ICANN SOAC Chair Reports ICANN - SYDNEY Sydney, Australia 26 June 2009 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Now it gives me pleasure to call on the next group of reports and I wonder if I could have the chairs of the at- large, the ASO, the ccNSO, the GAC, the GNSO, the RSSAC and the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, do we have those chairs on stage, please? Another group of very hard-working individuals leading equally hard- working organelles within the ICANN organism. And because we have absolutely no imagination, we're going to go through these in alphabetical order which means that we kick off with the At-Large Advisory Committee. It gives me great pleasure to call on Cheryl Langdon-Orr to give the report of the ALAC. Cheryl. >>CHERYL LANGDON-ORR: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Our community, building on the summit's success, has had a full-packed Sydney ICANN meeting as listed in the standard meeting schedule. And a perusal of any of those agendas will show the topics we've discussed and the depth of these discussions. We also allocated our human resources across all other meetings in ICANN, which really meant if it didn't have "Closed" on the door, you had an ALAC at-large or regional leader in the room. We hope you noticed us. In a few more formalized ways, however, we're going to implement a reporting mechanism and an accountability on those activities, and if the slide is up -- and there isn't a dongle so I can only hope someone can click the button -- we should have a URL coming up. There we go. Which is where the complete and more wordy report is going to be found. We've just finished our 7:00 a.m. till 8:30 -- in fact, 8:40 -- meeting putting that report together, but it will be up very shortly. And with the next click -- and I now put a full URL with the third click, because having learned yesterday at the DNS abuse it could be risky for me just to use some form of tiny URL, I've given you the options to click either. But if you do click that tiny URL, you'll find a spreadsheet which lists every meeting that every person attended, and a report back from them which goes into the building of our community views. So I think that's important, so the rest of ICANN know how we're working. Other than that, we've met and thoroughly, I believe, had healthy, interesting discussions contributing directly to understanding how the GAC feels on important issues, how the cc's feel on important issues. We had to highlight, I think, the way that the regions and the ALS leaders have now started and freshened a number of conversations, not the least of which is in the matter of IDNs and geographics as the result of the GAC meeting we held. One of the things we'd like to highlight to you, Mr. Chairman, is the excellent remote participation our community experienced here at the Sydney meeting. Obvious thanks to Kieren and of course the public participation committee there. And also I think we, almost with the complete run of meetings, are going to say thank you. What we got out of public participation meeting, what we got out of the structural -- security -- structural improvements committee meeting, and all the others listed in the report are saying from us we are more engaged, feeling more welcomed, learning more, and interacting more than ever before. The public participation and the remote, however, wasn't just limited to formalized meetings of the ALAC and we had a -- I think a notable input from Latin America and the Caribbean region even throughout yesterday's very interesting and informative afternoon in both the IGF workshop and of the DNS abuse workshop, and that wasn't a how-to guide. It was about the abuse of the DNS. The malicious abuse in new gTLDs was another workshop that our community contributed to, and enjoyed what we took home from. But we want to make special thanks to the time taken to the travel support meetings that have been held, both openly and with our community, and I would make particular mention of how many positive and affirmative and "thank you" comments are coming back from our travelers that need to go directly to Steve and his team for having made this experience in Sydney a very good one. Liking to close on the higher ends of the pleasure of being here in Sydney at this meeting, was our breakfast with the board and our discussions on better inclusion of consumer organizations and interests and those are obvious conversations we'll go on with. And we need to thank our amazing staff in the final points. How Nick, Matthias, Heidi, and Gisele manage the plethora of work we throw at them in these meetings I do not know, but I'm very pleased they do. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Cheryl. Are there any questions from the floor about the ALAC report? If not, we'll move to the next one, which alphabetically is the address sorting organization and I chair on the chair, Adiel Akplogan to give that report. Adiel. >>ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was planning to do this report in French but I seek that nobody has a headset, so I will do it in English. Oh, okay. So this report is the report of ASO, but as you would know, this NRO is through the MOU with ICANN, and it has taken on the role of -- no, and which is also supported by an exchange of mail which happens every year between NRO and ICANN to confirm our support but also to support our contribution to the budget of ICANN. Within the NRO, we have the NSOSI, which is also very active this year. It is the nomination of a board representative this year, Mr. Ray Plzak. This new vacancy also follows this -- the discussions within the registry for the global policies, and there is a discussion this year around how IANA will manage to pull off IPv4 -- IPv4 and this discussion is current and followed by us, but this number council is being supported financially by NRO, in addition to the contribution, the direct contribution of NRO to the ICANN budget. One of the major activities of the NRO is -- currently is the implementation of the resource key infrastructure to certify the resources that are entrusted with. The NRO affirms again -- reaffirms its support for an infrastructure with a single certification authority, but this model, according to our current discussions, might take some time to come into place, and in the meantime the five RIRs together agree to deploy a system based on five of authority certificates which are signed which will make it possible for us to issue certificates to our members from January 1, 2010. There is a public declaration, public statement, which is being published. Regarding our other activities, we try to monitor the development regarding the management of addresses and internal resources on a whole, and we try to formulate a position on them. Recently, we had to fight for the survey that was launched by analysis for the address management. We thought that this survey did not reflect -- was not neutral in reflecting the author's intentions. Within the NRO, we are also very closely involved in Internet Governance and IGF where we have several workshops and we belong to several panels regarding to Internet Governance and IP addresses management. NRO operates also through various coordination groups in various areas: Communication, engineering, as well as public relations. And these various coordination groups are working on very specific topics such as -- so there is coordination on engineering is working on how to -- within the RIR how can we better support the deployment of IPv6 and as well, the deployment of DNSsec (inaudible) and that we're managing. Finally -- and this is not the least of our responsibilities -- the NRO has expressed its clear support at the end of the GPR between ICANN and the American government. We believe within the NRO that it is no longer the end of the JPA. We believe it's no longer necessary -- no longer necessary to control the operations of ICANN and the multi- sector system is someone -- is mature enough to support the development of ICANN as well as to self-manage the management of Internet in general. So we responded in that way on the end of the JPA. NRO is still very keen to improve relationships with ICANN, and we send mail to the ICANN chair to organize more between the board of ICANN and the NRO, and the management team of ICANN to have meetings, regular meetings, to talk about topics of mutual interest and I take this opportunity to invite the ICANN board to our meetings that we hold with our members on the development of management of the IP addresses. Thank you. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: And thank you, Adiel. Are there any questions for the chairman of the ASO? Raimundo. I hope it's a question. >>RAIMUNDO BECA: Only one remark, and I will make it in French since you spoke in French. Just a remark to say how a member of the board is nominated by ASO and that I appreciate the statement regarding the -- amongst all the statements that were received, that's the best one, in my opinion, the one that captures best the interests of ICANN. That serves best its interests. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you. Is there another question? Thank you. >>SÉBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Adiel, for this presentation. That was very interesting. I just wanted to ask the following question: How can we imagine some closer work, closer operation between ASO and ALAC? Because I think it is one of the major topics which is the involvement of users in the development and use of IPv6. >>ADIEL AKPLOGAN: I think it is a topic which is dear to us as well within the NRO. As you say, within each RIR, the development of rules is in a bottom- up process which is -- through which members, end users within the communities, are very involved in general, but more specifically I think we ought, within each RIR -- we try to develop relationships that are very close with the ALAC representative, so that the information within IPv6 can be broadcast or distributed. With a particular example for Africa, AfriNIC, I think we organize regular training around IPv6 and during those training workshops we have sessions more frequently for the end users regarding general information, and I think all RIRs are doing the same. And beyond that, we are very open within the NRO in order to explore with ALAC in general directions for cooperation. Of course in order to increase user information -- end user information on IPv6 and the particular role they can play to accelerate the process. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, I'm going to move on, then, to the ccNSO and ask Chris Disspain to give the report from the country code name report organization, Chris. >>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Thank you, Peter. Good morning, everybody. We've had a, as usual, very busy time. Some highlights. The expense analysis, Kevin's extraordinary work on the expense analysis was very welcome. We also welcome the extension of the comment period. One of the points that we made strongly was -- to Kevin, was that -- and this is not just about this particular thing, but generally, was that some smaller ccTLDs who do want to have input into these things have to find the time to do it and the extensions are very welcome. We're looking forward to some little bit more detail that we've asked Kevin for and for the ongoing discussions on that it's an extraordinarily good start to getting this thing sorted out. In geographic names on new gTLDs, we -- we're concerned that the submission that we've now made twice is not reflected in the DAG and we will be sending a letter to the board in the next few days to reiterate our position, which is very simply that country names at the top level are -- should not be permitted as gTLDs. They're not generic in any sense of the word and shouldn't be permitted. On the IDN fast track we had an interesting discussion on variants. There is a lot more work to be done on that, I think. And we're doing to try and see if we can work our way through the difficulties that are arising with respect to variants in the next six weeks. If we're to keep to our Seoul timetable, we need to work really hard. We're also going to try and put in place the mechanism to sit down and talk through the money situation for IDN so that we can speed up dealing with that. We have formally started out delegation/redelegation working group. This is a working group that's going to be looking at delegation/redelegation retirement of ccTLDs. This is not being done because we think there's a major problem. It's being done because the process is the rules and the processes have been jigsawed together over a long period of time and we think it's probably time that we had a look at them to make sure that there aren't any disconnects. We have agreed to set up an ad hoc emergency response planning working group which will be a joint project between the ccNSO and ICANN, together with a number of other people to move fast should we need to do so. This, of course, is following the Conficker situation. And finally, we are starting to talk about, and hopefully will agree, in the next couple of weeks, having in -- where are we going next? >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Seoul. >>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Seoul, thank you. [ Laughter ] Where are we now? [ Laughter ] >>CHERYL LANGDON-ORR: It's Friday, right? >>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Melbourne, right? To hold in Seoul a ccNSO youth forum. The idea is that each of our regional organizations would find two or three young people with experience and interest in this area, put them all together online for a month beforehand and ask them to write the agenda for the forum and then have them come and tell us what they want and what they think. Because, actually, they probably know far more about this than we do. They're out there using all this stuff, they have a different concept of privacy, for example, than we do. So we're going to try to get that together in Seoul, if we can. And if we can't, we'll do it in Nairobi. That is assuming we can agree to do it. I don't have in addition, really, to say, Peter but I'm happy to answer any questions. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Looking for questions but seeing none. Thank you, Chris. We move, then, to the governmental Advisory Committee and I call on the chair of the GAC, Janis Karklins to give the report. >>JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you, Peter. The Government Advisory Committee met four days, 40 members, two observers and one invited country, Russia, participated in the meeting. The Government Advisory Committee expresses thanks to Business Events Sydney, AusRegistry, auDA, and Government of Australia for hosting the meeting in Sydney, and ICANN for supporting the GAC meeting. On IDN ccTLDs, Mr. Chairman, the GAC welcomes a release of the revised version of the draft implementation plan for IDN ccTLD fast track and the supporting documents. The GAC comments on Review 3 of the draft implementation plan IDN ccTLD fast track process are attached and I will give you highlights of those comments. The GAC reiterates its firm conviction that the same treatment should be given to IDN and ASCII ccTLDs, particularly on documented relationships and fees. On relationship between ICANN and IDN ccTLD manager, the GAC emphasizes that the overriding priority for deployment of IDNs is the need to ensure the continued stability, security and interoperability of the DNS. In this respect, an indication of the intention to respect and implement appropriate IETF standards, including IDNA protocols should be part of the application process. The GAC welcomes ICANN's flexibility regarding the form of relationship between ICANN and IDN ccTLD managers and believes that they should be not limited only to the two mentioned forms, but may also extend to include other options that may exist and may be more suitable to some ccTLD managers. On the financial contributions, the GAC believes that the cost estimate for the processing of each new IDN ccTLD request is prohibitively high, introduce a financial barrier for IDN ccTLD managers, especially from developing countries. The GAC believes that the proposed revenue percentage still needs further discussion between ICANN and the IDN ccTLD operators. There are a number of comments on IDN table procedures. On new gTLDs the GAC supports the proposed introduction of new gTLDs in view of their potential for increasing competition, promoting innovation and diversity, and increasing access to the Internet. The GAC discussed the draft applicant guidebook version 2 and feels that it does not yet respond to all the concerns that governments have. The GAC notes that considerable work is undergoing seeking to address several critical yet outstanding issues, but the GAC remains concerned about the number of important issues. Namely, root scalability and stability; the need to ensure respect for national and public policy interests, in particular, the need for adequate protection of geographic names (on the top and the second levels) and delegation/redelegation procedures; the need for more effective protection for intellectual property rights; the lack of comprehensive analysis of economic and competition impacts; the lack of business awareness; the lack of analysis of the risks of the end user confusion and/or harm; the one TLD category and single fee structure; and the complexity and the costs of the objection procedure and the implications of the proposed procedure for governments to submit objections, for example, on public order and morality grounds. During the Sydney meeting, the GAC benefited from the briefing by the IRT and SSAC and RSSAC on their respective areas of work. The GAC believes that these are important issues that deserve focused attention and need to be resolved prior to the posting of the third version of the draft applicant guidebook. The GAC urges the board to give consideration to the specific needs for noncommercial categories of TLDs, including social, linguistic and cultural TLDs and public authority-sponsored TLDs especially with respect to appropriate application procedures and financial arrangements. The GAC expresses concern about the three-character requirements for new IDN gTLDs, for example, in Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean scripts. Where many one or two characters have meaning. It should be taken into account developing the next version of DAG. The GAC appreciates the engagement intersessionally with ICANN staff on issues associated with the introduction of new gTLDs and the GAC intends to provide more comprehensive comments by the end of July. On the role of the GAC, Mr. Chairman, the GAC has held productive discussions during the Sydney meeting on its role and look forward to an early opportunity to initiate the joint process with the board on this important topic in accordance with board commitment in the affirmation of responsibilities in the joint project agreement. The GAC proposes a joint working group for this purpose. The GAC welcomes the detailed briefings from SSAC and RSSAC on DNSSEC and the signing of the root, the root zone scaling study and SSAC advisory on the problems associated with the use of wild cards. The GAC is particularly mindful that the introduction of new gTLDs and IDN ccTLDs has to be seen in wider context of other major changes being implemented in the domain name system, including, for example, introduction of IPv6 and DNSSEC. For this reason, the GAC is concerned about the cumulative impact on such changes of the security and stability of DNS and the Internet in general and looks forward to the conclusions of the report on the root scaling study. The GAC would like to formally acknowledge and recognize the significant contribution made by Dr. Paul Twomey to ICANN during his tenure as ICANN CEO and president and also in his role as the inaugural GAC chair. The GAC wishes Dr. Twomey well. The GAC, thanks all those who have contributed to a dialogue with the GAC in Sydney, namely Patrick Fältström, ISOC, ALAC, EABC. And the next GAC meeting will take place during the period of ICANN meeting in Seoul, Korea. I also would like to bring to attention the community that the GAC produced a report for information to the ITU council working group on WSIS. This report contains information about the history of the GAC, major activities of the GAC, as well as excerpts of GAC communiques on many substantive items. This report is published on GAC Web site and ITU Web site. The full text of GAC communique is published on GAC Web site. That brings to the end my report, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Janis. Thank you for the communique. We will be going through that, as usual, very carefully. Appreciate that information. Are there any questions for the chairman of the GAC? I see one. Thank you. We'll only have time for two so you, too, yes, I see you. >>PHILIP ARGY: Philip Argy from ArgyStar.com. Really more a quick comment, but picking up on your concern about the cumulative impact of a lot of the development, really, a related concern is that the resources of ICANN staff to assimilate and digest the massive material that's been presented for this meeting and all the material that's going on doesn't leave a lot of time for that really to be absorbed, assimilated, processed into some coherent picture. And on one view, the time between now and Seoul is very short. And you've really got stakeholders who aren't very plugged into ICANN who have important contributions to make that really, as we stand here now, almost haven't heard yet, what happened at the Sydney meeting. So I think the board really needs to look carefully at mechanisms for accelerating the dissemination, synthesizing, summarizing of what's going on to help speed up the feedback process, because otherwise I think Seoul will be almost premature in the sense that people haven't had enough time to process what's come out of Sydney to make it productive and effective so -- >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you for that. And, second. >>NIGEL ROBERTS: This is a question regarding the GAC communiqué. I welcome the GAC communiqué -- >> Your name? >>NIGEL ROBERTS: Nigel Roberts from Channel Islands. There is a question for clarification about one matter that you referred to, and it was some concern or query about proposed revenue share for IDN ccTLDs, and the question is is that about the principal of it or the amount? >>JANIS KARKLINS: I'm not sure that I understood the question. >>NIGEL ROBERTS: Well, we could refer back to the actual text, but the text says something along the lines of concern regarding proposed revenue percentage for IDN ccTLDs to contribute to ICANN. Now, to me, that could mean one of two different things. It could mean there is a proposed revenue percentage, and you don't like the number, or you think there should be some more discussion about the principle. >>JANIS KARKLINS: In the previous meeting in Mexico, GAC and ccNSO stated that the financial contribution should be based on cost recovery. And we are not hundred percent sure that a proposed percentage is based on cost recovery. For some GAC members, that looked like an IDN tax. >>NIGEL ROBERTS: I agree with that, and thank you for the clarification. >>JANIS KARKLINS: What we are saying now is that, first of all, further discussion should be held to clarify things. And we encourage ICANN to enter into discussions on these issues with the particular applicants. And what we're saying is cost recovery is still valid, and that these financial contributions should be kept voluntary. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: We are now starting to cut into tea time, so Marilyn, can you be brief? And Janis, can I ask you to be brief in reply in and if it's a complex question, we can deal with it off-line. >>MARILYN CADE: I will be brief. My question is to the chair, but also, perhaps, to you, as the chair of ICANN, Peter. As I understand it, the GAC communiqué is the way that the GAC is giving advice to the board. This is my understanding -- Is my understanding correct? >>JANIS KARKLINS: Yes. >>MARILYN CADE: Thank you. Mr. Chairman, might I ask you when I could expect to see a response from ICANN to the advice related to the economic analysis that has been requested? Since that request has come from a number of places now. And we can certainly take this off-line. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: We can, because there is a considerable amount of material in the GAC communiqué. And with respect to Janis's response, I asked him to be brief and he gave a brief response, but not all of the material in the GAC communiqué is advice to the board. And there is some discussion about which parts of it constitute advice to the board and which part execute declarations by the GAC, which parts -- thanks to Paul Twomey, for example, is probably not advice to the board. So it really is a more complex question. Thank you. Thank you, Janis. Now it gives me pleasure to call on Avri Doria, who is the chair of the GNSO, to given the report from that organization. Avri. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you, Peter. And in giving this report, I do want to emphasize the GNSO's commitment to the bottom-up process. [ Laughter ] >>AVRI DORIA: In the GNSO, we have reviewed progress on gTLDs and status of all of the overarching issues. We are very appreciate of all of the comments that we received from the staff, the presentations and such, and from the IRT. I would just like to mention that on most of these issues, discussions are ongoing and continuing within the constituencies within the GNSO. We were welcomed by the GAC and met with them and discussed issues related to geographic names. I wish to thank the GAC for its graciousness in receiving us and graciousness in answering our long list of questions. It was really quite helpful in trying to understand some of the issues and some of the ramifications and nuances of the issues. We met with the ccNSO and discussed issues of common interests in IDN, and are work to go co-establish a joint effort on variants and other possible issues with the ccNSO. There's a very strong commitment in the GNSO to working together with the ccNSO, GAC, ALAC, and other groups as much as possible. This is certainly seen within the context of the GNSO. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: There's some nasty buzzing. >>AVRI DORIA: Oh. So just to reiterate. As part of the restructuring, one of the issues within the restructuring was the cooperation with the other ACs -- with the other S.O.s and ACs, but it's been very good even without needing to have the restructuring to motivate us. We initiated a new PDP on inter-registrar transfer policy. We are currently working to create the working group charter for this. On most PDPs, we have been following the mandate of the improvements to basically work in terms of creating working groups as opposed to working with the old-style task forces. We had approved a PDP, a policy development process working group, on post-expiration domain name recovery previously. This time we approved the working group charter for that group. And just the details of the work that will be done on that is to study whether adequate opportunity exists for registrants to redeem their expired domain names, whether expiration-related provisions in typical registration agreements are clear and conspicuous enough, whether adequate notice exists to alert registrants of upcoming expirations, whether additional measures need to be implemented to indicate that a name has expired since once it enters auto-renew grace period, whether to allow transfer during renewal grace period. One of the reason I went down to this level of detail is that the working groups are open to constituencies, to other ACs, to other S.O.s, whether participating as representatives of their ACs, S.O.s or in their independent capacities. The staff is working on various ways to distribute the information on how to get involved in these working groups, but as we create a working group. In mentioning at the moment, I believe that with this working group we now have 17 working groups open. Once you start doing the work through working groups as opposed to just in a committee of the whole, one begins to see how many different things the S.O. is actually working on. The constituencies are working very hard, some of them have been very good in terms of getting at least one of their members in each of the working group. I do encourage the rest of the community to look at these working groups, to look at their charters, and to get involved in the ones that are of special importance to them. We are continuing to work on the restructuring and the improvements. We are close to completing bylaw recommendation to the board. We know that this is not a requirement of the bylaws, but we think it is essential in a bottom-up process that we do have bylaw recommendations before bylaw changes for the S.O. are, indeed, approved. We have been working very hard with the Structural Improvements Committee, and I am very grateful for the amount of time they have given both the council and the individual stakeholder groups and constituencies to try and work out some of the still-open issues. I point out to the board that we await anxiously, from either the Structural Improvements Committee or the board itself, responses on two of the very important open issues that remain how we elect board members to seat 13 and 14, and how the transition from seats in the constituencies to seats in the stakeholder groups is affected. We continue to work on policy development process guidelines, new working group principles, GNSO Council rules and procedures. And the stakeholder group charters are under discussion. That's about it. Thank you. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thank you, Avri. And any questions? Just before I open the floor to questions, I have to go to prepare for the next meeting. There are some urgent things calling my attention, so I am going to ask the president and CEO Dr. Paul Twomey to take over the session. So with that, let's throw both Dr. Twomey and the floor open. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Which I assume is different from throwing Dr. Twomey off, like a cliff. Bruce. >>BRUCE TONKIN: So the question for Avri, in terms of the new policy development actions that you talked about, one is, I assume, refining the transfer policy rather than creating one, since one already exists, and then you talked about one on the expiration of names, have you got a sense of how long these will take and whether you think that some of the new changes in the organization in the GNSO will mean that the policy development process is going to happen faster or slower? I am just interested in your sense of timing. Where do you think GNSO, as a whole, is going? Is it getting to a three-month cycle rather than a three-year cycle on some of those things? >>AVRI DORIA: One of the things we're trying to do to make the work proceed faster is being more focused on the topics, on trying to define charters with specific work items as opposed to just a broad let's work on -- and yes, it was redefining some of the definitions in inter- registrar transfer, not in redefining a new policy. So thank you for mentioning that. So that's part of what we're trying to do. We're trying to monitor the amount of time it takes us to do different things. In the policy development process work teams, in terms of re-thinking that, we're trying to understand some of the subparts of a process in terms of when one does research, when one starts policy development, how one deals with comments more accurately. So I don't know whether that makes it quicker or not, but it is certainly trying to make it more understandable, more predictable, as we begin to understand it better. In terms of does it actually make it quicker or slower, and this is still -- this is pretty much a personal viewpoint in terms of just experience, it is very important to open things up for more comment, for earlier comment, for more research. And that does -- and it is very important to try to reach consensus as opposed to taking a vote. That generally does not lend to making things quicker. >>BRUCE TONKIN: Yeah, that's right. And just in terms of the activities the last few days here, and there's a lot of work that was presented by the IRT report, there was some discussions on registry/registrar separation, do you have a sense that the GNSO wants to take that on itself at a council level? Was there any discussion of that. >>AVRI DORIA: There was not specific discussion on that at the council level. It would be wrong of me to say that the GNSO Council wishes to take that on. There are certainly members within the GNSO Council that are ready to take that on if the board decides that we should take it on, but we have certainly not sat down and come to any consensus on that. And I would expect that there probably is a split opinion on whether we want to or not. But I do believe that the council would be ready to. >>BRUCE TONKIN: Okay. Thanks, Avri. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Any other questions? Good. Well, we'll close that. Thank you, Avri. And we'll move now to the report of the chair of the root server system advisory committee, Suzanne Woolf. >>SUZANNE WOOLF: Thank you, Mr. President. Good morning, everybody. And I think most of us know RSSAC was one of the original ICANN advisory committees. We usually meet at IETF meetings, but there are also always RSSAC folks at ICANN meetings. The most meeting was in San Francisco in March, and we'll be following up in Stockholm at the end of July. The major work item to report on currently is the root server system scaling study with the expected addition of new gTLDs, IDNs and DNSsec data to the root, the root zone will be changing a great deal in a fairly short period of time. The ICANN board accordingly has asked SSAC and RSSAC jointly to undertake a rigorous technical study on the impact these changes will have on the process of generating and distributing the root zone. SSAC and RSSAC got together and formed a joint steering group to assess the task, and the major outcome of that phase of the project was the terms of reference framing the question -- framing -- well, framing multiple questions. Framing the issues, so that we could supervise hiring a consulting team to do the detail work since it turns out there's actually a great deal of data gathering to be done in order to complete the task we were set. The terms of reference was finalized in April. The consulting team is in place, and the steering group is actively overseeing their work, and we expect to receive a preliminary report, their early findings, at the end of August or so, with the final version to follow somewhat later. There's been actually a lot of activity around this report and this study here in Sydney. There was a dedicated workshop a couple of days ago. We had very, very good attendance. There's been a great deal of conversation. It's been -- it was brought up and we discussed it in the RSSAC/SSAC session with the GAC. I think the results will provide some very solid input to the relevant policy processes, which is the goal. RSSAC has also been discussing the ICANN independent review. The reviewer's report was published in March, and presented to RSSAC at the March meeting. The board working group overseeing the review will be consulting with current RSSAC members, and others, to come up with a set of recommendations from the findings of the review. We expect to make good progress on that around the July regular meeting of RSSAC. The last item that seems prominent right now is the recent news that ICANN, VeriSign, and NTIA are actively planning for the deployment of DNSsec in the root zone. As many of you heard in the presentations this week about -- on this topic, there's a significant component of technical discussion and review around moving this forward. And we're very eager to be part of that and looking forward to consulting with the -- with the principals on that. Any questions? I think that means it's time for coffee. >>PAUL TWOMEY: As always, pithy and fully explanatory. So perhaps then we'll finish, on the list I have here, with a report from the Security and Stability Advisory Committee, and its near-famous chair -- indeed famous chair -- Steve Crocker. >>STEVE CROCKER: You was momentarily confused because I heard "coffee" which is always distracting. [Laughter] >>SUZANNE WOOLF: My apologies for setting you up that way. [Laughter] >>STEVE CROCKER: It's a pleasure to give a report from the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. One very important piece of work is the joint work that we're doing with the Root-Server System Advisory Committee and staff that Suzanne has fully reported on, so I won't mention that. Next slide, please. Some key things that we have been pushing on recently and have reported on looking at what we're calling "internationalized registration data." You might think of this as internationalized WHOIS. The items marked with the red symbol there are matched -- not only have reports from us but are resulting in resolutions that we expect will be passed by the board in the next session here. The second bullet on there is "Improving Registration Security." We looked at a pattern of some weaknesses, a small number of cases but indicative of possible problems, particularly ones that affect domain names that might be targets for attack because of their high value or high prominence. The third bullet relates to the external review and a corresponding internal review. SSAC, like every component of ICANN, undergoes a review process and we have been -- it's been our turn public -- there was an external review that was published and we've recently completed our own contribution to the process by considering the questions ranging from the big ones of whether we need to exist at all to the more sort of businesslike ones of how we're organized and how can we be more efficient. We're in the process of implementing some of the improvements that we can do within our own purview, if you will, and then later I expect that the board working group overseeing the process will come up with recommendations and work through whatever structural changes are needed at the board level or at the bylaws level. We have a report on registration abuse points of contact, trying to improve the accessibility of registrars when somebody needs to get in touch with them to report a site that is -- needs to be taken down or that they think should be taken down. And the last point there is a new advisory from us that is consistent with all of the prior advice, casting an extremely negative glance, if you will, or posture with respect to the use of wildcards or what was formerly called "redirection" in TLDs, particularly in new TLDs, both cc and gTLDs, and there's a board resolution to that point as well. In addition to these sort of bread-and-butter issues within SSAC, we've also had for a very long time essentially a parallel thread on the strategic activity of bringing DNS security into full deployment. Next slide, please. We had a -- we've had a workshop in almost every ICANN meeting for the last several years. The pace has been picking up. These sessions are becoming more dense. This one was particularly full. In the middle of the slide, you'll see reports from Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand and PIR on behalf of dot org. There's -- this is really quite a lot more activity than there has been. I'm very pleased that Thailand's zone is signed, that dot org is signed. The others are in test and have quite a lot to -- have contributed quite a lot in the dialogue. There's also, of course, the quite prominent news that the root is in the process of getting signed, that the Department of Commerce in the U.S., VeriSign and ICANN are working out the details. There was also a symposium held recently which will be reported fully, looking at sort of the next layer out issues of how the key will be distributed, what impact a signed root might have on people who are not participating, and what the key rollover process will be. There was also a report from ICANN about DNSsec activities not related to the root for the other zones that they're managing, and a report on some issues with transfer of registrations between two registrars when DNSsec is involved in working through some of the mechanical details. And finally a report on trust anchor repositories. As you can see, this is a very full session, and the prospects are that we will have an equally dense and detailed session in Seoul. Thank you very much. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Thank you, Steve. The floor is open to questions. >>STEVE CROCKER: Coffee, coffee, coffee? >>PAUL TWOMEY: Yes. Comprehensive as usual. >>STEVE CROCKER: Thank you. >>PAUL TWOMEY: So I'd like to thank all the chairs of the advisory committees for their presentation. [Applause] >>PAUL TWOMEY: Thank you. The meeting is now adjourned and we will be reconvening at 10:30 or just a little bit afterwards for the board meeting.