ICANN|ARCHIVES

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the evening session of the ICANN Public Forum held 26 June 2002 in Bucharest, Romania. This session was devoted to presentations by applicants to become the successor (to VeriSign) registry operator for .org, and community comment on the applications.

Although the captioning output is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

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ICANN Public Forum
.org Reassignment: Bidders' Presentations
Bucharest, Romania
Wednesday, 26 June 2002
Beginning at 6:00 p.m.

Contents:

Presentations:

• Union of International Associations
• The .org Foundation
• The Internet Society
• Internet Multicasting Service, Inc., and Internet Software Consortium, Inc.
• Dot Org Foundation
• Unity Registry
• SWITCH Swiss Academic and Research Network
• Global Name Registry
• NeuStar, Inc.
• Register ORGanization
• Organic Names

Community Comment

Proceedings:

>>Vinton Cerf: All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin the review of the dot org proposals. There are 11 proposals to go through tonight. So if I could please ask you to come to order, ask the Board to be seated.

We will begin.

If Louis – yes.

All right. Ladies and gentlemen, will the Board please come to order. Can I have some volume here. Will the Board please come to order.

Will the Board please come to order! Thank you.

We are now in for a fairly lengthy session. My name is Vint Cerf. I am Chairman of the Board of ICANN. And I want to thank all of you for your ability to spend a long day and now an even longer one to go through presentations on proposals for the new operator of dot org. We have some ground rules for tonight which I would like to emphasize to all of the presenters and to the Board.

Each presentation will be no more than 15 minutes. There is a clock which is displayed on a monitor down on the floor there which I will keep an eye on. When that clock counts down to zero, I will ask whoever is presenting to stop talking.

If the presenters wish to leave time for some questions and answers from the Board, I would advise them to take that into account as they make their presentations.

For the Board, please ask short questions. Please do not engage in long speeches, because we do not have time tonight for that. We have time only for clarifying questions.

I'd appreciate it if you would cooperate in that regard.

At the end of this series of 11 presentations, we will have some time for public comment. We can go on for a time. I don't know how much. But keep in mind that 11 times 15 minutes is a lot of minutes.

(Laughter.)

>>Vinton Cerf: So all of us will have to show our stamina. But I do want to allow some time for public questions and comments.

We are also going to try to take a break after about two hours of this activity. So somewhere about 8:00 or 8:15 or so, I will call a halt to the proceedings for 15 or 20 minutes.

Let me remind each of you in this room that the fact that we are limiting presentations to 15 minutes should not be misunderstood. There is a large quantity of material which has been delivered to ICANN. It is on the web site. The material is openly available for anyone to read. And, of course, I expect every one of the Board members to read through it.

There is a great deal of information beyond that which is imparted tonight in this 15-minute time period. I do not want to have anyone leave this room thinking that the only opportunity that the presenters had was to speak for 15 minutes, because that is completely incorrect. There will be opportunity for continued public discussion through the web site, and questions and answers from Board members – questions from Board members, and answers, presumably, from the presenters on this public medium. So this is intended to be a very open and continued activity.

I'd like to introduce Louis Touton, who is general counsel of ICANN, who will give us a brief discussion about how we got where we are with regard to dot org, and then we will begin the process. So, louis.

>>Louis Touton: Thank you. Thank you, Vint. The dot org top-level domain has been operated since 1993 by Network Solutions, now VeriSign. In 2001, VeriSign agreed with ICANN that it would cease being the registry operator for dot org at the end of the year 2003.

At the Board's meeting in Accra in March, it adopted a series of resolutions providing for a process that we are now in to select the successor registry operator for dot org to take over when VeriSign's agreement terminates.

The application process has been one with several steps, so far involving posting of proposed materials for request for proposals, community and DNSO comment about those, finalization of those materials, and then a very quick action on a series of what turned out to be 11 bidders in getting together very extensive presentations that they will give overviews of tonight.

The request for proposal materials provide for 11 criteria that will be used to select the successor operator. Those are posted on the web site. And we have asked the presenters tonight to try to focus on those of the criteria that they believe are relevant. As Vint said, each presentation will be limited strictly to 15 minutes for the presenter to give his or her talk and the Board members to ask any questions that time allows, and then after the conclusion of all 11 presentations, there will be opportunity for community comment.

The order of the presentations tonight will be up on the screen in a moment, and was selected by a random draw.

And the first presenter is the Union of International Associations.

Union of International Associations

>>Anthony Judge: So thank you for the opportunity to make this presentation. My name is Anthony Judge, and I am accompanied by Nidy Caron and others. We are not going to use a Powerpoint presentation because we think we can communicate more directly in this very small space of time. Our organization is an international nonprofit organization. It was created in 1910, and since that time, we've had a statutory obligation to profile international nonprofit associations. And we see our bid as a logical extension of our statutory commitment to civil society.

I need to give you a bit more of a feel of our organization. Back then, we were profiling about 11 million bibliographic entities. The founder of our organization is now recognized by historians as one of the visionaries of hypertext, Paul Otlet. In 1950, we were covered by a UN resolution recognizing our capacity to undertake registry activity with respect to international associations. And since that time, we have produced what amounts to thick registries, namely, we profile in extenso about 40,000 international organizations.

In addition, we have parallel registries for the problems with which they are concerned, some 40,000 also, and the strategies they deploy in response to these problems.

Since the 1970s, we've been very active in promoting networking in civil society, and the whole concept of networking and subsequently how it consisted by Internet-type operations. So, for example, in 1979, we were one of the first people to take a computer to a developing country, in this case, Senegal, to demonstrate the possibility of using computers to assist people across the digital divide. In 1979 also, we were one of the first people to bring the Internet gurus from North America to Europe to enable them to give a flavor to civil society of the possibilities.

We're a very technocentric organization and we focus, I would stress, on the full diversity of nongovernmental, nonprofit, civil society, noncommercial, whatever you want to call them, organizations, which are typically associated with the dot org community and beyond.

So we are the ones who are partnering, through a subcontract, with VeriSign. So this is a very controversial issue, of which I was first made very strongly aware when we were checked in at this hotel and explained who we were. The person we were explaining it to said, with great astonishment, "oh, you are the one."

So it's very amusing that we're number one on this list.

I'd like to make a few comments about that, because it's been very clear in talking in the corridors that this is a major factor in how our bid is looked at. There seems to be a strong perception that VeriSign – some people even consider VeriSign is the brother of Satan and we were associated with the axis of evil in some bizarre kind of way.

I can understand the logic of this, and I – but I would say that from our point of view, and even within our organization, I would like to stress this, because it's a strategic problem for us, there is a lot of division as to whether this is a good strategic opportunity for us. However, we see a particular window which we think is a healthy one. We think VeriSign is the best operator, and by associating our expertise in civil society, we believe that we have a good way to start operating this dot org community registry. And through a rebid in a very short space of time, we hope to move on to some other technical operator.

Before I pass on to Paul Caron with respect to the governance issues, I would like to make some remarks with respect to the support issues, which is a very important issue for the Board.

In looking at the different kinds of support that various other bidders have offered, I would like to distinguish between generic bids in which the support says that the whole notion of having a dot org community supported by the Internet would be a very good idea, and that applies across all bids.

Others are character references to particular organizations.

In our case, we have presented information suggesting that the relationship that we have with some 40,000 international organizations on an extended period in a regular manner is a pattern of conduct which constitutes, in ICANN's terms, evidence of support.

So with that, I'd like to pass the floor to Paul Caron, who will talk about the governance issues.

>>Paul Caron: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being allowed to speak.

My name is Paul Caron. I have been on the Board of UIA for about 22 years. One of the things I did professionally was to run a very large clearing system called Euroclear that takes care of bonds and equities.

Just three or four points. Governance, transition, and a little bit about the money side, since I am a former banker.

The governance, we want as broad as possible. Tony has mentioned that the entire structure of the UIA means a very ongoing dynamic international relationship between our organization and these international associations, in the same way, the way we wish to structure the (inaudible) dot org, the company, operating company, will be with the board, an advisory council, and a technical panel.

I won't go into the large details of this, but we feel very strongly that we want a board which is a board that can make decisions, can strongly negotiate with outside suppliers, and can, in effect, take on the fiduciary responsibilities as the board should. The advisory council and the technical panel will be staffed by the types of people who really can aid and add to what we consider our mission statement to be, which is to serve the civil society.

The transitional aspect, the next point I want to make, is basically one that refers again back to Tony's comment regarding VeriSign. We don't think that dot org has been properly served. And since we're so close to the dot org, we know many things can be accomplished. Therefore, we want to concentrate for the first part of the transition on developing the activities, the volume, the interest within the civil society concerning dot org. This means we want stability. And when we look around, we felt that VeriSign really supplied us the proper cost, reliability, and service equation.

Within two years, we will start renegotiating with VeriSign or other outside suppliers to, in effect, provide the boiler room or the back office.

Lastly, the money. And I mention money because even though we're a nonprofit, we're interested in how we're going to be using the cash flow, how we're going to be operating.

Our entire purpose is to develop what form of cash flow we can use to reinvest in attempting to develop more strongly a bridge across the digital divide. In other words, what cash flow we have will be devoted back into the civil society, or it will be devoted, or – if possible, to the reduction of (inaudible) charges within the registry aspects which we would be responsible for.

I think that's it. And may I go back to Tony? Or --

>>Anthony Judge: So within this context, I think it's a good time to stop for questions.

However, I would draw your attention to a table we've produced which contains our responses to the various selection criteria, which is in the executive summary of our bid.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very, very much for your brevity. May I ask if there are questions from the board members?

Evidently not.

In that case, you are free to continue your presentation if you wish. You have 6 minutes.

>>Anthony Judge: Yes, I think what we haven't put up which I would have liked to have put up is some of the nature of the – some of the flavor of the enhanced services that we're concerned with.

I think one of the disadvantages of the way we're thinking of registries at the moment is that they are in fact unidimensional. They are names and addresses, in effect, thick or thin, whereas we are very concerned and have invested heavily in relationships between entities. So we're very interested in the network of relationships between the dot org organizations. We are – we have a heavy investment in documenting networks, not only networks of organizations, but networks of problems and networks of strategies. We are interested in how organizations can enhance their capacity to act by looking at the networks through which they can work and not using networking simply as a metaphor, but using information technology and, notably, Internet technology, to allow individuals at every level of society to reimage, reimagine the org community in a more holistic way, not using holistic just as a metaphor, but using such maps and even sound to enable them to get a better sense and better whole out of the community.

There's a great problem, I think, in playing with the word "community" without finding ways to use information technology to give reality to that sense of community.

>>Vinton Cerf: I would like to ask a question.

One of the biggest concerns I have is the quality and the stability and reliability of the service that is offered to the dot org registrants. In my view, that is probably the most paramount, because there are 3 million of those registrants, and they are depending on the registry to maintain their information.

I wonder if I could ask you to help us see your priority list, because doing good things strikes me as less critical, in my own criteria, than making sure that this thing works very, very well.

>>Anthony Judge: Well, I think – thank you for the question.

I think this is precisely, and precisely why we decided to use VeriSign as a subcontractor. Because that allows us to back off from the technical problems which very legitimately are a prime concern for everybody, and allows us to focus as managers of the org registry on the areas in which we are skilled, namely, knowledge of civil society.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

Stuart, was that a question? No. There's a question from Ivan. We have two minutes and 40 seconds.

>>Ivan Moura Campos: If you could give us a raw flavor of how the institutions that are associated with you are divided across the world. Do you have rough numbers for that? Where are they?

>>Anthony Judge: I would like to be clear about that. Although the name of our organization is Union of International Associations. We are not into making members out of international organizations.

The management of our organization, the governance, is a group of 150 individuals who provide custodial care for the operations that we perform. So our relationship with 40,000 organizations is entirely through the information which we collect from them and which we build into registries. Does that answer the question? Yeah.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you. Are there any other questions? Incredibly, you've completed with 1 minute and 40 seconds to go, unless you care to continue on. You have set a record, I think.

>>Anthony Judge: The other thing that I would like to say is that, you know, I think that our bid is what I would call a healing bid. We are interested in not only how the organizations are enabled to act in terms of making contacts and all the usually services; we are interested in how the actions of organizations can be shifted to a new level whereby they find the kind of coherence which they associate with community. So in that respect, we are very interested in both diversity, which we stress, we're very interested in the range of organizations, everything from the KKK to the Buddhist, vegetarians, to whatever you like, how these form together as an ecosystem, whether in agreement or disagreement, to form a larger whole, which is the essence of community.

>>Vinton Cerf: One other question. It's about money.

How do you make money now?

>>Anthony Judge: So we – and this is a good response also in relationship to concerns about VeriSign.

The information we produce is actually sold through a publisher. So most of our activities are financed through sale of information services. So we are very familiar with relationship with the commercial world and the kinds of distance it is important to establish between a large entity, commercial, of much greater power than ourselves, and the kind of management decisions we're obliged to make and the criteria we have to impose.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much for your brevity and your clarity. You have now run out of time.

>>Anthony Judge: Thank you.

(Applause.)

The .org Foundation

>>Louis Touton: Two of the 11 applicants have names that can be pronounced the same way, so I'll pronounce this one in a peculiar way to make it clear which one it is.

The next applicant is the "period org" foundation.

>>Vinton Cerf: Please.

>>Terry Drayton: Thank you very much, and especially the point of clarification with our two confusing names.

Pleasure to be here.

Wanted to quickly give you an overview of what we were going to talk about.

First, just introduce who we were, and then talk briefly about our bid, talk a little bit about support, and the folks that are behind it.

Why we believe ICANN should choose us, and then answer any questions.

Probably the first thing, the dot – The .org Foundation is probably the easiest way to keep it straight, is a brand-new foundation formed for the express purpose of bidding to become the successor registry for the dot org TLD.

We are a group of people, about a dozen who come from a pretty broad range of both commercial and non-profit space.

We have several members of our team here with us, live, Melessa Rogers, who is a career non-profit professional, spent more than 20 years working across the world in a variety of different noncommercial operations.

We had a couple of team members listed here who didn't make it, we have our registry service provider, technology eNom represented here by the founder and CEO and they're available to answer some of the questions we have here.

We have a broad range of support from organizations.

We have just begun the process of actually introducing that support.

We have one of our supporters Microsoft who engenders the same type of response we get, but again we have some really important reasons to why we selected Microsoft and why we think they're important.

And then briefly, my background, I'm the Executive Director of the association, often referred to as a serial entrepreneur, I've founded seven companies that have been successful in one form or another, I've been involved in a number of noncommercial enterprises as well, involved with universities and various associations.

For me, I'm best known as a guy who is capable of taking a vision and turning it into a real business, and that's really what I think we have here.

Perhaps the best example, and most tangible one for this group, would be I was the co-founder and CEO of homegrocer.com.

For those who know a little bit about our service, we were, at the time, we sold it to one of our competitors, the largest Internet grocery in the world doing about 400 million in sales, we had a profitable operation and about 2500 staff operating in ten different facilities.

So we're pretty use to building complex and large businesses.

Looking at our bid, we looked hard at the criteria ICANN would be using to investigate who would be the best group, and we focused on what we believed was the most important aspect first, and that was to ensure the stability, the security of operating the registry.

Our solution to that was to partner and retain the services of eNom, who are – for people who don't know, the sixth largest registrar in the ICANN group.

They've registered over a million names.

They're doing 50 to 100 million DNS lookups a day and offer a broad range of services to their current customers and things that we actually look at offering as part of our bid.

So real-time zone updates as opposed to the 24-hour current situation, that sort of thing.

Also included in that is support from Microsoft, and that includes both technical and financial support.

We think it is very important to engage a group like Microsoft into more aggressive support of ICANN. So everyone understands, the reason why Microsoft is so interested in our bid is eNom uses Microsoft software and of course it's very important to them to be seen and perceived and actually running an Internet infrastructure.

So for them it's a very important thing corporately, and we expect that the org participants and certainly our registry will benefit from their assistance.

The second thing we really looked at was serving the org community.

Our only agenda is to use the org foundation and its resources to benefit the org's themselves the actual registrants.

We did come in at the lowest price at four ninety-five to show it was possible to do that.

Unique among the bids, from what we understand, our only purpose is basically to assist with the organization.

So all of our net proceeds are going to be going back to the org's.

And again, we think unique in our group, our entire board and all governance will basically be directly elected by the actual dot org registrants themselves.

We also read the aspects the ICANN Board was looking for enhanced competition and what more could enhanced competition by having a new stable and viable registry.

We look carefully at the equivalent access provisions and a variety of other set of requests to adhere to ICANN standards and found that to be very much part of our bid, and then proposed things like no-cost transfers that the registrars find very acceptable.

In terms of registering the dot org names, we looked at enhancing the capabilities that are there and so we proposed in our submission actually extending the EPP interface and adding polling capability.

As people renew names and as people do lookups, actually enable us to gather information, to ask questions, all optional, but ways of sort of really getting a good feel for how folks would feel about different activities.

That's also how we look at electing our board members.

We also expect that we can do fairly well in finding matching funds for the VeriSign endowment, and we have made some good progress in there, but don't have anything we get to announce at this meeting.

And again, our entire purpose is really to focus on providing access.

We believe we will become the consensus choice among a variety of groups, and that may be a little bold to say on the second day of discussions, but we've sort of seen from most people that our approach to it is very straightforward.

We're not proposing anything really controversial.

We are getting good support from the noncommercial organizations, folks like the Digital Partners who provide – whose sole purpose is to bridge the digital divide, and we expect to see more and more.

We've had some early government support, we will plan on getting support from a broader range.

I'm actually a Canadian and Irish citizen currently living in the US so I figure at the least I can count on those countries.

We're also getting good support from the academic community and then from a variety of commercial enterprises who look at this as a way they can help support things.

And probably the comment to make there is I think Microsoft is actually one of the largest donors to the not for profit community; certainly their founder is the largest sort of worldwide so I think their credentials on that side speak fairly loudly.

We believe we're the best bid and that's why ICANN should choose us.

We think eNom is very strong technically, we believe we provide the best price and service to the community.

We think we already have a very broad base of support but it is growing, and adding a stable new registry is something that's very valuable for ICANN.

And then for us, we really are the only bid we can see that the org community is in complete control of the registry.

They have all governance.

And with that, I'd like to turn it over to questions if anyone has any.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much.

Are there questions from the Board?

Amadeu.

Keep it short, please.

>>Amadeu Abril i Abril: Does it work?

Here behind the wall of screens.

Couple questions, first of all, I had not understood exactly what is the relationship between Microsoft and your proposal because you mentioned it twice.

Do they have any managing or technical support role within the proposal?

The second one, you said that the dot org community is in full control of the governance of the structure.

Could you elaborate a little bit on how this works?

I'm thinking about all the forums you say you will organize and congresses, but how these go into the goals and the making of the organization itself.

>>Terry Drayton: Maybe in reverse order.

What we actually proposed in our sort of governance plan was that over a period of time we'd initially start with --

>>Vinton Cerf: That is not considered acceptable to block the timer clock in order to gain more time.

(Laughter.)

>>Terry Drayton: I thought that was a pretty good strategy.

What we actually looked at is directly electing a total of 15 board members for the foundation, of which 10 would be directly elected as a representative sample of all of the different organizations, both geographic participation as well as different types of organizations.

And then that group of ten would select five more participants.

So over a period of time, when we start we'd have five board members who are appointed and then over the course of the first three years we actually add the rest of the board members.

So that was our proposal.

And then really the agenda of the organization is entirely dependent on what that group of people do.

So we thought that gave us a direct tie back to the community.

Then to answer your first question in terms of Microsoft, we have a letter of support from their chief financial officer.

We are expecting that we will have a broader and more tangible letter, but that was as quick as we – as much as we could get in the short period we had.

What they have said is it is very, very important to them that they become part – a broader part of the Internet infrastructure.

Their whole focus now is moving into the enterprise space and for them it's a really big deal.

They also give huge amounts of money, just gave the digital partners $25 million worth of products and services so we believe we'll be able to add to our proposal when we have more tangible information.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

That's a clever strategy.

Can you say which organizations are registered now by eNom?

In which top-level domain is eNom registering?

>>Paul Stahura: You mean which TLDs do we perform services for?

I don't have them all memorized but --

>>Vinton Cerf: A lot of them.

So you're not functioning as a registry but as a registrar.

>>Paul Stahura: That's correct.

>>Vinton Cerf: But dot org is a registry so how does this work?

>>Paul Stahura: We think there's, technologywise, there's not much of a jump from being a registrar to a registry, and we think being a registry, technologywise, is easier.

We interface to a number of different registries, we do EPP, a number of services, a lot of Whois information.

So we think – we have the DNS set up already, so we think it's a pretty simple jump, actually.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

Are there any other questions for the Board?

All right.

I am absolutely astonished at the swiftness with which everyone is presenting.

Thank you very, very much.

You're welcome to take another two minutes and 40 seconds.

>>Terry Drayton: I think in the interest of the whole group we'll sit down.

>>Vinton Cerf: The chair acknowledges the generous contribution of two minutes and 35 seconds.

(Applause.)

The Internet Society

>>Louis Touton: The next presenter is the Internet Society.

>>Lynn St. Amour: I think we need tape for the cord because it keeps moving.

>>Vinton Cerf: So the first question is whether this is Microsoft's software.

(Laughter.) (Applause.)

>>Lynn St. Amour: It's an Apple.

>>Vinton Cerf: What have I done?

(Laughter.)

>>Lynn St. Amour: Sorry.

Can everybody hear me okay?

I'm afraid I've got sort of an ear and throat infection so my voice waivers in and out a lot.

One – I'm Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO with the Internet Society and we believe we have a strong and complete proposal. ISOC has long played a critical role in being sure the Internet evolves in a stable manner.

>>Vinton Cerf: I'm sorry, can I interrupt?

The charts are almost impossible to read and I don't want to – I want to interrupt the timing.

Thank you.

All right.

Let's go ahead.

>>Lynn St. Amour: I'm told the wire is not well connected in the back so I can't touch it.

As I said, we've long played a critical role in ensuring that the Internet develops in a stable and open manner.

We're actually proposing to set up a separate non-profit company which we're calling – I didn't touch it, I swear.

>>Vinton Cerf: We will reset the clock.

It's not fair that you should be literally screwed by an unscrewed screw.

(Laughter.) (Applause.)

>>Lynn St. Amour: As unpleasant as that may be.

And perhaps even deserving.

All you other Mac users, beware.

Okay.

So as I said, we've long played a critical role in ensuring that the Internet develops in a stable and open manner.

We've actually been involved with and supported the IETF, the standards process since our inception ten years ago, and we've supported various education and training initiatives, in fact going back even further than that for the last 12 years.

We're proposing who set up a separate non-profit company called Public Interest Registry that will draw upon the resources of ISOC's extended global network to drive policy and management.

We've chosen Afilias as our back-end service provider because they provide dependable global technology services and have the most experience in running an EPP based registry.

And I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce Ram Mohan who is the CTO of Afilias.

We believe this ensures a smooth transition and stability for the dot org domain. ISOC is a natural successor to manage dot org.

We're the foremost noncommercial organization focused on the Internet.

We have a strong tradition and long tradition of working in the public interest, one of the best examples is the developing country workshops we've run for 12 years now and in fact most of the countries that have come online in the last 12 years actually credit that fact to the Internet Society's efforts and those training workshops.

We have over 10,000 individual members.

Our membership is free, although we do encourage members to join through chapters and we encourage those chapters to collect dues to support their local efforts.

Over 65% of those members are outside North America.

We have 60 chapters, 70 chapters in formation and over 85% of those are outside North America.

So you can see we have a very diverse membership.

We have over 137 organizational members, many noncommercials are included amongst them, spanning most of the noncommercial base.

We have a strong globally diverse board.

And we're going to build on that foundation by creating a non-profit company to contract with ICANN.

The board will be appointed by the ISOC Board.

We expect there to be very little overlap between the two boards.

PIR policies will be derived from ISOC principles and will contract with Afilias for the back-end registry services so that was to explain very clearly the role

Why did we choose Afilias?

We selected them because of the most successful new gTLD registry.

They have over 850,000 dollar – 850,000 names in dot info, and they have global operations – headquartered in Ireland, with operations in the U.S., U.K. and Canada – fueling international registry competition they're a fully international registry.

Afilias’ .info authorized registrars now actually manage 99% of all the dot org registrations today.

Obviously that will facilitate a very smooth transition.

They contract exclusively with ICANN accredited registrars and they have a proven ability to make realistic commitments and then meet them.

I've summarized here the 11 criteria, and I'm actually going to comment on each one of them very, very briefly and then come back and summarize with the strengths column here.

The first one the stable, well functioning registry, both the Internet Society and its back-end provider Afilias have an established record of achievements that support our ability to preserve the stability and functions of the dot org registry.

ICANN developed policies.

We're committing explicitly that the Public Interest Registry will comply in all respects with ICANN policies.

As far as enhanced registry competition, our application proposes that a new and competitive entity, Afilias will perform the back-end services.

Our proposal is it should be more than an annex in country TLDs, it should be recognized as a worldwide domain for noncommercial organizations.

Public Interest Registry will carry out the commitments in the application, including, for example, the establishment of an advisory council and execution of a marketing plan to reach out to the global noncommercial Internet community, both the existing users and the larger group of organization that are not now using the domain.

We propose that the Public Interest Registry will be able to avail itself of the resources of the Internet Society, which provides an existing and globally extensive network of contacts with noncommercial Internet users.

Our application provides a detailed statement of the advance services that will be available from Afilias, our back-end registry service provider, with a proven record of performance.

Our proposed cost of services is the same as that now existing.

We have proposed full compliance with proposed protocol changes in the shared registry system.

And our application includes a detailed transition plan that is fully responsive to the need for a seamless and transparent process to the end users.

The Public Interest Registry as a not for profit corporation will qualify for the VeriSign endowment, and our plans include using it for marketing support and outreach programs.

We believe that our plan is complete and realistic.

Our analysis is based on the full range of experience of the Internet Society and Afilias

In summary, when we actually look at the 11 criteria, we think of them in two main buckets.

The first one, and I think the most critical, is a stable globally competitive registry, and the second one is support for the dot org community.

We actually believe that we can provide that support through ISOC's stable, responsible stewardship, through Afilias's proven reliable registry services delivery.

From new services designed to meet the noncommercial needs with input from advisory council and education outreach programs.

And we have clear community support.

And in fact, over the last week, since we've publicly announced the bid we received 400 letters of support from over 60 countries.

I think that's it.

We'll go to questions.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much, Lynn.

Are there any questions from the Board?

Evidently not.

Yes, I see Amadeu, did you have a question?

>>Amadeu Abril i Abril: Yes.

It's a short question but it's a question that's out there in the corridors.

It's not something you should solve, but the Board should solve, but how do you see the question of many Board – most of these Board members being members of ISOC and can that cause a possible conflict in your organization?

>>Lynn St. Amour: There are ten Board members that are members of ISOC as well.

My first question is I don't know why everybody is not.

(Applause.)

>>Lynn St. Amour: That notwithstanding, I don't think being a member of an organization is enough to recuse one's self.

I could use another example, since many of us are members of the International Red Cross, I wouldn't suggest that people should recuse themselves simply because they're a member of an organization.

Having a Board seat would be different, but there is no ICANN Board member today that actually has a position in the governance structure of ISOC.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you, Lynn.

That's, I think, a very good response.

Amadeu.

>>Amadeu Abril i Abril: And the second is also a short question because I don't remember reading that in the application exactly.

Perhaps it's there.

Your relationship with Afilias as a provider is intended as a transitional situation and – PIR, sorry, intends to internalize management later on in time?

Or you think this is the stable picture for the management under your application?

>>Lynn St. Amour: We're proposing we set up a permanent non-profit company reporting to ISOC that will actually sign the contract with ICANN and establish the contract with Afilias.

>>Vinton Cerf: One question on those lines, Lynn.

So this would be a separate organization with separate accounting and separate funding and so on.

It's not bound in some financial way with the Internet Society; is that correct?

>>Lynn St. Amour: It is completely separate.

It is wholly owned, if you will, by ISOC.

The board – so it's a subsidiary corporation of the Internet Society.

It will be run completely as a separate company.

We expect little, if any, overlap between the two boards, and we may have one or two positions initially as a part of the transition.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

Other?

Lyman Chapin.

>>Lyman Chapin: Can you say the role your other partners are playing in this?

You mentioned Afilias but there are a number of others mentioned in the application.

>>Lynn St. Amour: They're the only other person we're partnering with.

If you're talking about IBM – Ram, do you want to say?

>>Ram Mohan: I'm Ram Mohan, and I'm the CTO of Afilias.

There are a number of other organizations that are mentioned in the application, ultraDNS is one of the world's leading provider of managed DNS solutions, and we intend to use them to provide high registration to resolution speeds for the dot org domain.

We also use Iron Mountain for data escrow services and you'll find them listed.

And we use – we depend upon IBM's global services data centers to provide full support, 24/7 basis, for the data centers.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

Are there any other questions?

Evidently not.

You have four minutes if you wish to continue making any other comments, or you can return them to the pool.

>>Lynn St. Amour: I think I'll return them to the pool.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much for your contribution.

(Applause.)

>>Lynn St. Amour: I have to be unscrewed.

>>Louis Touton: The next presenter will be Internet Multicasting Service, in partnership with the Internet Software Consortium.

>>Vinton Cerf: So how many engineers does it take to get the Powerpoint presentations....

So this is proving another one of my favorite mottos, power corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.

(Laughter.)

>>: They still work to make standards for these laptops.

>>: Yes, standards would be good.

Trusted resource dot org, slash presentation.

>>Vinton Cerf: What we need is an Internet-enabled presentation and you use Internet standards to present to it.

Internet Multicasting Service, Inc., and Internet Software Consortium, Inc.

>>Carl Malmud: I have a very sick laptop. It's two years old here. It's not necessarily behaving.

There you go. Okay.

My name is Carl Malmud, I'm the chairman and founder of the Internet Multicasting Service. Our partner is the Internet Software Consortium. We are both public benefit corporations. IMS was founded in 1993. We're not proposing to set up a new organization. Both of our organizations are chartered to do public infrastructure on the Internet. That's what we've been doing for 10 years.

I have 5 slides. Let me briefly go over those.

I want to talk about performance and stability. I want to talk about our public aspect of what we're doing. I want to talk about our focus and purpose, the people involved in this, and then I want to close with a couple parables.

Today's for the letter "P," obviously.

Performance. If you look at our bid, and it's online, trusted.resource.org. We actually put it online before submitting it to ICANN – you will see that we have engineered a rock-sold public utility that builds on our existing infrastructure. Today, we operate the F root server, one of the busiest root servers. We do TLD DNS service for 22 top-level domains. We have a long experience operating very large databases on the Internet, operating large services.

We also – and I think this is very important – have a proven ability to carefully innovate on production services, to work with the IETF to understand where the standards are, understand where there is consensus, and very carefully roll those in to a public service.

So stability is definitely our first goal.

Public. That's a very important aspect of our bid.

We are saying, and we will publish freely available software, by that, I mean source and binary – DSD licenses. Hello?

So we're saying this will be available not only for registrar software, and there are a couple packages out there, but registry software. And we think that's a very important thing for promoting innovation in the future, for promoting competition. We have a long track record of producing production software for the Internet. Among other things, we introduce bind, we produce the leading freely available DHCP software. We have recently published Internet drafts that suggest way that is small to medium-sized name spaces, of which the Whois is an example, can be automated and moved into a more modern environment. We are proposing an open and transparent process. Everything we do, ranging from our finances, and if you look at our bid, you will see we submitted 9 years of tax returns, we have three-year audits, we will run the operation in a fully open and responsive and accountable fashion.

Purpose. We are a highly focused organization. We do run public infrastructure. We have also run projects and conceived and implemented projects that have brought the Internet to large new populations. We put the Edgar and patent databases on the Internet, which are responsible for bringing in large classes of new users. We ran the Internet 1996 World Exposition, which had a tremendous number of participants, from 130 different countries. We are used to creating level playing fields that create and encourage community participation.

We view that as a very important aspect of dot org.

People.

Our team is not a group that's going to be hired, a group that we will recruit in the future. The program managers listed in the bid all have long experience doing this. Paul Vixie, who is chairman of the Internet Software Consortium, has been working in this area for a decade, Suzanne Woolf has been working in this area for a decade, had worked at ISI, technical operations manager for ICANN. Rebecca Malamud and myself have been working at the Internet Multicasting Service. We are the people who will be accountable and responsible for the transition and the operation. We are joined by people like Rick Wesson, who is the CTO of the registrars constituency, and Michael Graf, who is responsible for security and other aspects of our operation. Michael you may know from having done the first PGP key networks. We have a variety of other very capable technical people.

Our governance structure is incredibly strong. As we were putting this bid together, we felt it was very important that there were a group of individuals who will fiduciary responsible and accountability to the public. And as part of that, we have expended our board to include Rick Adams, who is was the founder of UUNET. He is a well-known businessman, technical innovator. You may not know this, but he did the first innovations of SLIP, which led to the dialup industry. He personally went over our pro forma financials, and I believe we are the only bid that has published all of our financials. Pindar Wong. --

Both of them looked at this bid and felt it was something they could live with and were willing to put their reputation on the line. We've recently been joined by Daniel Karrenberg, founder of the RIPE NCC. We felt a public process making sure everything we do is out there in the open, all our statistics are out in the open, all our proposals for what we want to do are out in the open, public feedback, and a strong governance structure, is what leads to public accountability.

I want to close with a couple parables.

Global villages are a metaphor that I've been using for a long time. And I think any community, any society requires a mix of public and private infrastructure. One of the reasons we want to publish our registry software is we think that's going to encourage new commercial providers. In the real world, you have public parks, you have corporations, you have a mix. And that's what makes a society work.

On the Internet, public works are equally important. And by "public works," I don't mean good works. I mean rock-solid public utilities that can operate the dot org registry in a solid manner.

I'm done and would be happy to take questions.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much, Carl.

Are there questions from the Board? Stuart.

>>Stuart Lynn: Thank you very much, Carl.

I was a little confused when you said about the 22 top-level registries. Is that full registry experience or secondaries or what is that?

>>Carl Malmud: We serve DNS for 19 country TLDs and three generic TLDs.

>>Stuart Lynn: Thank you.

>>Carl Malmud: We have no direct registry experience. We have a lot of experience with the protocols, EPP and the registry protocol. We have a lot of experience, obviously, with the DNS, lot of experience with Whois. Suzanne Woolf, for example, ran the rWhois service for the .us domain. We certainly have a lot of experience with large database services. I think something that's especially important, we have a lot of experience on large, public, potentially difficult transitions.

We took the SEC database and we moved that over to the SEC. We have worked with the ITU taking their databases and putting them on the Internet. We have a lot of experience working with large organizations that either are cooperating or not cooperating. And one of the things I can say is that Paul Vixie, myself, Rebecca, and Suzanne, will be personally managing the transition and we will make it happen on time.

>>Vinton Cerf: Amadeu.

>>Amadeu Abril i Abril: Thanks, Carl. These are questions I have for all the applicants. I would like to ask you.

How many people do you think it's needed for running the total registry as it is today? Or in the next – future?

>>Carl Malmud: I did a very conservative financial model. If you look at our model, we're actually showing about a 37% gross margin after cost of operations. That's based on 19.75 FTE. We're going to supplement that with a series of consultants on things like security reviews, protocol reviews, and things of that sort.

But it seems to us that for something this size, in the 3 million names – by the way, we've scaled this so that we're really set to operate this at the, you know, 15- to 30 million-name level. At the hardware base, we're actually set to bring it up to about a hundred if we need to. But in terms of operations, in terms of making sure we have ICANN compliance, that we have registrar liaison, that we have our legal assistants, our technical staff, our customer support, we sized it at about 20.

>>Vinton Cerf: Okay. Thank you, Carl.

Just one clarification. On the Edgar database, am I remembering correctly that it started as a project funded by NSF and you operated the resulting system and then transferred its operation, what, to the SEC?

>>Carl Malmud: Absolutely. We, as an independent initiative, at a request of a member of congress who was then a chairman, we applied to the national science foundation. We got a small grant, supplemented that with a lot of hardware. We ran the service for two years. We felt at that time that it was important to transition it back to the SEC. We engaged in a public dialogue with the SEC. At the end of that, the chairman and other commissioners asked if we could get it up and running. We took our computers, put them in the back of a station wagon, drove down, configured their T-1 lines, got it up and running, no break in service. Today they are now running that service as, I believe, the busiest web service of the US government.

They also have bulk access to all their data as well, which is something we felt was very important. You can ftp the entire SEC database.

We also ran the patent database, they are not running our code, but we were instrumental in convincing the commissioners that they should open up their system and make it available.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you, Carl.

Are there any other questions?

You're free to continue on if you wish. Or are you going to donate the minutes?

>> Carl Malmud: I'm happy to donate the time.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much, Carl.

(Applause.)

Dot Org Foundation

>>Louis Touton: The next presentation will be by the Dot Org Foundation.

>>Mikhail Kazachkov: Ladies and gentlemen, members of the Board, it's a privilege and an honor to be here today, tonight. And I thank you for the opportunity to make our presentation.

My name is Mikhail Kazachkov. I'm a Russian national and a board member of the Dot Org Foundation. You have our proposal.

We all want to see the dot org domain grow. Ultimately, it will only grow with the global growth of the civil society.

The value of the dot org name registration will increase when, a, the concept of a noncommercial organization acquires increased social value; and, b, the dot org name becomes an obvious necessity to every such organization.

The slide lists of three elements we believe are essential for that: Outreach, validation, and technology.

Of course, there is room for civil society improvement in the leading market democracies. But there, at least, everyone understands why not for profits are important and what to expect from them.

There is not necessarily – this is not necessarily true of the noncommercial sector in many parts of the world outside. Before not-for-profits in that part of the world will decide to register their dot org domain names, they have to know why and how it will help them in their course.

We believe existing credibility of some noncommercial organizations can be expanded to the others, and the mechanism for that is validation of the bona fide ones.

Technology represented in our proposal will help make such validation official. But let me be clear: Dot Org Foundation is not planning to become a global validator. In our proposal, you will find a list of over 60 existing validators we compiled. Our role will be to link them with sources of technology and expert advice.

It is our vision that through proactive outreach, validation, and sophisticated but relevant technology, we can contribute to the steady growth of the noncommercial sector and thus to the expansion of the dot org domain.

We do not believe any noncommercial organization, either an existing one or built (inaudible) base, can possess technology and personnel required to implement the state (inaudible) with adequate reliability. Neither do we believe a for-profit organization can ensure credibility, independence, and policy insight required.

Hence, our organizational answer is a carefully structured private/public partnership.

We have examples of such successful partnerships. For instance, among the 64 campuses of the State University of New York system, several are private schools, Cornell University being the better-known one. The other examples are Max Plank and Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany. Our partnership consists of three organizations: Two for-profit companies and the Dot Org Foundation I represent.

The for-profits are Registry Advantage and Kintera. The slide lists what each brings to the partnership.

The Dot Org Foundation made it explicit we will outsource all technology issues to our two partners, with whom we have executed binding contracts.

Here I want to stress we are happy with our choice and believe some of our partners' technologies are truly vital to ensure the stability and growth of the dot org registry.

Dot Org Foundation was created specifically for this project. It is a fully functioning not-for-profit corporation, American 501(c)(3), largely thanks to decades of experience, its creators are bringing from the noncommercial world and the government. The foundation is fully legally established, held several board meetings, has an operating budget and sophisticated bylaws. Its international board of directors is on this slide, with brief characterization of these people.

The board represents three continents and has technical expertise as well as extensive not-for-profit and it business experience.

Bio sheets are attached to the proposal. Let me just mention one policy-level project not reflected there. A few years ago, the world bank awarded a nonprofit I am the president of a quarter of a million dollars to develop national communications policy for Russia, which would be alternative to the one pursued by the circuit switchers in the Russian telecommunications ministry.

The institutional legacy of that successful project the Russian Institute for – which has functioned for five years and which is the World Bank's partner in distance learning projects in Russia.

Let me summarize.

The Dot Org Foundation is 100% focused on the task as it was formulated by the ICANN Board. It has transparent processes in its adopted bylaws. All board minutes and resolutions will be posted online. We will be soliciting public input, again, in an online mode, before considering resolutions and policy decisions.

Moreover, after such policy decisions will have been made, there will be a 30-day period when members of our constituency who would like to challenge that and (inaudible) to consider will have an opportunity to request that.

We will have a 25-person strong advisory council. Three members of that council, the chairperson elect, the acting chairperson, and the outgoing chairperson, will have full voting rights on the board of directors of Dot Org Foundation.

Oversight will be provided by experienced and independent directors.

Independence can only be ensured through personal integrity and some proof of it. I will speak just for myself. I am the last dissident prisoner who was released from the Soviet Union after 15 years as a guest of the KGB hotel chain. Frankly, I don't think any pressure from a foreign partner or government can do what the KGB failed to achieve.

(Applause.)

>>Mikhail Kazachkov: The same is true speaking of the integrity of our other board members.

Thank you.

The full technology presentation is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. tomorrow in the (inaudible) room. So speaking of the Registry Advantage capabilities, I will only stress that its technology is proven, tested, and we believe best in class.

Again, let me stress what may be the most important feature of our proposal. It is fully focused on the success of the specific task as it is formulated by the ICANN Board. All revenue from fee also go towards strengthening the registry.

Will we need the VeriSign endowment? We sure would welcome it. How are we going to spend that income from the endowment if it comes?

Well, according to the Dot Org Foundation board decisions, of course, but with the opinion of registrants fully taken into account. In fact, we will launch such an online forum next week. Will we be successful if the endowment never materializes? The answer is definitely yes.

A few words on marketing. One can only market to consumers familiar with the concept of your product. Sure, we will, like some other bidders, engage in intensive marketing to an existing dot org online community. This will be our short-term strategy.

For the longer term, there is no alternative to what we call extensive marketing, outside the existing constituencies. A better term for that effort is probably market development. We already talked some about market development in my opening comments.

Well, sorry, something is....

Okay. The technology, even if it's failing us only at the last slide, which explicitly states the goals.

And our goals may not be original. They are pretty much the same as every other bidder. In fact, these goals were defined by the ICANN Board.

What should differentiate us is our vision in the implementation approach we have actually put in place. That sums up my comments, and I am open to questions.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much, Michael.

Amadeu.

>>Amadeu Abril i Abril: Thanks.

Two questions and a half.

The questions are – they are quite brief.

First, regarding money, a foundation normally has money devoted to a goal. Where does the funding for this foundation come from? And do you have enough resources to run the dot org registry in case you are without the endowment from VeriSign?

Second, you say that part of the benefit of this managing would be devoted, you know, focused on the community. Could you explain what this means, that money from dot org registry would be used to fund noncommercial projects around the world?

>>Mikhail Kazachkov: Absolutely not.

>>Amadeu Abril i Abril: Oh, thanks.

And the third one is validation. I haven't – understand this is an option, there's no obligatory validation for the registrants; is that correct?

>>Mikhail Kazachkov: Let me address them in the order asked.

Money. It's not for nothing that I characterized our organizational structure as private/public partnership.

The initial funding to prepare the proposal and to spin out the operation is coming from our private partners as a loan to the foundation.

I mentioned that we have fully executed contracts which state that whatever we spend, in case we are not winning the bid, we are not paying back. So it is a very detailed, well worked through with our lawyers and their lawyers contracts.

So we do have the resources to start it and to work until the cash flow from registrations is coming in to support us.

It's not for nothing we did not mention the cost of registration, because we don't really know. We know our estimates show it will definitely be below the $6 present value. But you can only really learn that once you are operational. Because we don't know whether the frequency of registrations will increase or decrease. And there are indications that they probably will decrease.

So what we do know is that we build a spreadsheet, address it as a business plan. And we know we can do that even if the endowment doesn't come in.

So that's the first question.

Second, are we going to spend any of the revenue on projects that – not directly related to keeping a stable and strong registry.

Absolutely not.

What we will do is, we will help national communities of noncommercial organizations by connecting them to the existing funders who are supporting development of civil society. We will be encouraging those funders to allocate some of their money to creating local national validators. Because even today, who is the validator for a commercial exempt tax association in America, IRS. Is the validation good enough for a European nation or Canada or Mexico? Apparently not. They have their own laws.

So the validators must be local. The emergence of such a validator is an important step in a civil society.

Let me give you one example. There is American combined federal campaign. Combined federal campaign is an annual event when every federal employee in the united states is encouraged to donate some money to a not-for-profit, a noncommercial organization.

The combined federal campaign screens these organizations, motivated them to write very brief abstracts of who they are and what they do. And then federal employees choose.

The money thus collected are then directed to these noncommercial entities.

So --

>>Vinton Cerf: I'm sorry, excuse me, you've just run out of time.

>>Mikhail Kazachkov: Okay.

>>Vinton Cerf: And in keeping with --

>>Mikhail Kazachkov: That's all right. I guess I answered most of the questions.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much for your contribution and proposal.

(Applause.)

Unity Registry

>>Louis Touton: The next presentation is by Unity Registry.

>>David Johnson: We are Unity Registry coming up here together to show our unity, of course. I'm David Johnson.

I'm very proud to be working with Unity Registry because I think they bring you the complete package.

I'd like to introduce Malcolm Corbett and Simon from ausRegistry and Stuart Marsden of Poptel.

Unity registry is a partnership of geographically diverse and complementary registrars.

ausRegistry is the registry for seven second level TLDs in the .au ccTLD.

Poptel has under its belt a successful launch dot co-op.

But Poptel has for 20 years been focused on serving the noncommercial sector.

It's motto for 20 years has been "connect-inform-empower" as aimed as the noncommercial sector.

ausRegistry has 300,000 registrations and serves the dot org au registry.

It has relationships with a large number of noncommercial organizations on a global basis, and its plan is focused on reaching out to all sectors of the noncommercial world.

And as I mentioned, it has successfully launched the .coop TLD.

We are mindful that the key criteria is a smooth transition, and stress that we have experience in transitioning multiple existing registries.

I think you'll find the longest and most detailed written proposal goes into great detail as to the requirements for transition, and we have focused particularly on the need to have a very proactive role played by the incumbent VeriSign during the transition and have committed in our proposal to pay any fees that may be determined to require that we can assure the smooth transition, run parallel systems as long as necessary, run redundant systems, and make a progressive and full migration to a thick registry using the state-of-the-art EPP version 6 software that ausRegistry is currently operating.

After a smooth transition, of course stabilization is important.

Our plan includes multiple redundant systems and data centers.

We believe that a for-profit organization plus our plan for a user cooperative to provide accountability and user input actually provides the best assurance of long-term stability, and we are not requesting and do not require the VeriSign endowment, which again we think will be simplifying and lead to greater stability.

We think accepting our bid will lead to enhanced competition by creating a new gTLD registry operator with a clear focus on the needs of this particular domain.

The registrars, of course, will be treated equitably and we will not be competing with them.

We do, because of our locations in the UK and Australia have the ability to provide 24/7 registrar support on both sides of the globe, and we have a plan for dealing with lower prices and reduction in prices as the registry grows.

All of that will only be possible if we can differentiate dot org and make it grow because its value is understood.

Our extensive marketing plan helps to I am straight how we think, based on the 20 years of Poptel's experience, we can reach out to the dot org community.

For potential registrants, of course, who are nonprofits that gives them a positive reason to register in dot org and giving them positive reasons, like the directory who will help find others pursuing the same purposes around the globe.

And we provided more detail on those items in the proposal.

Even for corporations in the dot org space, we think there's an opportunity to explain and induce them to use the dot org space to present their civic and corporate responsibility face to the world, so that we don't end up with a lot of dot org registrations that lead nowhere or only to a dot come site.

And obviously we think we can position the dot org space to the general public as a place they can make a difference by giving an involvement and getting and giving information

So overall, our approach to differentiation is to say that what dot com was for financial gain dot org can become for social gain.

Now, all of that only matters if it's assured by an accountability structure.

And one unique feature of our bid is a plan to create a user cooperative, which is a longstanding and trusted mechanism for assuring input into the policy decisions made by the domain, assuring one vote per member of the user cooperative in forming an org policy council that will have substantial input into how to spend the committed 10% of net profit before tax to develop new value-added services aimed at this community and developed with their input.

In addition, we have proposed and explained in more detail in the proposal to operate under new international standards for stakeholder accountability.

These require not just the statement of a proposed set of services but the establishment, through organizations, of concrete social-gain goals and metrics so that, over time, you can tell whether or not the organization is meeting not only the financial objectives stated in a business plan but the social-gain objectives stated in its social-gain plan.

Our plan does not, of course, divert registrant fees to any specific good works because we plan to serve all the registrants in dot orgs.

We have consulted widely with the noncommercial sector in putting together our bid.

We have strong support and expect more.

And you can see on the cards available, and you will see on the ICANN site, the statements of support that will be forthcoming.

So I think I'll call the others up to help me answer any questions you may have.

>>Vinton Cerf: Are there questions from the Board?

I'd like to lead in with one.

Thank you very much for that presentation.

Would you remind me of which second-level TLDs are operated by ausRegistry and the magnitude of those TLDs and registrations.

>>: We have, as they said, seven, org.au, id.au which is a new personal name space being announced and we also have the two closed au, obviously the biggest of that is the com.au with 240,000 domains currently in it and a fair spread amongst the others going up to 300,000, approximately in total.

>>Vinton Cerf: So you will be faced with a system that's ten times larger at the outset.

How do you feel about managing that?

>>: Our system has been built to be entirely scalable to many millions of domains and has been tested up to 3 million domains.

We have – it's basically an extension of our existing infrastructure that will be used for the dot org registry.

So our systems have been designed in that manner.

>>Vinton Cerf: The gentlemen are now blocking my clock.

Thank you.

Well – let me suggest that you all move over in that direction, please.

That way, and then I can see.

Thank you.

I have one more question, and it has to do not with the physical capability to handle large numbers of domain names but the staffing ability to deal with all of the changes disputes and other kinds of ills that accompany operating a registry.

>> Stuart Marsden: Okay. I'm Stuart Marsden from Poptel. Between the two organizations we now have about 80 staff.

>>Vinton Cerf: 18?

>>: Eight zero.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

>>: And we anticipate we probably have to hire an additional 15 people.

So this is well within our stability of handling this.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

Are there any other questions from the Board?

You have another six minutes, gentlemen, if you would like to proceed or return the time.

>>: I think in the spirit of cooperation and commitment to community, we'll cede our time.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much for your presentation.

(Applause.)

>>Louis Touton: The next presentation will be by SWITCH.

>>Vinton Cerf: It's enormously tempting to imagine there might be another organization called bait and that they would join together with SWITCH.

(Laughter.)

>>Vinton Cerf: You can tell, some of us are becoming a little exhausted.

SWITCH Swiss Academic and Research Network

>>Marcel Schneider: Okay.

Thank you very much for having the possibility to present our bid here.

Actually, we'll be a double act.

I will do some part, and Fay Howard, who I probably do not have to introduce to the audience, will do another part, mainly the differentiation part and marketing part.

My name is Marcel Schneider and I work for SWITCH, which is a foundation of the private sector established in 1987.

The focus of this foundation is connecting on the academic and research community to the Internet.

It is similar to what you have in the states called NSFnet or Internet 2 at the moment, and in Europe, for instance, CERFnet.

In the Netherlands or Sunet in Sweden and so on.

SWITCH is a non-profit foundation operating on the Swiss law and is financially very stable.

You can check that if you look at our bid, we have included balances so that you can make sure that you have an organization that can actually finance what's necessary with this bid.

As you can imagine, we are multilingual due to the Swiss origin and we are supporting already six languages in the registry business we are doing now, I will come to that later, and of course also multicultural.

We have proven know-how in networking, actually we are operating gigabit fiber network in Switzerland and also connectivity to the US in gigabit.

And we are also providing (inaudible) services to the academic community.

For instance, like e-learning, virtual campus, grid computing, et cetera.

We also operate .ch and .li top-level domains in 1987.

Actually, they have been assigned to us at the same time when SWITCH was founded.

And .li, probably nobody knows, is a Principality of Lichtenstein.

We just have a technical operation in this regard.

It's a very involved principality.

We have a proven track record for registry functions and we are well respected by Swiss registrars.

It is found out by a hearing that took place last year by the Swiss government, and since then – no, actually, it's this year.

We also have a delegation contract with the Swiss government to perform the registry functions for .ch.

Now, to the .org registry.

We propose in our registry concept two independent systems.

One will be located in Zurich at ETH and the other at CERN in Geneva.

And in between these two systems there's a gigabit fiberoptic links so the immediate changeover will be possible.

And this registry will be scalable and designed in the beginning to meet at least twice the initial load.

Now, the name server part, we propose 12 to 14 name servers located around the globe.

They will run a variety of platforms and architectures to prevent any kind of vulnerability using one of them.

Actually, it will be bind and derivatives, djbDNS and a Nominum global name system.

I will come to that later.

The goal that has to be met with regard to name services is that they can be accessed very quickly.

This is usually represented with round-trip times, and the many names we propose are actually to have short round-trip times with the normal so-called unicast domain system that is in place usually in the world.

And we try to combine that with the Nominum system that is based on unicast and therefore on routing protocols.

Because we'll comply with ICANN policies, actually, this concerns the contract with the ICANN accredited registrars, this is a model Whois type, and we follow of course also implement developments with any kind of Whois or other indexing services.

And we will implement a shared registry system by means of an improved registry registrar protocol and later also EPP, extensible (inaudible) protocol.

And of course we will have urp for the registrants and zone file data escrow agent.

And what I have here, rocket proof backup.

That means we have a contracting partner that enables mount ten in Switzerland and he will have a daily or even twice a day backup of the entire registries in Swiss mountain.

Okay.

More elaboration on the technical part. The shared registry system will be an improved – sorry, the registry registrar protocol will be an improved one.

Actually, we have input from registrars with regard to that and we are implementing their suggestions, and try to gain even more, as much as possible, from that protocol.

The development team will be led by Eric Brunner-Williams, and the design so far is that we will allow more than 3,000 simultaneous connections.

That ensures that it's nondiscriminatory and equal access for the registrars actually takes place.

And with regard to processing time, we have a design for 500 informational and 400 modification commands per second.

And we will accept, to ensure a smooth transition, the current registrar certificates.

The RRP plus that we will develop will be made available to ccTLDs at no cost because we think it will be quite interesting to integrate the ccTLDs and the gTLDs as much as possible for the registrar side and we plan to implement an EPP server over TCP that should be operational in the first quarter of next year.

Now, Fay Howard.

>> Fay Howard: Okay, to give Marcel a bit of a break I'll talk about marketing strategies.

SWITCH is aware of the diversity of existing registrants and that existing registrant database includes some commercial registrations.

SWITCH does not have an intention to impose restrictive registrations in the future, but will focus on the noncommercial organization – organizations, I should say, and will create a strong identity for the dot org world which will be probably less attractive to commercial registrations, leafing up to individuals to decide.

Having thought about it long and hard SWITCH decided conventional global marketing was not the best for this world, and probably not the best use of money for a not-for-profit ethic and trying to keep prices as low as possible.

But we'll engage in cooperative marketing with registrants, registrars and the registry to get some sort of synergy going there.

We want to make a difference for registrars.

Obviously, we want them all to be able to compete at an – on an equal footing and be as competitive as possible.

With that in mind, an initial fee of $5 for registration is envisaged.

There will be 365 day a year, 24/7 registration offices in three offices.

In addition to Zurich it will be Asia-Pacific region and North America.

This will be have competent personnel, high technical capabilities and financial know how.

We will have local bank for registrars to create as little disruption as possible and there will be a registrars' platform for general input in an open and transparent way with a business steering committee elected by the registrars to give feedback on pricing and services and if possible, a regional working group can be developed with support from SWITCH for travel and providing secretary services for the actual business of the steering committee.

Creating an org community for, a community gateway is to be designed to create not a dot com but a dot org culture.

This will be a global home for the noncommercial activities and provide communication interaction platform so that there is actual general win direct feedback from registrants on direction of the registry and the direction of the community gateway.

There will be org-at-a glance database and through web site search engines and newsletters for like-minded groups, independent polls if required, forums and meeting places for all kinds of organizations and institutions with noncommercial objectives.

There will also be an org community council along the lines of the registrar council, which can give input on allocation of surplus funds.

Again, this is enhanced services versus lower prices.

It's up to the registrants.

And they will be able to give input to the cooperative marketing strategies as will the registrars.

And the benefits of that are to bring like-minded groups together.

There are a lot of small organizations as well as the large high-profile dot org users, and they might have synergy and financial efficiencies by being in touch with other groups either in geographical or objective basis.

This can also create a high profile for the org community with a web site that links to smaller ones and is again genuine means of input for registry policies and practices for the end user.

>>Marcel Schneider: An easy one, the transition plan basics.

At least the more important things of it.

We'll have, in October, a trial run with CORE registrar, and in November at the latest, a trial run with data from VeriSign.

In order to be able to make the transition for the first of January in next year.

The endowment, we think we are we qualify to the endowment due to our noncommercial status and the amount proposed is $1.8 million US.

And the exclusive uses are to build up registrar platform and community gateway and regional registrar groups and initiate the community process.

So to finalize, it will be the chance for having new blood in the gTLD registry business.

There must be new blood because we are very near to the Transylvania mountains, and also a chance for a non-profit registry and a chance for a European multicultural and multilingual enterprise, and also we're a credible and independent and neutral approach by a registry, with a registry only acting as a facilitator in this regard.

And to actually get an identity for the org community, and to allow a smooth transition to the new registry.

In short, SWITCH 2 org.

(Laughter.) (Applause.)

>>Vinton Cerf: That's very good.

(Applause.)

>>Vinton Cerf: We have 50 seconds – 45 seconds left for one question, short answer, if there are any.

I have one.

I see – Amadeu, your microphone is on.

>>Amadeu Abril i Abril: No.

>>Vinton Cerf: I have a quick question on the finances.

If your price is $5, the previous prices have been much higher, has – your business model, you think will support that given the 3 million registrations that you have, are you not risking that you have to gain 10 million more in order to make the business model work?

>>Marcel Schneider: It is based on the actual amount of registrations now that are here.

And it's actually difficult to predict how it will outcome in the future but there's quite a lot of (inaudible).

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much and we are out of time.

Thank you again for your presentation and contribution.

>>Louis Touton: Vint, I think this might be an appropriate time for a break.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

I would agree.

Because everyone has been so swift, let's take a 20-minute break and we'll be back at approximately – I'm going to let people have a 20-minute break.

We will be back at approximately 8:15.

(break until 8:15)

>>Vinton Cerf: Testing, 1, 2, 3. All right.

Testing, testing.

How do I get this thing to work? I would like to reconvene the meeting, please. Will the members of the Board please take their seats. If someone is near the door, perhaps you can tell people outside that we are reconvening.

Will the Board members please take their seats. That means Mr. Pisanty, Mr. Murai. Board seats, please.

Thank you.

The meeting is now back in order. And we will have the next presentation.

>>Louis Touton: All right. We just have a few more presentations.

I wanted to ask all of the presenters who presented electronic materials to make sure that by the end of this evening, you have provided Dan Halloran here an electronic copy of your presentations. The evaluations will be done on the record, including the applications you provided and the supplemental materials that come in along the way, so that it is important that you have a – if you want that to be considered in the evaluation, that you submit it.

>>Vinton Cerf: Louis, may I ask for one clarification.

We have a very valuable script that has been produced during the course of these presentations. Will that be available to the Board and the public as well?

>>Louis Touton: Yes. These scripts, once – the real-time captioning, which is actually what it is, will be posted, as it was for the Ghana meeting. It's an excellent resource.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much.

>>Louis Touton: The next presentation will be given by Global Name Registry.

Global Name Registry

>>Andrew Tsai: Thank you, Louis.

I'd like to first off thank the ICANN Board for the opportunity to present our vision for a new dot org.

As well as the Internet community here today, for all the supporters out in the audience. As well as the nonsupporters, who have actually been more helpful in helping us redefine the definition for dot org. It's important to note that our vision for dot org really bubbled up from the ground up. And it's really about talking to the community members, the existing dot org owners out there today, the noncommercial constituents, the NGOs, we're very happy to have our partner in the vision for dot org, the red cross representative here, Lewis Coglin is with us, he flew in tonight just for this occasion. Through many long hours of work and, of course, spirited debate, the key thing about this is unwavering optimism on our part that the Internet is going to far exceed the expectations of what is possible.

And what we'd like to talk about today are 5 key partnership commitments that we want to provide to the dot org community.

The first, my partner will talk about operational excellence and how important it is to transfer the registry in a smooth and secure manner.

The Red Cross is really the organization that we felt was best suited to partner with, because if you think about a global outreach of this vision to communities around the world, dot org has a presence in 181 countries with 92 million volunteers. It's really very important for us when we talk about giving access to dot org to the international community.

We also want to talk very much about differentiation of the dot org space. We've got some very strong views on that. And points 5 are the initiatives that stemmed from all these discussions with different groups, including a success center. We are entitling it the dot org center. As well as financial resources to benefit the community, which we call – it's a newly founded fund called the causeway community foundation.

What I'd like to do to describe the vision in graphical format is show a video that captures the essence of what we talk about when we discuss community capital. The essence of it is that it is inclusive of the current community members in the space, it will be used to attract new noncommercials to the space, and equally importantly, it will be used to allow existing commercial dot org users the opportunity to reposition their dot org space.

So if you briefly allow me to switch on this quick video, I'll step aside for a moment.

(video.)

>>Andrew Tsai: The most important aspect for us, taking this vision, expanding opinion it, the most important issues that ICANN has articulated in the transition, is operational excellence.

I'd like to introduce Hakon Haugnes, who is the cofounder of GNR.

>> Hakon Haugnes: Thank you.

The very most important aspect of positioning a TLD like dot org is certainly reliability, stability, and security of the entire concession. This requires operational excellence both during and after the transition.

Our current technology is built as a state of the art registry system as the first of its kind outside of the United States. It's an in-house-built DNS system currently capable of more than 200,000 DNS queries per second. It's currently capable of more than 27 million queries per day.

It's a registry currently containing about 300,000 registered objects, but it scales to more than 50 million domain names. It contains a database backend which does about 1500 transactions per second. The system does updates within seconds of DNS and Whois worldwide.

It's a thick registry system. It's a centralized Whois. It's a state of the art operation center with global redundancy and sites worldwide on five locations. This system has ensured 100% uptime since it launched on December 15th, 2001.

This is a quick diagram about our global network. Our main site is in the UK. We have what we call a disaster recovery site in Norway, only used in disasters. And we have a DNS and mail site in Hong Kong and two DNS sites in the US.

These systems ensure 24/7 operations and 100% uptime.

Now, our entire system has been designed, built, and is currently operated by the Global Name Registry.

Everything is written in c++. We have used open source software. We love Linux. We have used the latest technology when possible. And all the system is extensively documented by our development and operations team.

It's also documented in the application.

When you're running a 100% uptime system, you need some pretty decent monitoring systems. This is just for those of you who are especially interested, a screen shot from one of the monitoring systems monitoring the packet transit times from our main sites to the different root servers.

This is a monitoring system monitoring the cross-network packet transit time between 5 different worldwide locations and all of our servers.

We're also monitoring all of our DNS, monitoring serial numbers, in fact, we also do it for some of the comparable best practice services out there.

We think that we are probably the only new TLD operator to never have had any downtime. We've never had any problems with data integrity. We've had a smooth sunrise period with no technical or for that matter, legal problems. We do our own DNS hosting and operations. We have also written an EPP client currently being used by other registry operators in their operations.

We think we are excellent in registrar relations. We have a very power team dedicated to customer service. We will want to use our registrar relations and our customer services team to enable an easy migration to EPP by allowing registrars to duly support RRP and EPP over a longer period.

We want to help registrars through the migration to a thick registry.

In addition, because of our technology and our cost-efficiencies, we can offer them a lower price.

Now, the transition plan is crucial. Our team has hands-on experience with similar transitions. Recently, a company called KPMQwest shut down their network. And we had to physically move our entire registry. We did that while continuing to support 100% uptime by using disaster site. Previously, our teams operated 1 million, 2 million-strong e-mail solution with more than 2 terabit data.

Previously essential in the build and operations of (inaudible) Alta Vista database index, more than 10 terabyte large.

The transition challenge is extremely complex, as we've laid out in the application. It's more than just moving a set of data from VeriSign to the UK.

We want to ensure a seamless transition for registrars, registrants, and the Internet community at large, which is far more than just moving the database. Among others, continuous RRP and EPP support, extensive support to registrars during the migration to thick registry, and among others, we want to leave options open for the community when the time comes to use measures such as Whois port forwarding. Imagine there are hundreds of thousands of sites out there using the Whois. And that part of the transition is probably more complex than just moving the data sites.

We have a familiarity with the VeriSign technology and teams. There's been some questions recently about the relationship between GNR and VeriSign for the purpose of dot name. Just to set the record straight, VeriSign will play absolutely no role now or in the future in the operations of dot org.

We have cooperated with VeriSign as a supplier for dot name, and we are today running similar systems. The only aspect of the dot name registry currently not operated by Global Name Registry is the EPP front end of the dot name registry.

Today and in the future, software written by us on our hardware will be supporting dot name.

And as I said before, parts of our software is already used by some other applicants for their own operators – operations.

We think that this gives us a great qualification to handle the transition properly.

With that, I'll hand it back.

>>Andrew Tsai: Thank you.

Let's talk quickly before we turn to the questions about differentiation, which is a very, very key component of this process.

And for us, differentiation starts with this constant community capital. Parts of that, from a structural perspective, include creating a dot org steering committee. Instead of setting something up from scratch, we view the best way to do that, effectively, is to use the current leadership of the noncommercial constituency, in addition to the leadership of the dot org registry, to create an oversight body that allows for transparency and accountability to the dot org registry.

We also think that price reductions are very important to maintaining a competitive nature in not only the registry market, but the registrar market as well. And in our current proposal, we have prices going as low as $3.47 per one year dot org registration, down from the current $6, based on certain duration and volume discounts.

But steering committees and price reductions alone are not enough. And, again, when we started this whole concept of creating the community capital for dot org users, we want to get a grass roots effort on what to accomplish for the Internet community. One of the main initiatives is the creation of the dot org center. This really is a success center. It's an opportunity for organizations around the world to figure out how to have a presence online on the dot org space and facilitate that.

Some examples may be a little league football team in Germany, for example, who want to organize an online presence so parents in the community can get more involved in their kids' activities.

For people in this room, it may seem trivial to set up a web site. For a lot of organizations, it's daunting. And to have a place where you can help facilitate web site creations to share success stories from people around the world, we think that is critical. And a large part of our proceeds will be going toward the dot org center funds to help the Internet community at large.

The second component of our initiatives is the newly founded Causeway Community Foundation. And this really is in conjunction with the dot org center. What this is about is really offering grants to affect the betterment of the Internet community. The most interesting thing about this is the ability for the actual existing dot org domain owners and users to effectively decide and input into where those grants are made in terms of Internet users around the world.

Without running out of time, I'd like to quickly flash through these. And I would say that all of this is on our presentation. But quickly, in summary, before we move to questions, we'd like to say that the key components are the 100% uptime, the tested and proven technology, large price reductions to promote and encourage competition, executing our vision to differentiate and respond to the needs of the dot org community, smooth transition from VeriSign, and equally important, given our European presence as the only European registry operator, greater access to the global community.

With that, I thank the Board again and offer some time for questions.

>>Vinton Cerf: We have 50 seconds.

Is there any question from a Board member?

Evidently not.

You have another 40 seconds if you'd like to continue or donate it back to the pool.

>> Andrew Tsai: I'll take that time. Thank you.

I would like to say the dot org registry.org is the web site where you can go view all these initiatives in more detail. Let me go through a few examples of how people can actually use this, whether it's constituents trying to gain more membership, whether individuals trying to band together to do good deeds, or, in fact, whether it's single site-specific short-term initiatives that want to get exposed on the dot org domain.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you. And your time is up. But thank you very much for your presentation.

(Applause.)

>>Louis Touton: The next presentation will be that of NeuStar.

>>Vinton Cerf: While we're getting connected up, Louis, is it confirmed that all of the presenters will be available for questions after this is done?

>>Louis Touton: Yes. They should be.

>>Vinton Cerf: Okay.

>>Louis Touton: They've been asked to be.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much.

You're on.

NeuStar, Inc.

>>Ken Hansen: My name is Ken Hansen. I'm the director of business development for NeuStar.

I'd like to thank the Board and attendees for the opportunity to share with you the highlights of our dot org proposal.

I thought I'd start by giving you some background on NeuStar, because I believe that our background is directly applicable to dot org.

Neustar is a trusted neutral third party provider of mission-critical infrastructure services.

We operate all of our businesses under this trusted neutral third-party model. And we have a legacy of transitioning mission-critical resources, including, for instance, the North American Numbering Plan, NeuStar managing that, a numbering plan that serves 18 countries in our region of the world. And in implementing the North American Numbering Plan, we transition what is truly a mission-critical resource that the public relies upon very heavily.

We transitioned this database and the global number portability database in the US, which the telecommunications network relies on for routing over a billion telephone calls every day. As you can imagine, that's – fits the definition of a mission-critical application.

NeuStar is financially strong. We raised over $130 million, and we invested heavily in our Internet registry platform.

For that reason, we have no need for additional capital or for the endowment to support dot org. If we do have a future need for additional capital, we have a continuing commitment from world-renowned, well-known venture capital firms such as deutsche bank, ABS capital and others. Their commitment to NeuStar is in writing, in letters each of them have provided, which we've included in our proposal.

In preparing our proposal for dot org, NeuStar has conducted extensive outreach activities with the noncommercial community. Over the last year, we've spoken, literally, to hundreds of noncommercial organizations. We've done that through an independent research study that we commissioned as well as in face-to-face discussions we had with the noncommercial community.

The noncommercial organizations we spoke with represented well over a million individual organizations and individual members. So we truly did get a good sampling of the noncommercial community.

Here's what they told us when we went out to talk to them.

First they told us that they rely very heavily today on their web sites. Noncommercial organizations use their web sites to communicate, to get their message out, to provide critical services to their constituencies. In other words, the end to raise funds. In other words, dot org and the web sites, and dot org web sites, are as mission-critical for noncommercial organizations as they are for commercial organizations.

The first thing that they told us is that transition – the transition because of the mission-critical nature of their applications, must not impact them in any way.

The second – so that was very important to them that in the transition, there not be any interruption in service, that it continue to operate in a seamless manner.

Noncommercial organizations also told us it was important to them that they had a say in what dot org is and what dot org becomes. They think of dot org as the noncommercial Internet itself, and they felt it was very important that they have a say not only did they feel it was important that they had a say; they felt it was important that a diverse segment of the noncommercial community have that say.

The third thing they told us, and they were concerned about, is they wanted to ensure that we preserved the identity of dot org. They wanted to ensure that dot org continued to be identified and associated with the noncommercial community.

So the first item, we'll delve into a little bit more detail, was that seamless transition they were looking for.

The NeuStar plan relies upon our experience transitioning mission-critical resources. We'll leverage our existing registry, which is already built, designed, is fully operational, running today. We will also leverage our existing relationships with the registrars. The registrars that we're currently operational with represent over 99% of the existing dot org registrations. That existing operational relationship will be an important tool for us in seamlessly transitioning the dot org name with the registrars.

We'll also leverage our very capable employee base. We have over 300 employees. They're well-skilled and very capable.

Our experience in transitioning mission-critical resources is vast and broad.

For instance, we transitioned the North American Numbering Plan from a very distributed database to a centralized database. We had direct experience – and I think this is an important differentiator – transitioning a TLD from the incumbent provider. NeuStar worked directly with VeriSign to transition the dot us TLD. We did so in a very collaborative fashion and users were not impacted in any way.

We built – based on that experience, we built a very detailed, comprehensive transition plan, which you'll find in our proposal.

I don't have time today to go into all of the details, but I can tell you the plan is comprehensive, reflects that experience, and it includes things like the – not only identifying all the potential risks, but identifying means for risk mitigation and contingency plans for unplanned happenings.

VeriSign is given a very clear and well-defined role in our proposal, obviously, given their existing operation of dot org, they're going to have to be very active. But it's very important that their role be very clearly defined.

The plan that we put forth will have no impact on dot org web sites. They will continue to resolve all critical services, including web site resolution and Whois will remain fully operational throughout the transition.

An important element of our proposal is the fact that a single organization, NeuStar, will take full responsibility for the transition of dot org from the VeriSign platform to ours. We do not have a need to coordinate with multiple partners. It's our belief that this additional control equals less risk. The more partners you have, the more coordination that has to be done. You already have two parties involved in this, the incumbent registry provider and a new registry provider. Introducing other new third parties just creates additional risk.

In terms of responsiveness to the noncommercial community. When we went out and spoke to them over the last year, conducting our research, and in face to face discussions, one thing was very clear. They want a voice. And they all want a voice. Not a single dot org organization or noncommercial organization, not a group of noncommercial organizations, but all noncommercial organizations want to have an equal say. NeuStar has proposed an independent dot org global policy council, and the dot org global policy council is to be built within a framework that has representation from all sectors, all geographies, and from both small and large noncommercial organizations.

The council members who will populate the dot org global policy council will be selected not by NeuStar, but by the noncommercial community itself.

NeuStar will work with the noncommercial community to create a selection committee comprised of the noncommercial community itself, using the same framework we've designed for the council to ensure that noncommercial representatives representing all the sectors, all the geographies, and both small and large noncommercial organizations are – have the sole responsibility for selecting the dot org global policy council.

In addition to that, we're proposing a system of checks and balances to ensure that the registry continues to be responsive to the dot org noncommercial community. This system of checks and balances will require NeuStar to take all proposals for changes to the dot org registry, policy, services, pricing, and deliver those to the dot org global policy council for consideration.

The dot org global policy council will then submit to NeuStar a written comment on the – their written comments on the proposal, along with their recommendation.

NeuStar will then be required to include the recommendations and comments of the dot org global policy council with any proposals we submit to ICANN.

This will be embodied in our contract with ICANN and will be a hard requirement.

In addition, the dot org global policy council can initiate proposals to NeuStar for changes of policies, new services, and pricing.

Just – in this case, NeuStar will also have an obligation to comment, to respond to the proposals made by the council, and forward those proposals made by the council, along with NeuStar's comments, on to ICANN for consideration.

All draft recommendations, whether they're initiated by NeuStar or the dot org global policy council, will be posted to the web for public comment and consideration by the dot org global policy council.

Forming a council isn't enough. We all know that operating a council requires funds. NeuStar is committed in its proposal to fund a full-time staff person to support the activities of the dot org global policy council. That includes a full-time staff person, tools such as a web site, discussion forums, list serves. It includes outreach activities, including dot org meetings at each of the ICANN meetings. And we will fund the travel of the dot org global policy council staff to the ICANN meetings so that they cannot only participate in the ICANN meetings, but can meet with the noncommercial community in that particular region. Of course, we'll also provide electronic means of participation.

NeuStar's received widespread support from a broad – from the broad sectors of the noncommercial community for its dot org global policy council.

Let me just give you a few examples. We've gained support from the Royal Mencap society, which is located in the United Kingdom; from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, which is based in Rome; the American Society of Association Executives, which is – which includes 25,000 individual members, executives from the noncommercial community; independent sector, which includes hundreds of the world's best-known charitable organizations; and the far eastern memorial foundation.

They also told us that preserving the integrity and strengthening the integrity of dot org was important to them. We've included in our proposal a code of conduct that requires NeuStar to target any NeuStar-sponsored marketing activities solely at the noncommercial community. In other words, no marketing dollars spent directly by NeuStar or provided to the registrars for marketing will be targeted at commercial users.

So there will be no promotions of dot org that are funded by NeuStar that target commercial registrations. And we're committing to that in writing. We're putting it in our code of conduct. We built a marketing plan based on the direct feedback we have gotten from the noncommercial community. And our plan laid out in our proposal has us targeting geographic diversity of dot org, improving sector diversity within the space, and channel diversity as well.

One of the most important aspects of our proposal is the enablement of competition. NeuStar is all about competition. We were founded to enable competition within the telecom industry.

We have no ownership of a registrar. No registrar or group of registrars has operating control of NeuStar. Therefore, we have an obligation and a structure that will support all registrars in an equal basis and treat them all fairly. We feel this is a superior model for supporting and fostering competition in a noncommercial industry. We're a small registry with only 3% of the existing market, but we have great potential to challenge the dominant provider.

We have a highly competitive price of $5. And that price is available from the very beginning without additional volumes or term commitments to the community.

This is just a summary of the points I have made. Thank you very much for your time.

>>Vinton Cerf: I'm impressed. You managed to go precisely 15 minutes. No time for questions. But thank you very much for that presentation.

(Applause.)

Register ORGanization

>>Louis Touton: The next and second-to-last presentation will be by Register ORGanization.

>>Richard Forman: Good afternoon, my name is Richard Forman, or good evening.

My name is Richard Forman.

I'm the president and CEO of register.com, and I am here today representing Register ORGanization, a wholly-owned subsidiary of register.com, which has applied to operate the dot org TLD.

Just to give some background, my experience, I've been in this industry for a while, and really got started around the time of the Green Paper, which was early 1998.

I'm familiar with the Green Paper, White Paper.

I was involved with the IFWP, in the Boston Working Group, and subsequent to that the formation of ICANN.

And one of the principles of ICANN that's been pretty firm is to ensure the stability and competition of the name space.

And I think that when looking at the dot org TLD specifically and the divestiture of it, it's critical that ICANN keep that mission clear that the divestiture should serve the purpose of dot org registrants both today as well as in the future.

When looking at the competitive registration or registrar competitive market, it's clear ICANN has succeeded.

Today VeriSign represents approximately 35% share of the global domain name registrar market for the gTLD market.

When you look at the top ten registrars outside of VeriSign they actually have a larger market share than does VeriSign, and then looking beyond that, it's still a very substantial market share.

So I would say competition has worked and with that competition there have been some great new business models.

There are indirect wholesale players in the registrar space, there are low-end retailers for individuals in small-to-medium size businesses, there are people who package domain names with what they're doing so on both a u.s. national as well as international basis, it's a competitive market.

However, when looking at the registry market, the situation is not the same.

It is not a level playing field in the registry market and some of the new registries that exist out there on the new gTLD space have not driven the volume that they expected or the market expected.

And one of the concerns I have and one of the reasons we're very interested in operating the dot org TLD is because we believe to create a successful registry, the registries need to invest.

Part of our application includes over seven and a half million dollars of marketing and other activities to promote the dot org TLD.

All the organizations in the world don't necessarily create a successful TLD, it takes hard work and we're prepared to back that up with a substantial investment.

Another situation that exists is that some of the proposals that I've read indicate low pricing or rather less than $6 pricing.

We have a $6 price that we're proposing, and the situation that exists when operating a registry is that the complications and the requirements for operating a registry grow over time, and unless a registry has enough money, they're unable to make those investments in order to make sure they drive additional registration volume.

Some of the new TLDs that exist out there are priced less than $6 but they haven't necessarily achieved what they wanted to on the volume front.

As I mentioned before, I've been doing this for a while.

I actually started the company back in 1994, and one of the primary goals that I've always had is trying to find ways to ensure that the community, users, get involved with the Internet, create a web presence, use e-mail, take advantage of the Internet.

And that mission for myself and for the company really hasn't changed.

It's really part of everything that we do.

We've already funded the Register ORGanization with $10 million in order to make sure it's successful.

One of the characteristics of the dot org TLD is money collected to date is not transferring over from VeriSign to the new operator so actually on day one, the dot org TLD represents a liability, in that the registry operator needs to continue funding it prior to the money coming in.

We recognize that challenge, and we're prepared to step up to the plate on that.

Also in terms of the VeriSign endowment, we are not requesting the VeriSign endowment in order – or as part of our application of the transition.

From a technical perspective, the application that we've put forth not only meets the criteria that ICANN has requested but, in fact, exceeds it.

We are operating several registries today.

We have the personnel and systems in place in order to operate the dot org registry, and we've done substantial testing of the dot org database.

We actually received the dot org database as part of our NDA with VeriSign.

We received the dot org database of names and we've done load-balance testing on those names to see how well our systems scale.

And I can see without a doubt that they pass with flying colors in terms of our ability to handle the volume of names that dot org has.

As I mentioned before, there's also a decreasing economies of scale.

Today when you look at the registries, the number of transactions that are occurring continue to grow while name growth is not keeping pace.

So actually, there's a decreasing economies of scale on operating some of these registries where you have to continue to invest money in systems, in personnel, in applications, even though you don't necessarily have the revenue coming in to support all those investments.

So that goes back and continues to say why we need to maintain a high price point and why operators need to be experienced as part of this.

So I've addressed issues of competition, I've addressed issues of technology, and financial stability.

Now I want to talk about the community.

Dot org really does need a purpose.

Dot org has floundered and it has not grown.

And part of the reason is because it doesn't have a purpose.

It is a generic name space today that doesn't mean anything, necessarily, to noncommercial domain name owners or noncommercial entities.

So we have chosen two non-profit entities one is the Benton Foundation, one is the Open Society Institute, in order to help make the dot org domain name and help noncommercial entities get involved with the Internet.

These two entities are experts in terms of working with non-profits and noncommercial entities.

And they know how to embrace them and open up new avenues and opportunities in order to make sure that they are no longer left out.

As part of our application we've made a commitment of $2 and a half million to these entities to make sure they're helping noncommercial entities take advantage of the Internet as well as growing the dot org name space.

Our mission quite simply is to build a preeminent global resource for the dot org community.

That means across all fronts, people, causes, and ideas.

And we're prepared to invest all our assets to ensure that the dot org top-level domain is a successful top-level domain.

I would like to invite up Jonathan Wells.

Many of you have already had the chance to meet Jonathan.

He's given several presentations over the past several days.

Jonathan Wells is the president Register ORGanization, the new entity that we formed in order to operate the dot org top-level domain.

And now both Jonathan and I would like to open this up for questions.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much.

Are there questions from the Board?

I have one for clarification.

Register – register.com currently operates a registry; is that correct?

Or not?

>>Richard Forman: We are the operator of several registries.

>>Vinton Cerf: Can you say which ones, please.

>>Richard Forman: In terms of what is public out there, dot ag, dot sc, in terms of what other ones have been publicly discussed, I would actually – I don't know whether it's in the application or not, whether we've gone into that, but also dot --

>>Vinton Cerf: I don't want you to say something that you're uncomfortable about, but I am interested in scale of experience.

And so that's really what I was trying to get at; what's the level of operation that you currently have experience with.

>>Richard Forman: Yeah, the level of TLDs that we have operation with in terms of from the registry level are relatively minimal today.

They are low.

But one thing that we did is when the systems that we have in place for the registry systems are able to scale much higher than that.

And register.com has the experience and we've applied the experience in our Registry Advantage operations because we have experience in managing Whois and DNS services for over 3 million domain names.

So we've taken that experience, and we understand scalability.

In fact, we think we are very experienced at understanding that scalability.

It's not a linear-scale issue.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you.

Are there other questions from the Board?

Apparently not.

I can't tell how many minutes you have because the gentleman is blocking the clock.

You have six minutes if you wish to continue, or you can donate this back to the pool.

>>Richard Forman: If there are no other questions, I'll donate it back to the Board.

>>Vinton Cerf: You're very kind.

Thank you for your brevity.

(Applause.)

Organic Names

>>Louis Touton: The final presentation tonight is by Organic Names.

>>Steve Dyer: Ladies and gentlemen of the ICANN Board, thank you for giving us this opportunity.

I'm Steve Dyer, director of Organic Names, and with me to answer questions afterwards is our technical cto.

We've already sent you a 281-page proposal which I'm sure you've all read, and so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail.

I do appreciate that as the final presenter, I'm the last thing that stands between and you the bar.

So I will try to keep this short. Organic Names has a very simple transparent bid.

We're a for-profit registry because we think there's no better way to focus a registry's attention on the needs of registrants than market needs and the profit motive.

We have formed an advisory board because we feel we need people to advise us on the policy issues that will arise, and we need to build policies for dot org.

Dot org has no community today.

It's a collection of people who have been put there for no really good reason.

We have to build that community, and the people who can advise us on that can do so; we will run a registry.

It's not the business of registries to fund good causes, we believe.

It's a tax on registrants to give money to other people.

Why should the Red Cross or Amnesty International pay us extra money for their registration so that we can give it to somebody else?

We believe that the good causes are the registries, and so we will run a profitable but competitive registry that gives money back to the registrants by reducing prices.

Organic Names is not connected to any other registries.

We don't have any demons in our background.

We are not connected to any registrars.

We're an organization put together from Centralnic and from Nominet UK, to registries, and we feel we are therefore well placed for competition.

We plan to remove barriers to entry in the registrar market.

There's a perception that the ICANN accreditation process actually stops registrars from getting into these markets and there are many registrars in smaller countries who need help getting in; we would like to facilitate that.

That will increase the number of points of sale, and that will facilitate access to the market and, thus again, competition.

We have, fortunately, a self-sufficient business plan so we won't be wanting that $5 million endowment and we will leave it to you gentlemen to decide what, if anything, you're going to do with it.

In our proposal, the technical design for our registry architecture and operational procedures are detailed, but plans alone are not enough.

We've heard a lot about scalability and systems that can be increased.

We have six years' successful experience of running registries.

Nominet UK has 4 million domain names in its registry, Centralnic has 1.5 million.

We have them there today, we suffer the pains of that level of registration.

We know what happens when you get there and what happens on the way to getting there.

So we've been there already; done that.

We've transitioned our registries I think five times now over the six years of operation of the two registries.

That's good, solid experience that we can apply to the transition of dot org.

We currently have working systems that support RRP, the web council and e-mail based technology and a development version of EPP.

We thus have confidence to fully support EPP when it becomes a standard.

We fully intend to comply with all your policies and play an active part in their development.

Compliance will be checked by our advisory board and by what we call the vice president of policy whose job will be to make sure that we're not breaking any of your rules or any of our rules.

To assure stability, we will provide similar services to those currently offered to VeriSign – by VeriSign, but at higher service levels.

We also aim to record registrant details both for escrow purposes and to provide a fully functional Whois, something that is lacking in dot org at the moment.

In conclusion, we've heard ten excellent proposals about how to run dot org tonight.

They're all about community and policy.

We are more about registry.

We think that a registry needs to be a registry.

It is not a government, it is not a governance body.

It's something which, at the end of the day, runs a fairly simple but very big directory, if you like.

We need to make sure that that directory works and, over years of time, maybe dot org will build a community that allows people to identify it better than they can today.

We've heard ten excellent proposals on how to run dot org tonight, and I'm proud to present the 11th and the best, Organic Names.

If you have any questions, we'll be happy to answer them, either here or, indeed, in the bar.

Thank you.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very, very much.

(Applause.)

>>Vinton Cerf: I have one observation.

Yes, thank you for not blocking the clock.

One observation to make with regard to the 5 million dollar matter.

It does not come to ICANN; it only goes to a successor proposer, particularly a non-profit one.

So we don't have the flexibility that you were suggesting.

>>Steve Dyer: I'm sorry to --

>>Vinton Cerf: No, no, perfectly okay.

I just wanted to clear this up for anyone else who might misunderstand.

Would you be so kind to tell me which top-level domain Centralnic has experience with?

>>Steve Dyer: Centralnic only has second level.

Nominet runs dot uk and they're basically at the third level because we have .gov.uk, .org.uk and some rather more odd ones.

.co.uk are the major registry areas.

>>Vinton Cerf: Off-line, I'd be interested about the gov.uk to find out what relationship you have with the UK government to make that work but that's not germane to this discussion.

Are there any questions coming from the Board?

I'm impressed with the parsimonious use of time.

Seven minutes, you have eight left.

If you wish, you can continue the discussion or we can now open up to the public?

>>Steve Dyer: I'll open up to the public and donate the time.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very, very much.

(Applause.)

Community Comment

>>Vinton Cerf: Well, we now have an opportunity for some public comment and questions.

I'd like to suggest – sorry.

Hold on.

I'd like to suggest – sorry. Hold on.

I would like to suggest that we put a time limit on questions of 2 minutes per speaker, and to ask that the respondents try to be brief.

And this is in consideration of the lateness of the hour.

If we find that that isn't working very well, we can reconsider. But I'd like to start with that.

And, please, as you ask the question, would you introduce yourself first.

>>Harold Feld: Harold Feld, Media Access Project, and one of the three noncommercial constituency representatives to the Names Council.

The noncommercial constituency met yesterday, and several of the dot org bidders took the opportunity to make presentations to us. We thank all of them.

We asked three questions to each of these bidders that I would ask the Board to consider.

One was, what is your marketing plan for differentiating dot org? And, in particular, how do you propose to require the registrars to follow that plan?

The second question was, what relationship do you propose to the dot org community specifically both in terms of governance, but also not merely in terms of governance in terms of a simple back-and-forth for less lofty policy matters, but just for more straightforward interactions.

The third question was, what will this look like from the end user's point of view?

Everyone has stressed that it is absolutely critical that there be no interruption of service. However, we do have some concerns that dot org registrants understand if they are not going to be able to transfer names during a moratorium period, if there are updates that will not be available, that registrants need to have sufficient notice in advance that those activities are not going to go through and what is the defined period in which those activities are not going to go through.

Finally, I would like to say that the noncommercial constituency is very eager to work with the Board and with staff in evaluating the bidders and assisting in any way.

While it is true that there are many dot org registrants who are not noncommercial entities and there are many members of the noncommercial constituency who are not dot org members, we feel that we are greatly affected by this decision, and we hope that you will take advantage of our expertise.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much for staying within the two minutes, and also for those very good questions.

Could we assure that those questions are available to us online and incorporated into the public documentation of this dot org consideration?

Thank you.

Please.

>>Jamie Love: Jamie Love, Consumer Project on Technology. I'd like to start out by saying that I'd like to compliment the Board and the staff on the preparations for the – for these bids.

I think you had a lot of really good proposals today. I think you could almost – you know, I mean, it's impressive, I think, the quality of the bids that have come forward. I think people are impressed with the work the staff did on the RFP. And everything I've heard from the bidders was very positive about the RFP process.

I also wanted to make – somebody mentioned earlier on – I think a couple comments on the presenters on the conflict of interest issue.

I think the Board should, you know, only address very, you know, big problems. I mean, if somebody – I certainly don't think if somebody's been a member of an organization that is part of the thing and they have no financial interest or benefit, that that's any big deal. In my mind, that's not a conflict of interest. Unless you're an employee of it or something, or unless they have some professional relationship where they get paid or something. But to be a member of the Internet Society I don't think is a conflict of interest, in my opinion.

And the only other question I wanted to ask is if the Board could give some recognition as to where all the money comes from the fees, where all the money goes on the fees for these guys to get approved.

I know in the TLD thing, there was a huge amount of money that was generated on the $50,000 registration fees. People felt it wasn't used to evaluate the bids, but just used to fund ICANN, or at least part of it was. If had you 11 proposals come through the transom, probably more than most people thought would come forward, whether you're going to spend the money to do the due diligence or it's just some way of getting money. I don't think you should have a tradition of asking people to pay more to apply for a bid than is necessary to evaluate the bids.

And so I'd like to have just some feedback at the end of the day. Did you really need all of that $35,000 per bidder in order to do this process? If not, you should ask for a smaller amount. In fact, I think on these things, you ought to actually get most of your money when you actually award the bid, because they're the person who actually can afford it. Use this to screen out the bids and not as a big fund-raising thing. Because I feel sorry for the guys, because there's many good bids that don't get it.

Anyway, that's all. Thank you very much.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much, Jamie.

Stuart.

>>Stuart Lynn: Thank you, Jamie, for allowing me to clarify that. I'm not sure whether you were at the meeting in Accra, but the Board announced at that time that once we knew how many bids were in, we would be reassessing and reevaluating that. That should come up on the Board agenda on Friday.

I want to say, however, that everything that we did in the gTLD space and in this space was cost-based. But the costs are a lot more than just evaluating the bids. There are other cost factors that come into the equation as well.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you very much, Stuart.

Please. Don't forget to tell us who you are.

>>Naomasa Maruyana: My name is Naomasa Maruyana from Japan.

Thank you very much for a very interesting presentation by all of the applicants. I am quite interested in this show. It's very good, quite interesting, and I'm very excited to hear that.

And – but the question is for the Board, not for the applicants.

Do you have any thinking about the nationality of the applicants, that is – quite frankly, I don't want some kind of biased decision or evaluation by the nationality of applicants. But do you have any thinking about the – about incorporating the nationality of applicants to the evaluation or not? If there is some, please explain that.

>>Vinton Cerf: Stuart, did you say you wanted to respond?

>>Stuart Lynn: Yes. As I recall, there are about 6 or 7 applicants that would be considered US --based and about – the complement, 6 or 7, that were from overseas.

The criteria have been laid out. And it's the best bid, according to those criteria, that will be selected.

>>Vinton Cerf: I would add to this that I feel no sensitivity at all to the nationality of the bid. I'm much more concerned about the ability to operate a successful dot org registry for the benefit of the registrants.

Hans.

>>Hans Kraaijenbrink: Maybe I can add one minor comment.

Like a sort of positive discrimination that if two bids are equal, that we might favor a non-US bid over a US bid.

>>Vinton Cerf: The gentleman can speak for himself.

(Laughter.)

>>Vinton Cerf: I'm – I will remain absolutely neutral on this point.

I think that's probably as much as you'll get for now. Please.

>>Rob Hall: Hi, Rob Hall. I'm not sure, Vint, if these are questions for the Board. I think they're probably questions for the actual --

>>Vinton Cerf: This is intended to be either questions or issues either for the applicants or perhaps for the Board as well. Applicants would be best.

>>Rob Hall: Sure. And I apologize. I haven't been through every application.

I heard some applicants say they were going to work equally with all registrars. And I think I heard the last one say that they thought the ICANN process for accreditation of registrants was too difficult and they were perhaps going to work with others. I know this has come up in the past. If I'm wrong – I would encourage the Board to look at are they working within the existing framework for registration and accreditation. This has happened with other TLDs in the past, and you've stayed exactly even so far.

>>Vinton Cerf: The presenter may wish to respond.

But my understanding is, if you'll permit me, that they said only that they would encourage accreditation and help others to become accredited through the ICANN process, not to work with others that have not been accredited.

If I'm incorrect about that, I should be --

>>Rob Hall: If I am incorrect, I apologize, but I would encourage the criteria the Board would look at to look at that.

>>Vinton Cerf: Would you like to respond.

>>Steve Dyer: That would be initial position. But we are concerned that the perception, whether correct or incorrect, that the ICANN accreditation system has tended to exclude particularly smaller registrars, community registrars, which we feel is relevant to dot org. We only intend to change that with the Board's consent by working through the ICANN process. But we've just noted that the exclusive access to registries, to ICANN-accredited registrars only may prove to act as a barrier of entry for community registrants. And that's something we'd like to see if we can address.

>>Rob Hall: I would suggest it's not the accreditation process of ICANN, it may be the $100,000 bond to VeriSign which should no longer probably apply to dot org. But would I encourage the Board not to change the accreditation – you need to be accredited to sell any TLD that ICANN controls.

>>Steve Dyer: And as far as the hundred thousand dollars is concerned, that seems to be a matter between the Board and VeriSign rather than for us.

>>Vinton Cerf: Stuart.

>>Stuart Lynn: Just to clarify, ICANN policy requires that gTLDs use accredited ICANN registrars. If that's going to change, it has to change through the policy development process.

But as far as the award is concerned, it would require that it be with accredited ICANN registrars.

>>Rob Hall: All bids would have to conform to that to be considered?

>>Stuart Lynn: To that policy.

>>Adam Peake: Adam Peake from Glocom, a research institute in Tokyo. And I am – thank you, Andrew.

And you can take a look at glocom.org. So I'm an org user. I'd like to know from organic, you're looking at a profitable and competitive registry service. I'd like to know, are you the low bid and can I look forward to my price dropping because of that? I'm not going to be participating as actively in this global policy stuff. So am I talking to the low bid here and can you give me an example of where you're coming in price. Thank you.

>>Steve Dyer: No, you're not talking to the low bid. We are looking at a price of about $6 at transition, because, a, we're looking for a smooth transition. And, b, we are assuming, possibly wrongly, that our costs are going to be slightly higher than the costs of VeriSign, because VeriSign has huge economies of scale. And we are starting up a new registry.

However, we are launching ourselves into a competitive market. We anticipate that the price will reduce because it will pay us to do so. And we have also specified in our bid that we will cap our prices at whatever price VeriSign is currently charging for dot com or dot net, given the normal business circumstances. If they give it away free for a week, we may not follow. But otherwise we would cap our bid at that level. Does that answer the question?

>>Vinton Cerf: Yes, it does.

Are there any other questions or comments from the assembled audience?

Are there any questions or issues from the Board?

I think on the basis – do I see someone racing to the microphone? All right. You just barely made it.

>>John Lawrence: I just wanted to ask a question – sorry. John Lawrence from Australia. And I guess from England to some extent.

Wanted to ask the nature of the relationship with Nominet. I guess there might be some concern about that relationship. And I just wanted to ask that question.

>>Steve Dyer: Well, I hope there's no concern about it. And I certainly didn't mean to gloss over it.

The position is that the board of Nominet, which I happen to sit on, looked at the possibility of running dot org sometime ago. And we considered it quite carefully. And we came to the conclusion that Nominet itself could not and should not bid for dot org, purely because our memorandum and articles of association are very tightly drawn to the dot uk name.

So Nominet as an organization cannot bid and is not bidding in this bid. I must make that clear.

The experience of Nominet, however, is in this bid in large quantity in that we have everybody from Rob Blokzijl here, who has to recuse himself from the Board for this bid, with Willie Black and Keith Mitchell, Alex Blye and myself, all bringing that expertise to bear to this bid. But it is not a Nominet bid.

>>Vinton Cerf: Thank you for that clarification.

I don't see others racing to the microphone. Others may momentarily race either to the bar or to perhaps get rid of other liquids consumed.

I will call this meeting to an end and thank all of your for your participation.

And before you go --

(Applause.)

>>Vinton Cerf: – I have one other thank you. And that's for the two ladies who are doing the real-time captioning. They're here in the front. Please stand up and accept our thanks.

(Applause.)

>>Vinton Cerf: We will reconvene the public forum at 8:00 in the morning tomorrow in this room.