diem, et cetera. For each meeting, there's also a travel support report. And it shows the amount of travel that was provided. So for the Seoul meeting, we obviously don't know the amounts yet. The invoices haven't come in. But we do a preliminary list. This is maybe a week and a half old. I know, like, for some people had cancelled right before the meeting. Whoops, I went too fast. But you can actually see the numbers. So I'm going to avoid your question a little bit and say we actually can see who is supported as of the date of this report. Does that answer your question? >>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER: Yeah. That's very useful. And it does look like some of the old councillors were supported. And I just want to go on the record to say that our stakeholder group was surprised or in disagreement with that. And I don't think there was a council-level decision taken on that. And I don't think we discussed it within this travel group. There was some talk about it on the list. But I don't think any decision was taken. So, you know, it just -- just to say that it's not my -- independent of my own personal opinion, I know the registrar stakeholder group were unhappy with that. >>KEVIN WILSON: And you were unhappy with that because of the budget impact? >>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER: Because we feel that only active councillors should be supported. >>KEVIN WILSON: Yeah. When this first came up, yeah, -- let me partially respond. When it first came up, just to remind you, I think I got it from Olga and maybe someone else as well, asking, was there budget, was there budget for it. And I was intentionally vague about it, saying, well, there -- the short answer's no. If you're asking if there's budget, the answer's no. But if there's a significant policy impact, if there's a significant reason -- just the whole reason why we have travel support at all, if getting the work of ICANN is dependent upon or heavily -- or accelerated by having more travel support, then we'd consider that. Now, we didn't know -- at one point, we thought it might be significantly more, because they were talking about working groups and special groups and, you know, all kinds of folks, maybe 100 more people at one point, and we were hearing rumors about that travel requests were coming. So rather than going out and saying, "Well, here's the dollar amount. How do you want to spend it?" We said, "Let's just handle this on an exception basis." I don't know the names of all the people that were going out. So how many -- I don't know the answer to your question, actually. I just know the list of people. I don't know which ones are actually exiting and which ones are coming. But that's an interesting question. And I think that also should be factored into the new travel guidelines on the process by which exceptions. And this is why I wanted to answer your question before we go back to Olga. I asked you how many people were supported. Guess how many -- if there's 130 folks, travelers, that were supported, get how many exception requests we received? Anybody want to make a guess? And that means in addition -- like, people that weren't on the original list, people that asked for their special -- I'm looking around the room. Everybody is stooping down and wondering if they were on that exception list. We had over 60 people, six oh. And some of these people requested exceptions and then exceptions to the exceptions and then exceptions to the exceptions. Steve and I have a joke, Steve Antonoff, who you meant in Sydney, joke about this, but we felt we might have to double the travel budget, in addition to the out-of-pocket cost for the travel support, we might have to build a whole travel agency team with a customer service system. So I'd like that also to be put on the questions and tables from the community, is, "How can we get this done?" I mean, obviously, the CFO, put my blinders on, I'd like to say, "You can have 'X' travel and you can travel on such and such flight and have such and such date and such and such time and such and such level of service or else no." But, of course, others would push against that. So, anyway, I put that out as a question not necessarily today, but part of the travel guidelines next year, I'd like to improve that travel. We tried to make it more efficient. But you'd like to improve upon the process and the exception requests. Yep. >>TIM RUIZ: Maybe you've addressed this before, but I'm just curious why there -- you couldn't just set an amount. I mean, like with the per diem, for example, I think the way that's handled, it was explained to me after I got here, because I didn't know. You know, it's just a set amount that's provided for the per diem per day, and then, you know, that's actually prepaid, I guess, in many cases. Why couldn't that be similar for, like, airfare, the same way, that here's the set amount that's allowed, you know, based on region or whatever. And then, you know, let them book however they would like to book? >>KEVIN WILSON: You want me to answer that now? We have addressed it in FAQ and whatnot. The short answer is, we have a fiduciary responsibility to manage the funds. So we believe -- and I don't know what the legal basis of this is, but I know it's a common sense standpoint -- we believe that it's not appropriate to, for example, give a department head a bank account and say, "You can spend money any way you want." That's what the staff -- There's a process by which an officer needs to approve a certain amount. And if it's a computer purchase, the I.T. department needs to review it to see if it's compliant. There's things other than that. Likewise, it's inappropriate for us to just give outside people cash to spend however they want to, whether they, you know, read about the Internet at home and don't show up to the meeting and just use it as funds for that. You know, there's kind of a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that's -- that it's being spent wisely and in accordance with this -- with the overall intention of the whole community travel support. So that's kind of the short answer, is the fiduciary responsibility. You're looking -- you're squinting your eyes. It's not a -- landing 100%. There's different models to ensure that. But right now, the model that we're trying to follow -- and, to be honest, I don't think it's working fully correctly because of the number of exceptions -- is to provide a travel agent that really watches the costs. I know there's a couple of exceptions where people have bragged about how they can do better somewhere else. But 90% of the time, we hear that our travel agent is able to save money and be responsive and do that. So we believe -- as long as we can get rid of the exception process or reduce the exception process, that would be better. And then the other -- the more specific -- let me just finish answering that, if I could, Tim. There's a bunch of other details on that. So, for example, if you spend less money than -- if you're allocated $2,000 for airfare and you spend $1500, what do you do with the extra $500? Do you just get to keep that? If someone spends -- if their flight from -- for whatever reason is $5,000, instead of $2,000, what are we going to do? Do they get an exception request for that? To avoid that, we just say, "You get" -- like this, one travel support, you know, hotel or lodging for the approved days, per diem for the approved days, and round-trip airfare at the right level. Okay? >>TONY HOLMES: I was just going to say, to Tim's point, I think if you just look at one of the meetings that's coming up, in Brussels, that would answer that question. Because if you had a regional level for Europe, Europe's a big place. I mean, you get to Brussels from some countries, it costs next to nothing. From other parts of Europe, it can be pretty expensive because you can't go direct. So I don't think that that works if you look at it on a regional basis. And having a cap the same for everyone, the prices are quite different. >>TIM RUIZ: I guess I just don't see it any more complicated than, you know, a travel agent booking 130-some-odd tickets. And then dealing with all the exceptions. I don't see where it really -- it doesn't seem like it saved anybody any time in trying to deal with it all, than saying -- than maybe even dealing it on an individual basis that, you know, if this councillor or this individual is coming from here, this is the -- this is the going rate, you know, that we can get from a travel agent. But they could book it however they wanted to do it. I mean, you're handling the per diem that way; right? I mean, there's no -- >>KEVIN WILSON: Even with the per diems, it's an amazingly complicated process. And you would be surprised -- maybe not -- how many people who get per diem also get an extra actual exception request on top of that. So, from a time savings, to have a set dollar -- if you have a set dollar amount or set amount for travel, then it would be much easier. The odds -- I believe the probability of that happening in our environment is close to zero. That if -- you know, if I had my way, I'd be very, very regimented and say, "You get 'X' amount or else." I just don't think it would fly with our community. There's -- the level of travel is more tailored and more unique for each one. And I think there's an expectation, if you're supported with travel -- that's the environment that I came into, is that these are, you know, professional, very -- busy, need the level of service that allows them to have that variability. >>TIM RUIZ: Yeah. I just think that -- in reality, a lot of the people that are being funded, at least in some cases, we'll putted it that way, instead of saying "a lot" -- the people who are being funded are the necessarily incapable of paying for some of that travel themselves. So while they might appreciate, you know, the reimbursement for their volunteer time from ICANN, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not willing to pitch in and maybe travel a little bit better, you know, instead of coach, going business. But it just seems like it makes it difficult for that to happen if you -- either there's going to be all this multiple exceptions or some other process, you know, to make that a little bit easier for those who want to upgrade that way. >>KEVIN WILSON: I'd like to explore it more, actually. Every meeting I've attended with you -- I've been here almost -- over two years now -- this exception process and, you know, can't you provide us the funds instead, that question continues to come up. So it's clearly the FAQs are not working. So I think we need to explore that a little further with the next round. Thank you. Alan. >>ALAN GREENBERG: Yeah. I -- When you talk about the number of exceptions you're seeing, I worry at a number of levels. First of all, how much executive time is being allocated to this? Which probably is not the best use of resources at that level. It would be interesting if you could summarize the types of exceptions -- requests you're seeing, just like you said, some of them save you money. That's fine. But to understand what the other ones are to help -- perhaps we can help in trying to identify what ones should be put into policy, you know, without keeping them secret. It might be a productive discussion to have to lower the number of specific exceptions each time. There may be some exceptions which can be handled by your staff without going all the way up to you, if we can try to categorize them well. >>KEVIN WILSON: Point well taken. >>JORDI IPARRAGUIRRE: My question is, I wonder why if it really makes sense to subsidize, to pay travel expenses for people that belongs to constituencies that form the GNSO, I mean, at the end of the day, the people in the constituencies belong to an industry and defend an interest. So how, participating is part of the business. And attending the ICANN meetings is part of the business. So, from my viewpoint, I see no reason why no one working, cooperating, or being member of a constituency should be paid or subsidized to attend an ICANN meeting. Having said that, maybe we do -- can find certain exceptions, but maybe five or three, not 60. So I would -- and I will go for that when you are going to ask to get input on the new strategy for that. But I think that we have to really challenge the way in which we are paying all those travel expenses to GNSO councillors belonging to constituencies. >>TIM RUIZ: Yeah, this is Tim. Let me speak to that a little bit, Jordi, because it throws me. We discussed this on the council over and over and over again. And then when we had a vote, if I remember correctly, the registries voted in favor of funding everybody for the council. >>JORDI IPARRAGUIRRE: Well -- >>TIM RUIZ: Registrars agree 100%, but the support wasn't there when the time came. >>JORDI IPARRAGUIRRE: Yeah, but you know that registries vote on what's agreed on the registry and on the constituency, and that's my personal view on the point. So it's not the registry view. It's my personal view. And I still think that it's not -- personally speaking, it's not fair to get money invested or subsidizing people that we, myself also, pay -- I mean, we earn money on that industry, so attending that meeting is part of our business and we should be considering that. >>OLGA CAVALLI: Yes, Eric. >>ERIC BRUNNER WILLIAMS: Thank you. Yes, Eric Brunner Williams from CORE. Two points. First, with regard to the travel planning, I don't see enough exception made for handicap. And I say that because every time we come to a meeting, Amadeu, who is nearly blind, has to go from one hotel to the next because his ICANN hotel coverage is the smallest possible footprint in time that he could be here and participate in the meeting. And, therefore, if he has any travel originating requirements for being a day or two over on either side, he has to change hotels. And that means basically saying to one of our blind participants that they have to go stumble around in the streets. And that's an exception that we should make. We should be aware of handicap, whether it's Amadeu's or anyone else's. Then if I could just to turn to the issue that has been the discussion between Tim and Jordi. As a registrar, I recall speaking, and when we did have voting in the RC, voting against spending our money on sending our councillors; that we could have spent that money better by finding more deserving people with less money than those of us that had it and were representing business interests. So I just differ in my memory, Tim. Thank you. >>TIM RUIZ: That's a good point and I don't think that's necessarily off the table. It will depend a little bit on what we find out. I think that was one of the concerns Kevin has is that there may be some flexibility in how that's used, but he is just concerned that there is also transparency and an understanding of how the constituencies are making those kinds of decisions. So I think we have got to accommodate that as well, but I hear you. >>STEPHANE VAN GELDER: I really get surprised that every meeting we have we come back to this subject, even though we have come to a decision as a drafting team, we came to a decision as a council. Whether people agree with that decision or not, I understand that not everyone might agree with it. But a decision was taken to try and facilitate the whole funding issue for the council for the stakeholder groups, that there would be an allotment of slots for travel funding that was equal to the number of councillors. And that's it. And the stakeholder groups can do with that as they wish. So if they want to send their councillors, they can. If they want to send someone else, they can. So I don't think we should debate the -- that system over and over again if we want to make some progress. But having said that, I would add that I don't -- I have never understood the argument that goes some people have money so they can get -- they don't deserve funding, so I suppose you are talking about the larger companies, and some people don't have as much money so they deserve funding. I don't think funding is something that we're trying to do to help people that don't have money. I think funding is something that we are trying to do to help the ICANN system and the ICANN process work. And if we're doing that, then what we're basically saying with funding, at least at the GNSO Council level, is we need a GNSO Council to work, and so we want to ensure that the people on the council are all here at the meeting. So some people could afford to come, some people can't but we aren't going to go into that. We want those councillors that are working for the community to be here at the council meeting. So if that -- I mean, if we're going into this funding thing just saying we want to help the people that have less money, then that's a different viewpoint. And then I would fully agree with the fact that those who have money should deserve less funding or none at all. But I don't think that's what we're trying to do. I think we're trying to help the system function. >>TIM RUIZ: In all fairness, though, I don't recall too many people trying to make the argument that based on how much money anybody had. There was an initial attempt about need. It was recognized that that's a very difficult thing to try to put parameters around or to identify. How do you describe -- how do you define "need"? But I think there was a feeling by many, and many registrars actually, that registrars, registries, and anyone else who is involved here who has a commercial interest in the outcomes of this work should not be funded. And that basically involves probably everyone on the council except for possibly the NCUC. That was not accepted by the majority of the council. But -- And that's fine. This is a dead issue, it's a dead issue. I am not trying to reraise it. But I just didn't want to characterize the opposition to the funding as who had money and who didn't. >>OLGA CAVALLI: If I may, I would like to comment what happened in the drafting team and in the council. We discussed this before, and we agreed to try to get all the members of the council funded, and this has been achieved. Also, about funding retiring councillors, in the conference call held about mid-August, there was a special request to the drafting team to review the situation, if it was possible to bring those retiring councillors to the meeting. So we had several exchange of e-mails, perhaps you remember. Some people were against, some people were for that. And finally, what we decided to ask, if there were remaining funds from the DNSO, previous funds, to fund this retiring councillors. We never get to know who were there because they never told the council about who were needing that. They just contacted you directly. I think this was the procedure. Maybe this -- >>KEVIN WILSON: You are talking about the DNSO? >>OLGA CAVALLI: Yes, the retiring councillors who were funded for this meeting. As far as I remember -- I didn't get that information from the -- >>STEPHANE VAN GELDER: That's my recollection as well. That's why I was asking the question earlier on. I remember this discussion as being what Olga said. At one point, because some people were opposed to it and some people were for it, and we were trying to find a solution, someone said could those remaining DNSO funds be applied to that. And I think you replied no because there was an idea before of splitting that equally between the then-called constituencies. And the remaining funds were there because some constituencies didn't use them or something. >>KEVIN WILSON: For Sydney. That's right. So the remaining funds -- I wish I had it off the top of my head. I think it was the business constituency and the -- >> Registries. >>KEVIN WILSON: The registries were actually paid, but -- for the DNSO restricted funds. And Ken has that. Or the registry you know, account, still has that. And he's assured us that that would be disclosed. That's the one requirement that I had, is that the whole council -- I think, Glen, you have complied with that -- the whole council would know, by e-mail, that who actually was supported as part of the DNSO restricted. So if there was a exception request that came in for the DNSO I would have said no, it has to be broadcast out to the whole community. Not to the community. To the GNSO. Right; Glen? And you did. Good. As far as -- I think you would have to tell me the specific names and we would have to go through our e-mail traffic, between Steve and I -- Steve and me and his travel team and the exception requestor to identify which of those were either granted an exception for whatever reason. The other group is the registries had another group which was the carryover from the Sydney meeting. Do you remember that? They didn't get support at the Sydney meeting, and so that was in FY '09 transfer that we allowed to happen. >>OLGA CAVALLI: Alan wanted to say something. >>ALAN GREENBERG: Maybe I'm missing something, but the issue of retiring councillors, this is a very special case where retiring councillors retire at the beginning of the meeting. Normally, new councillors come in at the end of the meeting. And NomCom ones may be funded. Ones who come in from constituencies, they change between meetings. So this is a very special case, and I don't think it's worth an awful lot of talk, because it's not likely to happen again, unless we're planning on the GNSO reform again. >>OLGA CAVALLI: I think Alan is right. And somehow in the -- in the exchange of e-mails in the list of the drafting team and in the council, that was also considered. And the idea that Kevin that if the request was not that much, that could be handled. And I think this is what happened. >>ALAN GREENBERG: It's not pressing, so -- >>OLGA CAVALLI: Okay. Any other comments? Jordi, you wanted to say something before or it's okay? >>JORDI IPARRAGUIRRE: It's been more or less said. But my understanding is that subsidies were based on need. And my understanding, my personal viewpoint, is that all the ones that are involved in the -- maybe certain exceptions, but there's going to be five or three that are working for the GNSO. We do that because we like and we want to serve the community. So I don't think that has to be paid. Otherwise, we have to be paid, paying everyone that's giving a hand here. And that's all. >>OLGA CAVALLI: Yeah. We discussed this in the GNSO. And as Tim said, it was -- some other thing was decided. Okay. How do -- could we exchange some ideas of how -- what do you need from us to move forward? >>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER: Could I ask -- >>KEVIN WILSON: Okay. You won't forget? >>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER: I'll try to remember. >>KEVIN WILSON: Okay. I think the -- my closing request is, from a travel administration standpoint, I think I communicated clearly that, you know, ICANN's not a travel agent, but we're trying to act like one with 130 -- actually, 250 supported people, counting all the vendors and everybody, with the dollar amount, and then the exceptions, there are so many of them. So I think Alan had a good suggestion, which is we'll categorize them and come back with suggestions for how to improve that process. So from a travel administration standpoint, I think the problems had you with the GNSO restructuring won't happen, hopefully, this -- before Nairobi, anyway. So if you can get the names in earlier, that will really, really help the process. Number two, if you can let your community know that if -- generally, if we're quiet, it means that we are very, very busy doing things. So what happened from an administration standpoint this last time is, we were quiet and we were -- we started getting all kinds of feedback that because of our silence, that we weren't being responsive. But in actuality, the travel team was working around the clock, literally, around the clock. I was getting e-mails at 2:00 in the morning as they were trying to take care of an incredibly busy time. If there's an onslaught like that, if you can just keep that in mind so we don't stress the system so much. So those are some travel administration, just common dealing with the customer service aspect of it, both sides, customers need to be good customers, and we need to be responsive and deliver appropriately. So I think we've made great progress in that in the last year. So, hopefully, that feedback that I'm getting from the community, you all and others, and the other stakeholder -- or SOs and ACs, that that's been positive growth in that area of the administration, but continue to do that. And then the big one is, help us synthesize and collect these good ideas on how to balance the budget impact, the need for -- you know, I think you've just expressed very well by Jordi and Stéphane, you know, the need for it, but also the balance on the budget. So help us work through that process as best you can. We don't want the GNSO to be dominated with travel discussions. But at the same time, we need your wisdom on how to effectively, you know, administer this, plan for it, budget for it, et cetera? >>OLGA CAVALLI: Which is the best way (Off mike) -- the meeting in Kenya in early March? Which would be the best date, the desired date for you to have all the names of all the councillors? >>KEVIN WILSON: Tomorrow's great. I actually don't know the date off the top of my head. Glen, have you talked to anybody? Do you know? >>GLEN DE SAINT GÉRY: No, I don't know. >>KEVIN WILSON: We don't know the date, but I will send an e-mail tonight saying, "Let's get the date as soon as we can." I think it's 60 days before the next meeting. >>GLEN DE SAINT GÉRY: From this meeting. >>KEVIN WILSON: From this meeting? No. Sixty days from now, so 30 days before? >>GLEN DE SAINT GÉRY: Would it be? I don't know. >>KEVIN WILSON: Two months before. Well, I'll find out. >>OLGA CAVALLI: You can think about it and let us know so we can organize our work in the council and see and bring you the right information at the right time. >>KEVIN WILSON: One of the challenges, and I know your background and why it was, but this last time, we spent a lot of time coming up with those dates, and then pretty much two of the major groups, NomCom and GNSO, broke through those dates very significantly. So we -- And, you know, if -- once again, if I was a hard-nosed environment where I could say, "No," then I would have said, "You missed the deadline, you don't get travel support." Tim, I don't know how you would react to that. But so that's the challenge we have. So I think you're saying you'd like to have the dates so these you can shoot for that again. >>OLGA CAVALLI: It would help. Tony wants to respond. >>TONY HOLMES: Well, there were some specific problems with this meeting as well. And for some constituencies, there were no problems. I have exactly the same councillors, they didn't have to do anything. Other constituencies actually had to hold elections across this period as well. >>KEVIN WILSON: Right. >>TONY HOLMES: To appoint new councillors. So for some, they could have given you who wanted funding probably within a couple of weeks of the last meeting. For others, it was far from easy to do that. And it was a one-off situation that shouldn't occur again. >>KEVIN WILSON: Right. We're aware of that. That's helpful. Yeah. >>OLGA CAVALLI: Yes, it was exceptional. It's an exceptional situation. Okay. So if you can send us the date, that would be very helpful. And any other comments, questions? So I'll summarize what we talked today and exchanged with the drafting team. And we keep in touch with you. Thank you for coming. >>KEVIN WILSON: And please let me know and let Steve Antonoff know if there's anything we can do from the travel administration and travel support to make it better, make it more responsive, get the right people here. Thank you. >>STÉPHANE VAN GELDER: Kevin, can I ask you, the current system is set for this coming fiscal year? Then do we have to talk about the next fiscal year or -- >>KEVIN WILSON: Yes. So internally, we're already kicking off the next fiscal year budget planning process. But from your standpoint, at the Nairobi meeting, there will be a framework. And there will be actually meetings up before the framework. And I don't know if the travel team would want to plug into that formally into the process. But certainly at the framework in Nairobi, that would be the time, yeah. >>OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much.