ICANN|ARCHIVES

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Thursday public forum. This is a new format for the public forum. And, in particular, a number of reports which had been in the past presented orally have been put up on the network for your information, and time has been allocated in the agenda for any questions with regard to those reports.

Specifically, the audit committee report, which was prepared by Vanda Scartezini, the chair of the audit committee; the Board Governance Committee report, by Roberto Gaetano; the conflict of interest committee, by Demi Getschko; the finance committee, by Raimundo Beca; the meetings committee, by Susan Crawford; and the Reconsideration Committee, by Rita Rodin.

So those six people are all here before you on the dais and are prepared to respond to any questions you may have, presuming that you've read the reports. And if you have any.

If there are no questions on those reports this morning, then I will proceed to the next item of the agenda, which is the reports from the supporting organizations and advisory committees.

So let me pause now and ask if there are any questions from the floor or from the board concerning the six reports that have been posted.

I would suspect that it was wise of us to post them this way and save all of the time that we would have spent hearing them presented orally.

In that case, I will call on Ray Plzak, who is the CEO of ARIN and the chair of the ASO, or at least representing the ASO this morning, to present that report.

I saw Ray here earlier this morning, but -- oh, there he is. Okay.

So, Ray, your time accelerated. You're now traveling faster than the speed of light. And you may have to pause for approximately 12 minutes in order to let the light beam catch up with you.

But thank you for taking the time to join us today. And we look forward to your report.

>>RAY PLZAK: Thank you, Vint.

>> Can't hear you.

>>RAY PLZAK: Hello. There we go. Better.

Actually, this is the speed of the Internet, which is different from the speed of light. So we're well in hand here.

Give me a moment to get hooked up here.

And --

>>VINT CERF: Does this mean that PowerPoint runs at lower than the speed of limit somehow?

>>RAY PLZAK: You'll have to take that up with Mr. Gates.

>>VINT CERF: Yes. I will let him know.

>>RAY PLZAK: Okay. Good morning. As Vint said, I'm Ray Plzak, president and CEO of ARIN. And this year I am the chairman of the executive council of the Number Resource Organization, which is the organization that performs the functions, missions of the Address Supporting Organization as specified by the Address Supporting Organization MOU between the NRO and ICANN.

So I am here this morning to provide a status report. And I'm going to cover four items this morning. Actually, I will not be presenting all of them. I will be assisted by Sebastian Bellagamba, who is the chair of the address council.

But I will begin with a -- or general report about the status of the Internet number resources. Then I will discuss for a while the IPv4 consumption. Then I will turn the lectern over to Señor Bellagamba to provide the address council report. He will report on two things, the recent policy activity in all the regions. There will also be an ASO policy activity report. And then he will also provide a report on one of the most important duties that the address council discharges, which is the selection of a board member to the ICANN board of directors.

Then I will return to the microphone for a closing thought.

And with that, let us proceed.

I won't dwell on these numbers, but this is the -- other than to say that we prepare this report quarterly. This is the last quarter report, which is the 31st of December of 2006. And so there may be slight variations to these numbers that have occurred over the last two months.

As of the end of last year, this is the current status of IPv4 address space. And at the end of last year, the available pool in the IANA was 55 /8s.

This is the trend in distribution of IPv4 to the various regions by the IANA since 1999.

And you can see that there has been an upturn in consumption. So demand for IPv4 exists and is increasing.

This is the cumulative totals as far as the distribution. And you can see the three larger registries are pretty much equally divided as far as consumption of address space. If you've been following this trend over the last several years, you will notice that there's been significant increases particularly in Latin America, but also in Africa. Both of these are representative trends of what happens when you're able to regionally deal with address space allocations.

From a standpoint of Autonomous System Numbers, this is the statistics. And the consumption. ARIN continues to have the largest portion of consumption of address -- excuse me, Autonomous System Numbers. However, you will note that it is now below 50%. Up until this time, it had been more than 50% of the total. It's been a significant growth in the European region.

IPv6, I'm actually going to show this portion of it in two ports.

Prior to the implementation of the adoption implementation of the global IPv6 policy last year, IANA was issuing IPv6 address space to the RIRs in units of a /23. And so this represents that consumption up to October of last year. And as you can see, at that time, most of the address space had been allocated in Europe.

Since that time, the policy called for an equity of distribution initially, so each RIR was given a /12. You will note from the asterisk that APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, and RIPE NCC, their previous allocations were included inside that /12 that was initially allocated to them.

And so in the future, you will probably see just this chart, and you will see probably different variations of this chart, which shows you the regional consumption of IPv6.

We are working on different ways of keeping you informed as far as the rate of consumption on a regional basis.

And looking at the aggregate total, you can see that about 50% of the IPv6 space has been allocated in Europe.

If you are one that likes to do things with statistics, they are available in a raw form, both through the NRO Web site, and also historical and the allocations to the RIRs' information is available via the IANA Web site.

And so let me now turn to an issue that has been lurking for some time. It's been talked about over the last several years. There have been various predictions and so forth in terms of this is going to happen. Well, yes, indeed, actually, IPv4 is being consumed. And as I have just shown you, that it is being consumed at a faster rate.

Just as a reminder, this is the consumption of the allocations to ISPs of IPv4 space since 1999. And, again, you see an increasing demand -- well, actually, this is a good thing because of the fact that it means the Internet is growing, which is something that we want, and is being more widely deployed.

However, along with demand, you have the other aspect, which is supply. This shows the evolution or devolution, as the term may be applied, of the central pool maintained by the IANA. The last bar to the right is number 48. If you recall from the slide I showed earlier, that showed the central pool of 55. Well, that was 55 at December of 2006. This 48 figure represents the data as of yesterday.

So you can see that supply is diminishing.

And so we are in that -- coming up on that bind as far as not being able to meet our needs.

This is a chart that's provided and is updated periodically by Geoff Huston. The red line is the consumption of the central pool. The green line represents the central pool of the RIRs.

Now, you'll note that the RIR pool line tends to be relatively constant. That's because the RIRs are managing a supply in terms of being able to satisfy demand. And so as you would hope, they would try and keep that pool as level as possible so they can meet the demand, meet the need as it arises.

But you'll note that it drops off. And it drops off because the central pool starts to drop off. And they start losing their supply.

So, from a projection based on current rate -- and I have to emphasize the word current rate -- that we would expect the central pool to be depleted somewhere around 2011, and we would expect the RIR pools to be depleted about 2012, 2013. From the IANA perspective, this means that they would no longer have allocation units to provide to the RIRs.

However, from the standpoint of the RIRs, they would still have IPv4 address space, but they would not have it in sufficient aggregate quantities to issue to providers in the same manner they do today. Numbers would be less than whatever the minimum allocation sizes.

And so they could meet some demand, but they couldn't meet the general demand.

So, in general terms, the pool gets depleted.

So, obviously, this will have consequence.

So what could happen?

Well, there's no reason to expect that the demand for IPv4 won't continue. It will, for a variety of reasons. There's well-established infrastructure. People in their business models will continue to do so.

We can expect an increased use of network address translation devices to help mitigate the depletion of IPv4 by more people adopting the use of perhaps private address space.

You can see also a growth -- and I'll use the term "growth" here -- of a secondary or gray market. Some people would like to use the term "black market."

This is a naturally expected phenomenon when the legitimate supply is not available to meet a legitimate demand.

This poses a few problems. One is, is that it's -- obviously, this would probably take place in a barter or trading system, something like that. The characteristic of I.P. addresses, as a spouse in RFC 2008, is that they are not property. They can't be bought, sold, traded, bartered, whatever. And, therefore, you now have the creation of a market that's going to attempt to do that.

More importantly, as secure routing becomes more and more important to more people, the problem exists that the person that receives this address space may not be viewed by the legitimate, if you will, operator community as being the legitimate user of the address space. That legitimacy is only provided by the registration of that address space to an organization in an RIR database.

That becomes more significant as the RIRs continue along with their program that they've been developing to attach certificates as an attestation of a routing object, in other words, an I.P. network identifier, to a specific organization.

So what this means is that if someone obtains I.P. addresses through this secondary market, they may not be able to use it in the manner to which they'd expect, because they would not be viewed as a legitimate user. And this becomes more and more problematic as people are being faced with liabilities for allowing unwanted content to be processed and passed through their networks.

So there is this deleterious effect.

So this is one of the major issues that's facing the RIRs, is how to work in this environment, how to mitigate it and make it work.

The last thing is the panic, IPv6 frantic deployment, everyone waiting until the last minute to do this.

This in itself is also a dangerous situation, because this is where people will lose customers, this is where portions of the network could have problems as someone hurriedly attempts to renumber, excuse me large amounts of resources they wouldn't necessarily have to because they weren't prepared.

So I can't say that all of these are going to happen. I generally would say that they all probably will happen in some way, shape, or form. And it's really up to us to find ways of mitigating and countering these expectations.

So what's been done so far is a good question.

Before I get on to that, this chart, the line shows the address space, IPv4 address space, that's advertised. In other words, it's present in the routing tables. This is address space that is expected to be routed, because it means that someone has placed it in a routing table with the expectation of being able to communicate across the Internet.

If you look at that number, you will -- and compared it to the other charts, you would see that this number is somewhat less than what's been allocated. It's a difference between what's being advertised and what's being allocated, which would be the fuel for the secondary market.

This address space exists for two reasons. One is that some people have obtained, validly, IPv4 address space and are using it privately, behind NATs, or not even connected to the Internet.

But an example would be, for example, a large-scale corporation or a university, someone of that nature, who basically would be operating a private network but still has a desire and a need for unique I.P. address space and the use of private address space doesn't work for them.

The second thing is, is that there's a large amount of legacy address space that was allocated prior to the implementation of a few things to allow it to be aggregated and issued in smaller blocks. And a large amount of that address space is, in a sense, lying fallow.

However, the dichotomy here is that, for example, an early adopter received what at the time was called a class A address, a /8. And that gives them the ability to have approximately 16 billion networks.

Well, if -- or somewhere in the -- a million networks.

>>VINT CERF: Yeah, excuse me. It's 16 million terminations. And they can be divided up into however many networks you want.

>>RAY PLZAK: Right, it's terminations. But it amounts to 4 billion computers. 2 to the 32nd; right?

Anyway, the number is larger. Let's -- the point I'm going to try and make here is -- and let's not -- is that it's a large number. And if they are only consuming 10% of that, that is still a large number of termination points, networks, and so forth.

And to renumber out of that address space so they can give the whole block back to an RIR is a costly proposition in terms of time, people, and money.

I'll give you an example of such an activity.

Around the year 2000, Stanford University was the holder of one of these original /8s, class A addresses. And they decided, as good denizens, to give it back to ARIN, and in turn, ARIN would provide it back to the IANA.

And because they only really had the need for two /16s, class B addresses.

Well, it took them about two years to do this. And they were doing this in a benign environment, taking their time, with no pressure to get it done, and did it properly.

And so it was a priority for them. And certainly they were devoting resources and so forth to do it.

But you can see how careful of a proposition this really is.

And to look at a business to all of a sudden decide that it's going to interrupt its activities to go through a similar activity, in some cases, having a much more diversely applied amount of address space, it could take longer.

And from a standpoint of a business, the return of investment is very low, because I'm expending money and resources, and I'm really gaining nothing other than being a good guy and giving address space back to the community.

And for those people in the accounting offices and stockholders, they don't understand sometimes what munificence means. And it's not a bad thing, but it is a fact of life.

So that's a part of the problem of the renumbering.

So the real question is that the real solution is IPv6: Well, why don't we have IPv6? IPv6 has been around and available for unicast address space from the RIRs since 1999. The statistics point that out.

But it's not been widely adopted.

Well, there's a few reasons for that. Some of them are technical. And the others I've kind of mentioned already are economic, incentives.

The solutions to date have been to try and solve these issues not -- I -- I have to be -- I want to be careful here with the technical solution is that it's not been solved in a rapid manner, but the fact is that the market and the businesses that want to use IPv6 in order to surmount these technical difficulties have used the RIR allocation policies as a means of solving a technical problem.

And in addition, the economic incentives for the deployment of IPv6 almost exclusively have been dealt with through a matter of the RIRs allocation policies and their fee policies.

The economic incentive problem exists in both the developing and developed world. A lot of people will say, well, the solution for the developing world is just use IPv6. Well, unfortunately, IPv6 from the standpoint of a startup, it's probably a little more expensive than IPv4. Just as it's easier to buy a used car and cheaper to buy a used car than a new car, it's cheaper to buy used IPv4 equipment than new IPv6 equipment.

So when you are faced with those kind of cost decisions, and that would be one of them, it becomes a difficult thing, decision to make.

In addition, because of the less-than-desired deployment of IPv6 at this time, there's a general requirement that you have to dual stack a lot of stuff. In other words, be capable IPv4 and IPv6.

This in turn is another cost, because the amount of used IPv4, IPv6 dual stacked equipment is not that great.

And there are other things associated with it.

There are developing countries that already have IPv4 networks. The costs that I mentioned associated with converting to IPv6 from a numbering standpoint in a short order may be a little bit difficult as well.

So clearly you need economic incentives in this area to help mitigate that situation.

In a developed world you it is just the opposite. You have a well established infrastructure. And here the problem is that there's no reason to convert to IPv6 that's economically desirable. And perhaps the best term there is "desirable."

And so if it's not desirable, it's not going to be done, and it won't be done until I have to.

And so here again now, the incentives have to be something that makes it economically desirable to do so.

And as I've said so far, the attempt to solve these issues has been to use the allocation policies of the RIRs. And you can see from the nature of those problems that I discussed, this is not exactly the best way to do this. In fact, it's probably inappropriate to proceed much further down the line other than what's already been done.

A careful analysis of the IPv6 policy proposals over the last several years will clearly demonstrate that most of these policies have been directed towards trying to solve these problems. So the time really is to start looking to other ways to do it.

So what has been done? Well, the NRO, I.E., all five of the RIRs, have been active.

The history of the policy activity on IPv6 since 1999 will show you these policies have become more and more liberalized to the point that the criteria to obtain IPv6 from an RIR is very, very liberal. Some people have characterized it as being you are alive and say give it to me, you qualify. It might not be quite that liberal but it is very liberal.

The IPv6 fees in all the RIRs have been waived. Speaking from the standpoint of ARIN, it has been waived since the year 2000.

So basically, you get it if you want it, and you pay no service fees associated with it.

So in essence, the RIRs through their policies have been attempting to give it away.

In addition, the RIRs have been consistently conducting training and workshops trying to raise the awareness level of IPv6, and have been actively engaged in helping people to understand how to implement it and use it.

So there's been a lot of activity and support by the RIRs in this area. And the RIRs will never claim that they are supporting or promoting one particular technology over another. But, on the other hand, we don't stand in the way of its deployment. So we do what we can to facilitate it and we facilitate it depending on the wants, needs and desires of our communities.

One of the other things that the RIRs are very concerned about is to ensure equity. That's why when the proposal was handed to the address council from the NRO for the global policy, one of the things we insisted upon was an initial allocation of a /12 to every region. That put every region of the globe on an equal fitting with IPv6 in that space. And as we move forward and as we have done in the past, we will do what we can to make sure there is an equity of distribution, that resource is available to all.

Mitigating negative impacts, there are things we can do, could do, so this is something that we are actively engaged in. And where it can be done we will do so. But again, we have to do it consistently with the wants, needs and desires of our communities.

And lastly, one that people -- some people see as a panacea is recovering IPv4 address space. Well, the RIRs do recover IPv4 address space. And in the case of Stanford University, it was a beneficial munificence on the part of an organization. We fully expect other organizations to do so as well, and they have.

The RIRs through the normal course of business also recover address space. For example, through people that are discovered to no longer use it and the request is to give it back and they receive it back. Sometimes organizations default on payment of service fees and in the end don't pay the fees, and the address space is reclaimed. But there is no active go out after every single piece of IPv4 address space.

None of our communities have expressed a desire for us to expend resources in this area. And in the end, you are only going to put off the inevitable depletion of the central pool by a few years at the most.

So while this is being done, it has not really been necessarily that effective.

I will point out, though, that when the RIRs embarked on a redistribution of the DNS responsibilities for the legacy address space, a project we called ERX, for early registration transfer, we uncovered 17 /8s that no one knew about and we turned them back to the IANA. It took a while procedurally for this to occur because ICANN, the IANA, did not know what to do with this gift, didn't know how to accept it. But it was, in the end, done.

We have recovered through these other means I have talked about probably the equivalent of about five or six /8s but it hasn't been able to be aggregated into single /8s.

So this activity does occur.

And as I said, from here on out we are basically using a policy process to try to fix other problems. So what else can be done? Well, to the technical community the call to action is keep on working but maybe accelerate your pace of work. The IETF has undertaken increased effort and level in this area, but they probably do, indeed, to do more.

This is a point where businesses could become involved and provide a little bit, maybe, more technical expertise into the IETF process. Let those engineers have some more time to work this problem. So this is where you actually get businesses involved as well.

The other big guy, the hidden elephant in the room are the governments. And what can they do?

Well, they can coordinate with industry, there's things that they can do to encourage industry to be a participant in solving these processes.

They can adopt incentives. Only they can do regulatory incentives, only they can really do economic incentives, whether it be in the form of loans or grants or tax relief or some other thing.

They are the only ones that can say, through a policy of adoption of IPv6, that people who do business with us must use IPv6.

So they have got to be a strong supporter.

They have got to stand up and support and promote activities in the IPv6 deployment area.

I gave this presentation to the Governmental Advisory Committee on Tuesday, in fact using the same slide set.

This slide set was also used in the Address Supporting Organization workshop that was conducted by the address council yesterday.

So we thought it was important to bring it before you so you could hear what's going on, and actively tell you that we are ready to assist where we can to help make these things happen, and we will continue to do so. And we look forward to a stronger partnership in this area to make things happen.

So that's my little discussion on IPv4 consumption. And I would like now to turn it over to Sebastian Bellagamba to provide the address council report. He will be discussing two things, a report on the current policy activity in the various regions and also a selection -- what's going on with the selection of the ICANN board member.

Sebastian.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much, ray. Sebastian, you have the floor.

>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you very much.

I will go through these two topics very quickly.

And here's a summary of the current policy discussions on the RIR communities in the different five areas on the screen right now.

Basically, AfriNIC is discussing about the allocation period, about two months and it's in discussion right now. APNIC has adopted a policy on 4 byte ASN and it's another policy that ray already mentioned about IPv4 that's called IPv4 countdown.

And there is also now under discussion in the ARIN region as well as the private and independent minimum size. In LACNIC we have micro-allocations for critical infrastructure. And RIPE has the increase on the allocation window, the allocation period, and PI assignments as well.

As for IPv6, you have a summary here. Some of the policies I presented to you in Sao Paulo has been adopted. Some of them are under discussion and there is some new ones over there.

In the other policy discussions, the topics is 4 byte ASN, basically, has been adopted. That is in force, actually, in all the RIRs.

ARIN has another policy that is in other policy discussions, as well as LACNIC.

I would try to concentrate now -- sorry. The next policy public fora for the RIR community. The next one is -- I think it's ARIN in San Juan, Puerto Rico late April. After that, RIPE in Tallinn, Estonia -- Abuja, thank you very much. Abuja before that in Nigeria, an AfriNIC meeting. After that is RIPE in Tallinn, Estonia, in the second week of May. LACNIC in Isla Margarita, Venezuela in late May. And APNIC had a meeting a month ago, so it is having their second one this year in August. End of August, first week of September.

Always if you would like to check our policy archives are publicly available, the URLs.

One of the main tasks of the address council is to select a board member for the ICANN board. And I will give you an update on the process we are facing now. Here is the schedule for selecting our new board member.

We called for nominations on December the 20th, and we are now into the comments phase, and we just started the interview phase. Actually, some interviews has been made here in Lisbon.

As per ICANN bylaws, we need to announce the candidate selection on May the 8th. So we will end up our procedure, our selection process, on May the 7th.

We have it is publicly available eight candidates available that met the candidacy criteria. Four of them, the one in blue has been interviewed here in this one. And as I said before, the comment period is still open and will be open until April the 20th. You will find here the URL for stating some comments on the candidates and look for comments on them, too.

What would be the next steps in this process. We have a period, as I mentioned, interviews have been done. We are going to meet in the ARIN meeting in late April as an address council meeting. And we are going to face internal discussions on candidates. And we are going to select a candidate for May the 7th.

For the first time since we approved our new procedure -- actually, in Sao Paulo we approved it, and the NROEC ratified it as the ASO MOU.

We are going to be able to conduct our voting via electronic means, which is actually great.

And all the archives for these discussions about the board selection processes are available in the ASO Web site. Here you have the URL again. There you will find all the minutes of all the address council meetings we had so far.

And that would be it.

I would like to invite to Ray again for a closing thought.

Thank you very much.

>>RAY PLZAK: Thank you, Sebastian. Actually, this closing thought is a participatory event that I would ask Paul Twomey to stop doing e-mail long enough to participate in.

As many of you are aware, over time ICANN and the NRO have been discussing and negotiating terms of agreement.

We concluded a Memorandum of Understanding several years ago, and we were proceeding down the path to provide a little bit more formal definition of some of the areas of that.

And so we have been making what we consider to be some good progress on it. We have had some very, very productive meetings over the last several months and we hopefully can conclude this thing sometime this year, as we said last year. No, last year we said we would do it this year. No, no, no, no, no. Although some people say this seems to be an ongoing hobby that ICANN and the RIRs are participating in. So this actually keeps us talking to each other, and maybe, I don't know.

But in any event, periodically from time to time, we like to talk about this, and actually give you a report of what's happening. And what we actually would like to do at this point in time is to show you what our expected outcome of it is by actually, Paul, if you would step up here, I have a check for about 50% of the money that's in escrow, which we will give to ICANN as a good faith contribution of our expectations of this being a successful outcome.

[ Applause ]

>>PAUL TWOMEY: Well, Ray, I knew from Bart Boswinkel and all the discussions that this was on the table, but I didn't know it was on the table so quickly. So thanks very much for that. That's excellent. Good.

>>VINT CERF: Thanks very much, Ray.

>>RAY PLZAK: So with that, Mr. Chairman, this concludes the Address Supporting Organization report. And we are available for questions whenever you desire to have them.

>>VINT CERF: I'd ask you to stay in the room, not at the podium, though. The questions will come later after some of the other presentations have been made. And I can warn you ahead of time, I have several of my own. So I'd appreciate it if you would remain with us.

>>RAY PLZAK: Sure.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you.

The next report comes from the ccNSO Supporting Organization -- the country code Supporting Organization, and that's to be presented by Bernie Turcotte. Bernie, are you here? Yes, he is coming from the back of the room now.

>>BERNIE TURCOTTE: I don't have a check Paul, sorry.

>> That's the standard from now on.

>>BERNIE TURCOTTE: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Whoops, I have to stand away from the mike. My name is Bernard Turcotte and I am here with the very difficult task of trying to replace Chris Disspain to give this report.

There will be no PowerPoint slides, but simply a brief recap of our activities this week, which have been many.

ccNSO is pleased to present its support for the meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, on the 26th, 27th, and 28th of March. Approximately 30 ccTLDs were represented at the meeting, as well as several observers.

All of those present expressed their appreciation for the work done in facilitating the meeting by the members of the local host organizing committee, and it has been absolutely a great meeting. So congratulations to the local host.

Joint session with the GAC on IDNs. IDNs seem to have kept us quite busy this week.

The ccNSO met with the GAC to discuss the draft issues paper. The selection of IDN ccTLDs associated with the ISO 3166 dash one two letter codes, prepared jointly the joint ccNSO/GAC working group.

Part was related to the use of mandated lists for IDN ccTLDs, and as part of this discussion, presentations were given by Elisabeth Porteneuve of AFNOR and Debbie Gossign {?} of World Language Documentation Center.

The group agreed on a way forward to continue their joint work on IDNs.

The joint session with the GAC on regions and other topics. The groups met again to discuss other topics of interest, both ccTLDs and the Governmental Advisory Committee. David Archbold, ccTLD manager for Cayman islands, gave a presentation on some issues with the current definition of ICANN regions from ccTLD manager's point of view.

Useful discussions took place and the GAC was encouraged to provide input.

The group then received an update on the development of the dot TZ TLD, the Tanzanian government passed a resolution in 2003 to turn it into an I.T. infrastructure.

The group held a discussion on retiring IANA's discussion paper on retiring country codes top-level domains. The GAC expressed concern that IANA follows the ISO list when retiring TLDs.

Although the list proves to be extremely reliable when introducing country codes, it was seemed this was not the best way to proceed when a country ceases to exist.

ICANN CEO and president of the ICANN board. The meeting was joined by Vint Cerf and Paul Twomey who discussed the work of the ICANN board. Paul Twomey identified the main issues within ICANN at the moment and mentioned the e-IANA effort and thanked the Polish registry NAT for their help and commitment to the project. He also highlighted the fact that once e-IANA is in place, IANA will introduce an authentication regime to ensure robust mechanism for updating requests for the zone file.

Chris Disspain raised concerns about a draft paper prepared for the U.S. homeland security, which suggests amongst other things that the U.S. government be the sole signer of the DNSsec root. He suggested that it may be time for the broader community to consider this issue and possible solutions.

Registry failover. Patrick Jones of ICANN introduced the group to the registry failover project. This was initiated in the ICANN operational plan.

Although it's primarily for gTLDs, comments and information from ccTLDs on their experience with the failure scenarios would be appreciated.

General manager, public participation. We were quite pleased to have Kieren McCarthy give an overview on what his role involves. Kieren defined filtering of community input as well as a lack of interaction has created frustration in some communities.

To change this, fact sheets and newsletters with relevant information will be produced. An interactive Web site has already been launched where the community can follow the ICANN meetings and give their immediate input. And we, our community, has certainly felt the changes and would like to congratulate everyone on that because I think it is really a wonderful initiative, with a lot of positive results quickly.

IANA update. Olivier Guillard, dot FR, chair of the IANA working group, reported that the IANA working group had conversations with IANA on issues such as the accuracy of the data in the IANA database for ccTLDs, and what the term Supporting Organization actually means.

The next major issue for the group is to revise the list of CC concerns with IANA. However, I should point out that it is the general sentiment that here, also, there has been significant progress made and improvements, and that Kim and Dave had just been wonderful and we are very pleased with the performance on many issues and look forward to fixing many of the other issues.

Kim Davies gave an overview the of the most important topics on IANA's agenda. The main project has been to start the root zone management work flow automation. During the next few weeks, a first functioning version will be available for testing. However, the main server function will only begin in May, we are told. We are greatly encouraged by this and look forward to this.

Our second IDN session-to, two further sessions on IDN issues, (saying name) of Greece explained how the Greek registry opened registrations for ancient and current Greek characters at the second level in July 2005. The problems that the registry had to face due to linguistic complexities were outlined. These problems will have to be tackled again when IDN registrations open at the top level.

The group also received presentations from Jonathan Shea of Hong Kong and Minjung Park of Korea on second level issues in ccTLDs and crossover issues with the work being undertaken by the GNSO which had been identified within the IDN working group.

A further session was dedicated to discussing the draft issues paper prepared by the joint ccNSO/GAC working group. It was agreed that a great deal more discussion is required on this issue and that a full day session would be scheduled for the San Juan, Puerto Rico meeting to deal only with this issue, so we can hopefully move forward quickly.

There were updates from regional organizations. The group received presentations from the regional organizations on their current work. Don Hollander, APTLD, Michuki Mwangi of AfTLD, Peter Van Roste of CENTR and Margaret Valdes from LACTLD all emphasized their commitment to cooperate with each other and the ccNSO on relevant issues.

ICANN's global partnership perspectives. Representatives Giovanni Seppia, (saying name), and Baher Esmat, please forgive me for mangling your names, updated the group on their efforts to establish relations with country code operators around the globe and we are getting a lot of good feedback on that. It was noted since the liaisons began their work they have assisted in accountability framework discussions and have assisted several countries with their ccNSO applications. So we are seeing some real progress on the ground and we think that, again, is a good thing.

Accountability and transparency. Paul Levins, executive officer and vice president of corporate affairs, presented outcomes of a report completed by One World Trust examining the accountability and transparency of ICANN. The outcome showed that ICANN in many ways was a very transparent organization, but improvement is still required in some areas.

The report will be published to the public and their comments implemented in a response to the One World Trust report.

The draft will be ready before the ICANN meeting in Puerto Rico.

I should note that we will be happy to see the terms of reference for the work being posted also, and I have discussed this with Mr. Levins and he has agreed to it. So we are very pleased.

Since I'm a little bit involved in this, I will add a personal comment. I think on the transparency side it has been an incredible amount of work. We have yet to undertake some serious discussions about the accountability side.

But wonderful and significant progress, nonetheless.

ccTLD updates. The group received interesting updates from (saying name) of dot EU, (saying name) of Czechoslovakia and (saying name) of the dot RS domain on the latest developments of their respective registries.

Updates from ccNSO board members. The last session was devoted to updates from the ccNSO's board members Peter Dengate Thrush of New Zealand and (saying name) of Brazil. They discussed the significant work the ICANN board has to face.

Discussion followed where was suggested that the ICANN board should focus on policy and should concentrate on key issues to try and diminish the workload.

The group thanked Donna Austin for her commitment and hard work as the ccNSO policy officer.

Donna is leaving her position after two years and hands over her post to Bart Boswinkel, who was welcomed onboard.

So this, for us, is significant, because Donna has put in a significant amount of work over the years, from the very early days, where it's always a little bit more difficult. And it is with heartfelt warmth that we wish her the best in her new function. And we are very sorry to see her go.

We would also like to welcome back our friend Bart, who we will certainly appreciate being with again.

This completes my report, unless there are questions.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much, Bernie. And certainly on behalf of the board and staff, your complimentary bouquets are very much appreciated, to say nothing of your own contributions to the ICANN process.

We will have questions, but it will be a little bit later, so I'll ask you to remain with us in the room this morning.

Thank you very much.

I should warn everyone that the speed of light has not only caught up with us, but surpassed us, because it's now approximately 9:30, and according to the schedule, it's only 9:15.

So I'll ask Janis Karklins if he's in a position to present the Government Advisory Committee report, and try to keep us a little closer on schedule.

Janis.

>>JANIS KARKLINS: So thank you, Vint.

I apologize if my voice will tremble since this is the first time when I do this.

Let me start -- or before starting the report on the work of the GAC, I would like to say that during the meeting, GAC warmly thanked its outgoing chair, Sharil Tarmizi, for tireless efforts and loyal service to the GAC in the past four years.

And I would like to invite the community here to do the same.

[ Applause ]

(Standing ovation).

>>JANIS KARKLINS: So the Governmental Advisory Committee met in Lisbon from 24th to 28th of 2007. 46 members and three observers participated in the meetings. It's an incredible turnout.

The GAC expressed warm welcomes to the government of Portugal and the organizers, Foundation for Computer -- Computacao Cientifica Nacional for hosting the meeting in Lisbon.

On WHOIS, the GAC adopted a set of principles regarding generic top-level domains WHOIS service.

The principles are annexed to the communique.

The GAC held a joint session with the GNSO Council regarding the recently completed WHOIS task force final report.

The GAC noted that the recommendations included in the report indicate a significant division of views regarding the appropriate approach to WHOIS services and urges the GNSO Council to continue its efforts to develop consensus-based proposals.

In this regard, having completed the principles, the GAC is committed to continue consultations on the WHOIS issues, including providing additional advice, as appropriate, prior to the further consideration of any recommendations by the board.

On new gTLDs, the GAC adopted principles regarding new gTLDs -- and these principles are annexed to the communique -- which are intended to provide the ICANN board and the wider global community with a clear indication of the government priorities for the introduction, delegation, and operation of new gTLDs.

I would like to clarify that these principles do not address new IDN gTLDs, but only new strings written in Roman script.

The principles respond directly to several agreed provisions resulting from the World Summit on the Information Society and will provide a coherent framework for future interaction on these issues, particularly in relation to the ongoing ICANN policy development process on new gTLDs.

On IDNs, Mr. Chairman, the GAC acknowledges with satisfaction ICANN's 7th March announcement of its successful conduct of laboratory tests on Internationalized Domain Names.

The GAC has taken note of the draft issue paper on selection of IDN ccTLDs associated with the ISO 3166, slash, 1, two-letter codes prepared within the joint ccNSO/GAC IDN working group.

In the spirit of collaborative effort, it was adopted -- that was adopted in Sao Paulo meeting, GAC has asked all its members to evaluate the sociopolitical and cultural implications of the issues outlined in the aforesaid paper in terms of languages and characters that may be used for IDN ccTLDs and respond directly to the ccNSO Council.

The GAC has similarly taken note of the outcome report of the working group on IDN constituted by the GNSO Council.

The GAC recognizes that the IDN ccTLD standard development processes can be slow and would encourage early action to develop methodology to prepare these standards.

The GAC and its members, along with the ccNSO and GNSO Council, will work towards the global deployment of IDNs, which will expand the spread of IDN -- of Internet, and enable a vast number of people to exchange information in their local languages.

On interaction with ccNSO, the GAC had a useful exchange with the ccNSO on ccTLD issues. The GAC heard views from ccTLD community on ICANN's regions and noted the sensitivities associated with this issue.

The GAC received a presentation of national case study highlighting questions being addressed in the country. The GAC intends to continue this dialogue with ccNSO on sharing good practices.

The GAC noted that the consultations on retiring country code raises public-policy issues and intends to provide advice in due course.

The GAC reminds the board that the applicable version of the GAC principles and guidelines for the delegation and administration of ccTLDs is the one dated 5th April, 2005, adopted in Mar Del Plata meeting, and attaches these principles to communique for information.

Mr. Chairman, on ICANN's board and GAC cooperation, the GAC welcomes the introduction of master calendar, which will allow all constituencies to participate in ICANN's policy development processes in a coordinated fashion. The GAC also welcomes the formulation of extensive outreach program and looks forward to contributing in this ongoing work.

On transparency and accountability principles, the GAC recalls the paragraphs of WSIS Geneva declaration of principles and Tunis Agenda for the information society relevant to international management of Internet.

The GAC took note of the affirmation of responsibilities for ICANN's private sector management approved by the ICANN board of directors on 25th September, 2006. The GAC encourages ICANN to continue posting advanced notice of the board meetings and agenda and full minutes of such meetings and maintain a spirit of transparency in its deliberations.

The GAC intends to provide advice to the board on the development of ICANN's transparency and accountability management operating principles and looks forward to the report commissioned by the board from the One World Trust.

On other matter, Mr. Chairman, we had a discussion on the status of application on ICM on triple X. In this regard, the GAC reaffirms the letter sent to the ICANN board on 2nd February, 2007.

The Wellington communique remains a valid and important expression of the GAC's views on triple X. The GAC does not consider the information provided by the board to have answered the GAC's concerns as to whether the ICM application meets the sponsorship criteria.

The GAC also calls the board's attention to the comment from the government of Canada to ICANN's online public forum and expresses concern with the revised proposed ICANN ICM registry agreement the corporation could be moving towards assuming an ongoing management and oversight role regarding Internet content, which would be inconsistent with its technical mandate.

As requested last meeting, GAC made a nomination for representation in ENAC, Emergency Numbers and Addresses Committee, with the expressed hope that this committee would never come together.

So the following members have been designed to serve as the GAC representatives to ENAC, namely, Mr. Pankaj Agrawala, from India; Mrs. Mainouna Diop from Senegal; Mr. Augusto Gadelha, from Brazil; Mr. Bill Graham, from Canada; and Mr. Stefano Trumpy, from Italy.

Concerning President's Strategy Committee report, the GAC welcomes, with interest, the final report of the President's Strategy Committee, and would appreciate receiving information from the board on how it intends to associate the GAC and its members with any follow-up activity to this report.

The GAC expects that any such follow-up activity will fully take into account relevant provisions of the Tunis Agenda for the information society.

The GAC warmly thanks all those among the ICANN community who have contributed to the dialogue with the GAC in Lisbon. The next GAC meeting will take place during the ICANN meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from 24th to 28th of June.

I would like also to note that this communique and its annexes constitute a formal advice to the board from the Government Advisory Committee.

And, in closing, I would like personally to thank ICANN for assigning a liaison to the GAC. And I'm looking forward to fruitful cooperation with Donna Austin.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much, Janis. It was nice brevity and concise. So you need not tremble any further. It was a well-done report. And, of course, we appreciate the advice of the GAC and will take it into consideration as appropriate.

The next report comes from Bruce Tonkin, the chair of the generic names supporting organization.

We are now only 15 minutes late. So the GAC, incredibly, has gained five minutes on the speed of light. We appreciate that.

>>BRUCE TONKIN: Hopefully, this will appear in a moment.

Okay. The GNSO, like the ccNSO and the GAC, has had a busy week, which started early on Saturday morning and has pretty much been working nonstop ever since.

The, I guess, main issues that we've been considering have been issues relating to new gTLDs. And we had a workshop on new gTLDs on Monday afternoon. And also, considering what our next steps would be in considering the WHOIS task force report. And we've had a number of meetings with -- also with the GAC and also within the GNSO, to consider next steps. So I'll try and sort of cover mainly the -- I guess the outcomes or the new material for this meeting rather than cover some of the material that we've presented previously during the week.

Firstly, on new gTLDs --

Perfect timing (Phone ringing) -- I think just to put it in context with new gTLDs is to also put new gTLDs in the context of global trends. And I think what we're seeing is that now many people in the world have access to convenient travel and also communication technologies. And this has meant that people no longer necessarily associate themselves with countries, because their community of interest is often distributed around the world, and they often meet people via travel in many different places. So we're seeing this sort of growth of international communities of interest that are cross-border.

We also see individuals increasingly have multiple citizenship, and increasingly have multiple language skills.

Companies and organizations are also now global and operate across many borders. So that's, I think, the context within which we're operating today.

The background of new gTLD work is that there was an initial ICANN working group on new gTLDs in June of 1999. And the arguments for and against new gTLDs have pretty much stayed consistent with that original working group report of 1999. To summarize some of the for and against, I think there are a range of arguments for, and they probably include increasing choice, improving diversity of the network, competition reasons, encouraging creativity, allowing innovation, providing an opportunity for global communities to have their own domain name hierarchy under the root.

I think the reasons against is it's unnecessary, because people can just register at the second level in the existing hierarchy. And also, there's seen as a requirement for defensive registrations to protect corporate brands.

I guess -- so the history, then, is, in 1999, there was an agreement to introduce new gTLDs and begin with a test bed with six or ten -- six to ten TLDs to sort of test to see what the impact would be on the network and whether it was a good idea or not.

In the first round, we had quite a diversity. We had fairly open names like biz and info, and more restrictive names like dot museum specifically for the museum community. Then again in 2004, we had another limited round, and we had dot travel, dot cat, and dot Asia. And it's interesting that they are three completely different types of TLD, if you like. Travel is obviously a particular industry type or recreational type. Cat is a -- relating to a particular language community. And Asia is obviously related to a geographic community. So we've seen quite different approaches there.

So this then leads to should we try and structure this top level in some way, should we go along commercial grounds and use things like finance, manufacturing, all the different commercial sectors? Should we look at different user groups, so we could have PC users, Mac users, other users. Or should we talk about food types, we have fish eaters, meat eaters, and in fact there are some that don't really eat very much.

Or should we allow communities to identify the strings that are most useful to their users and really not try and impose what any of our views might be on what that hierarchy looks like.

And I think the general decision of the GNSO back in around 2003, 2004, was the latter, that it wasn't possible to reach agreement on a structured hierarchy, there are just so many possibilities for how that might look.

So that comes down to why new gTLDs.

And I think this is one reason that I've chosen out of the range of reasons I've heard so far, but I think this is particularly relevant when we start considering IDN-based gTLDs. And that is, essentially, that we want to support the functional, geographic, and cultural diversity of the Internet by allowing globally distributed communities the opportunity to have their own hierarchy of names starting at the top level and recognize that not only communities identify themselves with either countries, in other words, the existing ccTLDs, or by the original broad com, net, org categories. Com was for commercial, net was for network operators, and org -- and I checked the RFC -- was for miscellaneous.

And it was interesting that I don't really think they have envisaged that individuals would own domain names. I think it was in the sense that it was big organizations that had domain names. And so we had commercial organizations, network operators, and other types of organization.

So the new gTLD committee accepted the outcomes of the 1999 work, taking into account the experience with introducing new gTLDs so far and focused on lessons learned and creating a process for introducing new gTLDs in a scalable manner.

And throughout that process, we've used the ICANN mission and core values to guide that work.

While this work on new gTLDs has been conducted, international domain names have been a hot topic of the last few years. And the committee supports the introduction of IDNs once the technical testing has been completed. And the intent is that they will be treated the same as any other new gTLD in the process. But we do recognize that, obviously, it makes implementation more complex.

An example of that is that we have a requirement that strings at the top level should not be confusingly similar. And we recognize that once we open that up into different scripts, that we need to get advice from people that have expertise in those scripts and expertise in the languages that use those scripts. So there's certainly going to be a need, I guess we'll see a lot more diversity even in the decision-making processes and in the evaluation panels that are used in the process.

We did establish a GNSO IDN working group. And that completed its report last week. And mostly it's identified many areas of implementation. And a lot of those recommendations for implementation will be incorporated into our final new gTLD report.

Which brings me to the next steps. And I'm not going to attempt to take people through -- in this session through the process, because that was done on Monday in depth.

But we're seeking to finalize our recommendations by May of this year and produce a final, final report. And then we will submit what's called the board report to the board by early June of this year. And then available for the board to consider at its meeting in Puerto Rico.

Now, we recognize that not every element of implementation will be dealt with. But we feel at that time it's appropriate to formalize the policy of introducing new gTLDs and recognize that the staff will continue to work with the GNSO to examine matters such as dispute resolution details, et cetera.

The other big topic before us this meeting was WHOIS, as it is at every meeting. And I think, again, I just want to go back to a bit of the background and what WHOIS is and what its requirements are.

I think there are really two requirements in terms of the policy process. The first one is that the contact information must be adequate to facilitate timely resolution of any problems that arise in connection with a registered name. And, secondly, that we need to take reasonable precautions to protect personal data from loss, misuse, unauthorized access, or disclosure, alteration, or destruction. So I think those are the fundamental requirements.

We -- the council received the final report of the WHOIS task force in the last week or two, and the -- that task force report has recommendations with a narrow majority of support in the task force. And, essentially, three of the six GNSO constituencies are in favor of those recommendations as they stand. And the other three constituencies have remaining issues that need to be considered before they feel comfortable in supporting those recommendations.

We also met with the GAC on Sunday and heard similar concerns as has been raised by some of the opposing constituencies. And so what we've decided to do is first thank the WHOIS task force for the work that they have done. And they have been working on this for a couple of years. And I'd like to particularly thank the chair of that task, Jordyn Buchanan. And at times, he probably felt that he was trying to chair a meeting between Attila the Hun and Ghengis Khan.

He has been patient and made his best efforts to try to incorporate all the suggestions and work of the different constituencies in that group.

What we've decided to do now is to create a -- what we call a GNSO working group. And a working group's a little bit different to a task force. A task force is very structured and has a set number of representatives from each constituency. And we've also allowed the At-Large Advisory Committee to appoint someone to those task forces. And typically, we've appointed one of our council members that has been appointed to the council by the Nominating Committee. And the way that has worked out in the WHOIS task force is it's really just acted as a casting vote, that the three constituencies have consistently opposed each other through most of the work, and the Nominating Committee member effectively has a casting vote.

So we feel that we need to sort of open that group up a bit wider and, naturally, continue to include constituency members, but perhaps not limit it to one or two reps per constituency, but allow broader participation.

We're really encouraging direct participation with some people that have law enforcement expertise. They don't have to be representing in the sense of, you know, presenting the official line of a particular law enforcement body, but what we're trying to seek is people that have worked in that sector that are prepared to provide us with expertise in their area.

And also, more broadly, allow community participants at what we call an observer level. They don't have a vote, but they may participate and contribute their knowledge and experiences.

And many of the things that we study in WHOIS I think have been studied in many other parts of the community, particularly in governments, where governments store data and make data available on a basis based on sets of rules to legitimate users.

So there's many models out there, I think, with adding some additional expertise we can consider.

And the idea is to cap the length and time this working group will work for, so it will be 120 days. And that will work to examine the issues raised with respect to the policy recommendations of the task force and then make recommendations to the council concerning how those policies may be improved to address the issues that have been raised by those that have concerns with the current recommendations.

So the working group tasks, then, that we have focused on is basically focusing on the concerns that members of the community have raised this week with the current task force recommendations. And that is to define the roles, responsibilities, and requirements of the contact point. And today that contact point, for those that are familiar with today's WHOIS, is essentially similar to the admin contact. Currently, it's not defined what the role of the admin contact is. We're now calling this the operational point of contact. But, essentially, it's similar. And provide some clarity on what those roles are. But also provide clarity for what happens if those roles are not fulfilled. So if you contact this point of contact and they just ignore you, you know, what are the next steps?

The other issue is that where some data is removed from public access, we do need to identify how the legitimate interests -- and these legitimate interests include law enforcement, intellectual property, Internet Service Providers, individuals that may be concerned about some bad action as they perceive it related to the use of the name -- so we need to look at how we continue to provide access.

And also, we want to consider whether a distinction should be made between the registration contact information that's published based on the nature of the registered name holder, so is it appropriate to distinguish between legal persons, which is generally being referred to as companies and organizations and so forth, or natural persons, being individuals? Or should it be in some way related to the use of the name, if it's used for commercial or noncommercial purposes, for example.

Now, these are not easy distinctions to make at a registration level for a registrar, but -- at the time of registration, but those distinctions may be useful when it comes to complaints. So, as part of a complaint, you may be able to show that this person is of a certain type, and based on that type, there's certain action that can be taken in those circumstances, or certain data that can be made available.

So that's basically the end.

So I'll leave it there, Mr. Chairman.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much, Bruce.

Ask you also to remain in the room in case there are questions as we complete all of the reports for this morning.

The next report is from the root server system advisory committee. And I'll ask Suzanne Woolf to present that report. Suzanne, do you want to do that from where you are?

>>SUZANNE WOOLF: Yeah. Which microphone? There we go.

Yeah, I was planing to stay here and maybe save some time, out of respect for our schedule, although, I'll note, Mr. Chairman, that network people have been asking for faster light and slower time for decades now.

[ Laughter ]

>>SUZANNE WOOLF: We'll do our best.

Okay. I'd like to present just a brief overview of some of the recent activities by RSSAC. I'll try keep it quick.

>>VINT CERF: But remember to speak at a moderate pace.

>>SUZANNE WOOLF: Yes. I had that conversation with the transcriptionist yesterday in the SSAC meeting. They promised me chocolate.

Just to recap, for those who may not know us, we're one of the original ICANN advisory committees, including root name server operators, the RIRs, researchers, and interested others.

RSSAC does not represent the root name server operators but serves as a forum for interaction between operators and ICANN.

Provides written recommendations and informal advice to IANA. Meets regularly at IETF, most recently in Prague just a week ago.

A couple of updates on current activities.

First, the summary, and some more detail to follow on a couple of these items. On IPv6 addresses for the roots, we have, in a joint effort with SSAC, report to the board has been finalized. There's a -- there will be a little more detail on that in a couple of minutes. And also spent some time on that in the SSAC meeting yesterday. So the archive of that more lengthy presentation will be available.

On DNSsec for the first time at this meeting all of the root server's report ready to serve signed data. So we regard that as a critical step to signing the root and are very happy to report that.

We also have been working on a consensus statement. We have been working at the last couple of meetings with Tina and the other staff and interested parties on IDN. So we have a statement that I hope to have finalized today or tomorrow on IDN.

But before we go into the current -- the formal work items, the results of this meeting, I'll note there was some discussion of a recent event that involved some of the root name servers, made some headlines. On February 6, several of the root name servers observed an unusual amount of traffic to some locations. A distributed denial of service attack, an attempt to overwhelm servers and network links.

It lasted for a couple of hours, and presented a standard DDOS profile. It did not look unusual to security experts we saw -- we talked to as far as what we saw.

The impact of the attack was very limited. Some users saw some delay. We think in DNS resolution.

But there were several reasons why the damage was confined, was limited.

First, only some operations were attacked, which meant that if you couldn't reach one, you could still see the others. The DNS is designed to be redundant that way, and there are, in fact, 13 different ways -- different entry points into the system and many, many more than 13 servers that provide DNS service for the root.

For operators that use Anycast, Anycast compartmentalized the impact. So even when one location saw a significant impact, other locations belonging to the same operator did not.

The discussion in the RSSAC meeting centered primarily around shared monitoring and analysis capabilities and possibly closer coordination in the future with TLD operators and an agreement to continue discussion on both of those items.

For the formal agenda of the meeting, we spoke on the IPv6 work item. We have some news on that.

This seems especially timely in view of the RIRs report on IPv4 address supplies and future of the IPv4 address space.

The need for the DNS infrastructure to be fully IPv6 compatible was identified some time ago, but there was also a significant due diligence to undertake as there is anytime we add new capabilities to the existing service.

We just completed the recommendation to IANA to IPv6 addresses to the root for TLDs several years ago. Several of the roots are ready to put the service into operation. However, we haven't yet added v6 addresses for the root name servers themselves until this report was done, this due diligence was done.

There have been concerns about backwards compatibility for the installed base. It wasn't clear that older software on the Net was ready for this, and of course there is no flag day you can impose on the Internet. There's no way to make sure everyone upgrades. So there's a need to make sure there's no inadvertent harm done to holders of older DNS software in the name of enabling the future.

Not to go into technical details on that, they are in the report, but RSSAC and SSAC together did the due diligence and have made a recommendation to the IANA to proceed with IPv6 addresses for the root servers. And we are very pleased to report that.

IDN, we report IDN for the Internet is a very complex undertaking. DNS in the root is only a very small part.

We have been -- we are forwarding a consensus statement to the board, including a few technical and operational points.

There is no problem that we can see with a proposed test of standard delegations of name server records for IDN. We request that ICANN, and particularly IANA, keep us informed as test plans and implementation go forward.

RSSAC is happy to provide advice on DNS specific technical aspects of test and deployment, and on the specific issue of aliases for existing names in the IDN space. Should aliasing become a requirement, RSSAC would work with ICANN to identify how to meet it. But it's our understanding that such a requirement has to come out of the policy processes undertaken by other bodies.

A couple of odds and ends.

One work item that we've recently taken on is a revision of RFC 2870. An obscure technical document that some of you know is the most recent formal best practices for root name servers. It's been a useful guideline document for us but was written in 2000 and is seriously obsolete. It was written before DDOS, before Anycast, before significant employment of IPv6.

We've observed that having it out there can lead to misunderstandings, since the provisioning and operations guidelines it suggests are often somewhat naive for the current environment.

So we're working on a revision that will provide some more realistic guidelines both for what we do today and for the evolution of the service going forward.

The other item is RSSAC has always had very little need for formal process, but we do see a few things evolving as we go forward.

The current item being a succession plan with a little more formality.

We've also recently appointed a vice chair. He ran the Prague agenda. Jun Murai remains as our chair, Matt Larson is our vice chair. So we have a little more process in place and we will be delivering a draft of a succession plan as an item for our next meeting.

A few administrative notes.

Next meeting in conjunction with IETF 66, July 9th of this year.

Particular reviews and updates we expect at that time, any further discussion with ICANN on IDN. The usual operational updates on Anycast and any service deployment, and the presentation here will have the usual URLs for further information which I will not go through now. Although note that our committee page on the ICANN site is part of the revision of the new Web site launch this week. I'm not sure if the new content is up yet, but will be soon.

And that completes my report, Mr. Chairman.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much, Suzanne.

Gained a few more minutes. We may actually catch up.

I noted that Steve Crocker just came in, and so Steve, if you are actually prepared, I'm happy to ask you to present the Security and Stability Advisory Committee report.

You can do it either from where you are seated. We can pass the projection dongle, or you could go to the podium if you wish.

We have a little fishing expedition here to complete.

>>STEPHEN CROCKER: So I apologize for not being here from the beginning.

>>VINT CERF: Steve, is your microphone on?

>>STEPHEN CROCKER: Now it is.

So thank you. I apologize for not being here earlier. I was drafted into giving a keynote speech on IPv6, which I'm not actually a major expert on, down the hall at our hosts IPv6 meeting. And I was very pleased to be able to do that.

I chair the -- let's see. We're having a little trouble with the -- Are you seeing the same flashing that I'm seeing?

>>VINT CERF:It seems to be okay on the screen, Steve.

>>STEPHEN CROCKER: Here it's showing flashing. Oh, just the ones right next to me.

[ Laughter ]

>>STEPHEN CROCKER: How do they know that it's me?

>>VINT CERF: I'm sure that it's a Bluetooth effect.

>>STEPHEN CROCKER: I chair the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. I had to count all the way up to five to figure out how long I have been doing this, which is getting to be a long time. I was talking to Hagen Hultzsch the other day who had been on the board, I'm sure many of you know, and he -- it was in another context, but he may have been talking to me, he said, "You know the rule of three, five and seven. After three years you are permitted to leave, after five you should, and after seven you must."

And so I took it to heart.

So sometime, sometime, not instantly, no announcement here, but one of the things on my mind is the ultimate transition and stabilization of SSAC so that it doesn't just have a single personality to it.

I'd like to do a very brief introduction of what we are about, and then I want to talk about three things. Two very big results, and then one thing starting up.

We are a source of security and stability expertise. We give advice to the board. We are chartered under the board. We give advice to staff, Supporting Organizations, and also to the community at large.

We have a fair amount of independence -- that is, we're not a public relations organ of ICANN, exactly. We're not adversarial, either, but we try, as I say, to be somewhat independent, to speak to the issues that we see, very often self-tasked.

The other side of that equation is we give advice. The advisory part of our title is, I think, extremely important. We don't have any formal authority built into our structure. There's no requirement to run things past us, nor is there any requirement to listen to what we say.

Of course, you are foolish not to pay attention, but that's a separate matter.

Here are the members and key people who are involved. It's a very distinguished group. With the exception of Dave Piscitello and Jim Galvin who are paid members of our staff, the rest of us all have regular day jobs in critical sections of the industry in registries, in address registries, in ISPs, in security research and so forth.

We don't have functionaries, we don't have bureaucrats and so forth whose job it is to be a member of SSAC.

There is another organization that we are strongly cooperative and coordinate with. Lyman Chapin chairs the registry services technical evaluation panel. This has come out of the revision about how changes in registry operations are handled through a funnel process, so-called, and that when there are security and stability issues raised with respect to the introduction of a new service by a registry, after an initial look, if it's determined that there is a substantive question, a very organized and very short-fused process takes place. The standing team of experts and a couple of months, 45 days I think is the interior of that process, and then it's got some time around the ends, the beginning and the end of that.

And in our public sessions, we have made a point of providing time for Lyman to present his results and we keep in quite close contact.

They did not have any transactions to report between the last meeting and this meeting, so his report yesterday in our public meeting was brief.

Okay. On to the good news.

Some of the root server -- some of the 13 root servers have IPv6 addresses. Some of those name servers. None of those IPv6 addresses currently are being advertised within the root zone.

Why is that? And the answer is that the historic -- historical design of the initiation process, the so-called priming process for getting a resolver going at the beginning of its operation, is that it would ask -- it would have an idea about where the root servers are built into a hints file or from some other source, and then it would ask one of those addresses in there for the official current list of root servers -- root server addresses. And the answer would come back all 13 addresses, and things were constructed so that those addresses fit within a single packet.

And a single packet historically has been 512 bytes, and so there was a constraint of how do you fit all of those addresses into that size packet. And they fit, but not by -- but not with very much room to spare.

Now, along comes IPv6, and if we start assigning IPv6 addresses, which are four times as long, and in addition have to retain the IPv4 addresses, how will they fit within a single packet?

And if they don't fit within a single packet, what happens? Does something break?

That's the question that has sort of hung in the air for a period of time.

That question needs to be answered in order to reach the point at which there is eventual smooth operation of IPv6, end to end, top to bottom, without dependence on IPv4. How soon will that be? Not very soon.

But it is a necessary piece of the planning so that one can begin to see IPv6 self-sufficiency instead of merely IPv6 as an adjunct to IPv4.

So that's the question we took up.

There are a number of technical details.

Are the end systems now able to handle larger packets in and the answer turns out to be generally yes. And in fact, more than generally. Almost uniformly. Small little details around the edges, but rapidly disappearing.

Another element that is not immediately visible, doesn't come obviously to mind, is that there are boxes in the middle of the processes, firewalls, address translation boxes and the like, some of which may not, or at least we were concerned might not be able to handle the longer DNS packets, or, conceivably, were not expecting to see IPv6 addresses within those packets.

We engaged in considerable amount of testing, of consultation, reaching out to vendors and to operators, and we got very, very good, very good results. These results are posted on the Web site, ICANN Web site. We did this work jointly with the root server system advisory committee, a very successful joint venture.

The basic recommendation is to move forward but to move forward in a very deliberate fashion with plenty of time and plenty of notice and interaction with the community.

And we will be polishing off the findings and recommendations and handing that up to the board and on to IANA for consideration, and that will proceed.

The other thing I need to mention is along the path of DNSsec adoption, Sweden and Bulgaria are now up. Sweden has done a formal commercial launch of DNS security service last month in Sweden. I was privileged to participate. And I was expecting a very well organized and professional operation.

It was all of that, but it was a great deal more.

In addition to the registry and the registrars being prepared, they worked with one of the major banks, Swede bank, and with the major ISPs who are running resolvers that are DNSsec compliant. And so that's a worked example that is serving really as a beacon around the world.

I have since, in the short time since then, encountered multiple groups that are traveling to Sweden or drawing from that experience and using that to move their own DNSsec implementations forward, including even a portion of what's happening inside of ICANN, which is very good.

And so over the next period of time, there will be additional adoption.

We still, of course, will have to wait and see for the very big players, for com, net and org, for the vendors like Microsoft and Apple and AOL and so forth. There is progress there. Little bits have been announced in the past, I won't go into it here, and more to come.

Finally, on the what's coming up side of things, we're initiating an IDN study. What in another IDN study, you say? That's kind of my reaction, too, but it's necessary.

The question has to be both asked and answered: Are there security and stability related to IDNs? If so, what are they and what limits do they suggest on the range of options? It is certainly not our job to dictate what the policy should be but it is our job to raise awareness of consequences of different paths and to try to make a distinction between things that will work and the things that are likely not to work and to provide that guidance to the users and decision-makers who have to choose what path to go.

We'll move as quickly as possible. We fully appreciate the urgency, and at the same time, there is this collision between physics and politics. And historically, no matter what the policies are, the physics usually wins, sometimes in an ugly way and sometimes not. But there we are.

So with that, I will get off the stage. I don't know whether I have helped or hindered the schedule here, but I have talked as fast as I can this morning.

>>VINT CERF: Well, I'm glad that you didn't speak any faster out of consideration for our scribes.

We are about ten minutes behind at this point. It's time now to call on the ALAC for its report, and my notes say that Jacqueline Morris is going to offer that report to us.

After which, we will open up the floor to questions on the reports that have been presented so far.

I'll also be asking Kieren McCarthy to relay any questions that may have come in the online forum or other means of asking them.

Jacqueline, please go ahead.

>>JACQUELINE MORRIS: Thank you.

Good morning, everyone.

The At-Large Advisory Committee has had a very busy three months since Sao Paulo. Today we will have the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between ICANN and two new regional organizations, Africa and Europe.

Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands has also concluded their Memorandum of Understanding.

These new RALOs join the Latin America Caribbean RALO in making the ALAC truly representative of and responsible to the individual Internet users in these regions.

North America has been a challenge for the ALAC.

It has the lowest participation, even though it is among the largest in terms of number of Internet users.

We are working hard to form the North American RALO however, and hope to have some positive news for you by our next meeting.

These advances have led to many changes in the composition of the ALAC, as the interim ALAC members who have spent a long time getting these RALOs up and running are replaced by members rooted for by the regions.

At this meeting here in Lisbon we will have six new ALAC members out of the 15, and Latin America - Caribbean's two members who joined us in Sao Paulo. Familiar faces are moving on but most of them will remain involved with ICANN.

At this point I would like to thank the outgoing interim ALAC members for their dedication and hard work. We also have to thank our last chair, Annette Muehlberg, who resigned recently for personal reasons but who led us very capably through almost all of the RALO formation process to date.

ALAC has also been deeply involved in policy issues that affect the individual Internet users. We have drafted statements on three of these issues and I will expand a bit on them now. The statements will soon be available online.

>>VINT CERF: I'm sorry to interrupt. It's Vint. You might moderate the speed just a little bit. Thank you.

>>JACQUELINE MORRIS: Sure. I can go slow. Okay.

On domain tasting and domain monetization. These are two different issues, only one of which we believe falls within ICANN's purview. Namely, domain tasting.

We believe the five-day add/drop loophole is being exploited to the instability of the Internet addressing resources. However, we recognize more rigorous research is required to establish its effect in a completely convincing manner. ALAC is therefore taking the necessary steps to formally request the initiation of a PDP by GNSO on this matter.

I am happy to report that we are actively working on this with several constituencies within the GNSO. At the same time, we invite any other constituencies and groups who share our concern on this issue to work with us on achieving a common consensus position.

While many of us believe that domain monetization might cause confusion and does not benefit user experience, some of us consider it a content issue, and hence outside the realm of ICANN regulation.

On internationalization of domain names. Through ALAC's efforts, nearly 100 user organizations rooted in more than 40 language communities on all five continents have joined the ICANN community. You may have noticed recently ICANN has translated documents in the meetings into Spanish, French and Portuguese and has provided simultaneous interpretation at these meetings. More is needed, and we hope soon ICANN can function effectively in multiple languages.

Internationalized Domain Names will remove the last barrier that prevents non-Latin script users from conveniently and effectively using the Internet. Despite all the challenges and difficulties in implementation, IDNs are crucial to the achievement of true global participation in the Internet community.

ALAC has been actively participating in the IDN activities of the president's advisory council -- committee on IDNs, and on the policy-making activities in the GNSO and ccNSO.

>>VINT CERF:Jacqueline, I'm sorry, it's Vint again. Can you slow down just a little bit. Maybe a little bit more. Thank you.

>>JACQUELINE MORRIS: Okay.

ALAC is committed to bringing the users' voices to ICANN and facilitating relevant research and policy. Deployment of IDNs raises many technical problems and policy concerns.

We strongly suggest the following be taken into account in the policy-making and technical application processes.

One, representatives from the at-large community, particularly from the regional at-large organizations, be able to join all of the ICANN IDN policy-making processes with full membership and voting rights.

That local and regional preexisting developments regarding IDN gTLDs be taken into account when considering introduction of new IDN domains.

That support from the local language community be a key element considered for evaluation of IDN TLD applications.

And that ICANN IDN policy-making and implementation processes be substantively accelerated and no delay be tolerated.

In recent days, we have heard extensively about the RegisterFly issue. But we should recognize this is more than a singular incident.

Having examined the events connected with the RegisterFly case, noting the request for input made to the community by ICANN CEO Paul Twomey, and in its commitment to seeking the best interest of the individual registrants, the ALAC has resolved that ICANN, as the entity responsible for accreditation of gTLD registrars and registries, and for the related contractual conditions, should make it duty to ensure that such contracts guarantees the minimum protection and prerogatives of registrants, especially individual ones, that are necessary to keep the market effective and competitive by allowing consumers to freely select and change their domain name suppliers and to enforce such rights in a predictable and accessible manner.

Specifically, in regard to contractual agreements, recognizing that the public Internet users are intended beneficiaries of its contracts, ICANN should strike the no third-party beneficiary language from its registrar accreditation agreements and registry agreements. That ICANN should promptly adopt a schedule and provisions for escrowing of data from all registrars as envisioned in RAA36, and from all registries.

That ICANN should ensure that the agreements contain appropriate clauses that, while ensuring the security of the process, allow all registrants to promptly transfer their domain names away from registrars that provide an unsatisfactory level of service without financial or procedural burdens.

ICANN should ensure that the agreements require registrars and resellers, to the extent possible, to provide adequate information to all registrants about their contractual rights, and that ICANN should enforce its contracts, possibly while adding intermediate and graduated actions against breaches of contract.

The ALAC recognizes that much more can be obtained by adequate education of registrars, resellers, and registrants, and by the establishment of voluntary lightweight best practices regarding procedures and relationships between these parties.

The ALAC proposes to work together with the registrar constituency and any other interested party to build consensus on a mix of useful additions to address these issues.

And that's it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much, Jacqueline.

I must say that progress has been substantial in the ALAC sector, with the large number of ALSs and now new RALOs that are coming. In fact, at the end of the day, we'll be signing a collection of agreements. So that will be a very important milestone.

We're -- it's possible now to undertake responses to questions, if there are any from the board or the floor, to any of the speakers who have presented this morning.

So let me ask if there are any questions either from the floor, the board, or from Kieren, who is channeling people who are coming in from the outside.

Peter.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thanks, Vint. Very belatedly, this is actually a question directed to the meetings committee. These were the reports that were put up. I want to hear from the meetings committee not necessarily now, but some feedback on what the changes to this meeting may have achieved, the way we started with the open forum and moving through finally to concluding with the forum and some of these other changes.

So --

>>VINT CERF: The meetings committee chair is not here.

So perhaps you could -- either we can get a public answer or you can check with Susan when you see her.

Thank you, Peter.

Other questions?

I have one or two for Ray Plzak. So let me ask Ray if he would please either take the microphone -- or if you're more comfortable, you can use the lectern.

Ray, first question, there was mention -- All right. While they're fuddling with the microphone, I'll ask the questions anyway.

There was mention of the 16-bit ASN number utilization. I think one of your charts showed that. Or it may have been in the ASO report.

I had thought that 32-bit ASNs were already in use. Have I misunderstood that? Because I see that there were still some consideration of policy for the 32-bit ASNs.

>>RAY PLZAK: The answer is, is that the report that you saw that Sebastian presented represented what has happened over -- since the last meeting that we had here with the board.

And, in fact, the 32-bit AS number has been adopted in all regions, and that policy called for a schedule of a transition. And that has been put into effect.

>>VINT CERF: Is it -- Well, okay. I'll take up some other specifics later on.

The second question has to do with getting IPv6 going. And you were eloquent, I thought, in your call for that.

Is there any possibility that the RIRs could work with the ISPs in order to help spur this along?

My impression that all of the software is there, but the ISPs often have not turned V6 on because they don't think anybody is asking for it.

What's your sense of that?

>>RAY PLZAK: My sense of that is that there has been work done in this area by the community in terms of policies. If you look at some of the policy, for example, the provider independent policy, the -- up until September of last year, it was not possible for anyone other than a service provider to receive I.P. addresses -- V6 addresses directly from a registry. Since September, that's been possible in the ARIN region and an actual discussion is occurring in the other four regions. And you can expect adoption of similar policies in them as we go forward.

There have been other things that have been discussed. In fact, over the last week and a half, there's probably been close to about 1,000 to 1500 e-mails discussing various aspects of this subject. And they have ranged from a number of things from different adjustments, again, of fees, perhaps escalating service fees associated with V4 and other things.

So the RIR community, which, basically, is a large part consisting of the ISPs, is engaged in this conversation.

But, again, as I said earlier, the use of the allocation policy process is perhaps becoming a little overtaxed in this area. And we need to find other solutions.

>>VINT CERF: Thanks very much, Ray.

Do we have any other questions? Peter.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Just a follow-up to yours, Vint.

Ray, thank you for that. I reacted, naturally, as I'm sure you intended, to the word "panic" in the IPv6 implementation side.

>>RAY PLZAK: The word was "frantic," Peter.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Sorry. Frantic.

First question, is this something that ICANN actually should be doing, this preparing the community for the expiration of IPv4 and introduction of 6? Or is this something that we just have to watch you dealing with? And you described the community, if it's -- the address registries are doing. Is this something that ICANN as a corporation needs to be doing in this area? And if there is, what?

>>RAY PLZAK: Okay. First of all, IPv4 is not going to expire. It'll be around for years and years and years to come. It's not going to go away.

Second thing is that IPv6 has been available as unicast address space to be consumed since 1999. It's the problem in getting people to adopt it that has been at issue here.

ICANN, as a facilitator, and with its ability to perform outreach in various areas in the business community, the government community, and so forth, should try and position itself in such a manner as it encourages things to occur.

I mentioned a couple of things in relatively simplistic manner, for example, encouraging businesses to maybe free up some resources to assist the technical community in their development solutions, to governments looking for different ways that they could participate, and so forth.

So I think ICANN's position and ability to be able to interact with these bodies on different -- and constituencies in different manners is probably the most effective thing that can be done. And certainly education that, for example, would help encourage the business community to begin planning and doing things so that they don't have to frantically deploy and so that they can come up with a gradual -- especially the entrenched people, the people who have been using it forever, before forever, they can make this transition a much smoother one. There are efforts underway, but whatever ICANN can do to encourage it, I think, is probably the best thing they can do.

>>VINT CERF: Susan, Suzanne, you had a comment to make.

>>SUZANNE WOOLF: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Just very briefly, exception has been taken, it was noted to me, to a word I used when I gave my update in the context of the update on RFC 2870. I'd like to revisit that in context, if I may.

It's been pointed out that the word "naive" may have sounded pejorative. That's one of the words I used to describe the requirements in 2870. It was not meant as a pejorative towards anyone, not the authors, not the implementers, not anyone involved in these service specifications and implementation.

The takeaway point that I meant to make was simply and only that recommendations that were timely, complete, and appropriate some years ago in a very different environment are not so anymore, as the situation has evolved. But certainly with no pejorative intent towards anyone involved, either past or present, in those standards or specifications.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much, Suzanne.

Steve Goldstein -- or Thomas, did you have something specific to this? Or -- all right. Steve first.

>>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Ray, I enjoyed your talk immensely. It was exceedingly informative. And so I have one question, just from my personal experience, that may have some application for a larger business community.

And that is, all the computers in my office are dual stacked. A lot of the peripherals, for example, HP printers, are not, that connect to the network. So do you envision that firms like HP would issue firmware upgrades to be able to be dual-stacked? Or will NAT'ing be able to take care of this? Or is there any outreach that would be useful to the vendor community to help make adjustments to IPv6?

>>RAY PLZAK: Here again, I would suggest that the education, the outreach effort is the best way to go here.

Specifically, in companies that are in positions where they are singular, if you will, in only IPv4 things, such as printers, this is where they can begin an early transition and gradually move in that direction. It would be less costly to do so.

And there are things that are happening now that would facilitate the movement to IPv6. For example, the latest release of Windows Vista, it comes with IPv6 enabled as the default. And it automatically will switch over to IPv4 if it doesn't see an IPv6 network, for example.

So there are vendor operations and activities taking place that would enable it. But if they go into an environment that is not, I guess -- I guess an appropriate term would be "friendly" to that deployment, it's not going to be widely used.

So it's one of those probably, usually, normally, generally, depends upon the situation type things. It's going to be different.

And, again, I think that the outreach efforts and so forth and encouragements that can be done to get the people that are best positioned to offer the incentives and to do something is the best way to move forward from our perspective.

>>VINT CERF: Okay. Thank you.

I'm going to ask that we curtail any more questions other than the ones that are still in queue.

I had Thomas Narten and Paul Twomey.

>>THOMAS NARTEN: Okay. Let me just say a few things.

I mean, the first one is, you know, what can we be doing more to encourage IPv6 deployment? I think the reality is that there's not a whole a lot of levers that we can actually pull to force people to do this.

And it's a fact, for example, that the -- all of the TCP/IP standards and Internet standards are voluntary. People will only deploy them if they see value and products will only implement them if they see value and so forth. We need to have a continued focus on education and let people understand that the world of IPv4 is going to change in the next few years fairly radically in some sense. You know, the IETF and other organizations need to work on the technical issues that Ray sort of alluded to. And the real technical issue that people cite all the time is that the IPv6 solution to multihoming isn't any different than the IPv4 solution. And that's been widely viewed as problematic for ten years or longer.

And the same goes, it would be nice if you could switch providers without renumbering your networks. That's an IPv4 problem. IPv6 really hasn't solved it in a significant way to where the problem just goes away. And there's a lot of sort of feeling that if that were actually solved with V6, then people would deploy it quickly because they would see clear value over V4.

But in terms of rushing this, I think, Steve, your point about the printer is very real. The reality is that what we're trying to do now is upgrade an infrastructure, where the vast majority of people that are using the infrastructure don't really understand how it works, can't be asked to do firmware upgrades and so forth. So the only way it's going to happen is if it just sort of slowly happens as people buy new equipment and the old equipment fades away.

Okay.

Thanks.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you, Thomas.

Paul.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: Ray, thanks for your presentation. And thanks for the check. That was great.

My questions are not associated -- well, my comment about the check is not associated with....

First of all, I think we just -- I just want to say that all the work that's going on with this discussion about an SLA and trying to get the SLA agreement in place, I appreciate all the work that you and your colleagues are doing. And I know this is not an easy task. But we're still very committed to trying to be in that sort of relationship and being quite clear about what our accountabilities are to you and -- so thanks for all the efforts that you're making. I really appreciate that.

Can I just take you through -- now I'm separating it out.

Can I take you through a scenario?

It -- am I right in seeing from your presentation that although it's very important to promote V6 takeup, that we're going to be facing an environment of V4 in the network which is going to be years, if not decades?

>>RAY PLZAK: The answer to that question is simply "yes."

>>PAUL TWOMEY: Okay. If that's the case, we -- I was -- I was interested that you pointed out about black markets and gray markets and transfers.

But it's likely, is it not, that there is going to be some sort of market mechanism for what is going to be a finite resource for which there's not going to be high demand at the early stage and diminishing demand over time, while equipment's being upgraded? Is that --

>>RAY PLZAK: Yes. If I may take a few moments.

The fact that the market is going to exist is not a supposition. In fact, the market does exist. I can categorically point to an occurrence that happened in the ARIN region several years ago where we uncovered an IPv6 -- excuse me, V4 /16 class B for sale on eBay. And took action to have that stopped.

So it does exist. And it does exist through a number of different means. So it's not going to go away.

The problem is, is that if it's allowed to all of a sudden grow and bloom, it does offer a distinct disadvantage to small providers. It does offer a very distinct disadvantage to providers particularly in developing countries, because they won't have the capacity to be able to afford to get these addresses. And so that in itself is another danger of the market, it's going to become an inequitable distribution of V4 and will place a disadvantage on the developing world.

So there are obvious things that have to be done. And we need to figure out what it is to do to make that happen.

We have to learn how to deal and live in this market world. We also have to learn how to deal with it in such a way that numbers don't all of a sudden become property.

And so it is a challenge, and perhaps it is something that we can work on together as well.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: Good. Well, I think that's useful.

I mean, I certainly am very conscious of the very different roles we have in this environment, and our MOU shows clearly that the global policy development is bottom-up coming through the RIRs and your constituencies and your members.

But I appreciate your closing comment, because I do think the responsibility of ICANN and the ICANN board in terms of stability, thinking about long-term stability, the issues you've just raised here are issues some of us have been worrying about as well. And that potentially we should pass this problem in two parts, at least.

One is -- has been the technical problem in the IPv6 takeup. But the other one is, what does the -- how should the environment operate in an equitable manner when the exhaustion has taken place?

And so it would be -- perhaps I could just put it on the table. It would be useful to have a dialogue about how could we best interact and start that thinking. Because we only have three or four years to think it through. And it's probably better to start thinking now rather than sort of being forced to think about it at the time or being given a fait accompli from the gray market.

>>RAY PLZAK: There have been discussions occurring over the last two or three years in the various RIR communities. And, in fact, in the upcoming ARIN meeting in San Juan Puerto Rico, we will be having another panel discussion on this very subject area.

So we need to very carefully figure out what our options are to go forward and figure out who is in the best position to have the greatest influence in the area.

Mr. Chair, if I can make one closing comment here. There's been some call that perhaps the RIRs should establish a deadline at which point they will stop to allocate IPv4 addresses, because that would provide a certainty to the market.

Well, -- and would force the issue of IPv6 deployment, perhaps.

I say that that's probably not a wise thing to do, because a certainty is already there. The certainty is that the central pool is going to be depleted. And to artificially establish a date will cause -- could cause other problems which would distract us from the real work that is ahead of us. Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thanks very much, Ray.

[ Applause ]

>>JORDI PALET: Could I say something, Vint?

>>VINT CERF: I have Francisco who was in the queue, and let me put you in there. Francisco.

>>FRANCISCO DA SILVA: Thank you, Vint.

Only -- I will not spend too much time, but in following what Thomas Narten was saying, which I confirm, and the question by Paul Twomey, there is a trend for the networks, infrastructure, the worldwide networks in telecommunications to be transformed into all-I.P. networks.

And the requirement that are put in the beginning was to function both for IPv4 and IPv6. I would say, why not two years ago?

And how this is being standardized in the medium term, in the five to six years, the functions that will be there provided with a low (inaudible), then I don't see a big problem.

And I would like also to comment about these developing countries, that, for instance, when operator of, I think, a country that has many representatives in this meeting, which is Guinea Bissau, was completely remade last year. And this -- all I.P. transfer mode, with which it is working. That means that I would not be very sure if there will be a very beginning difference with one part and other part of the world concerning the adoption of IPv6.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you. Your comment, please.

>>JORDI PALET: Jordi Palet.

Basically, I agree with what has been said, and I want to reinforce a couple of things.

Taking on the example of the network at home where you have everything enabled with dual stack and some devices, like printers or whatever, are not already using IPv6, I think it's important to realize that first that's happening already. I don't know exactly which printer models, but there are many already, including from HP, that support IPv6. And most of the time, people don't take the chance to go to the manufacturer's Web site and upgrade the freeware and so on. So that's one point.

But the most important thing is that we need to understand. And probably this is something that needs to be more reinforced in the education process that we are not taking out IPv4 from the network. And, actually, my suggestion when I train about IPv6 is, never take IPv4 from the local area networks. What it means, basically, is that you are still using everything that you have which is only IPv4 for whatever reason, and you use IPv4 when it's not possible to use IPv6. And you use IPv6 for new things or end-to-end communication, so on. I think that's really important.

We are not going to see IPv4 to disappear probably for many, many years.

The other question is, there is a feeling in general that getting IPv6, it's cost. And I think the key here is, it's not really that much, and especially if you plan ahead.

So the education we need to do is especially telling everyone, start getting used to IPv6, start making sure that when you do any acquisition, IPv6 is there, even if you don't turn on now, but get ready. Because the cost will be you need to do that overnight.

Thanks.

>>VINT CERF: Thanks, Jordi. I think it's time for us to take a break. And since we've run a bit late, let me suggest that we reconvene at 11:10. So I'll be back on the --

>>SUSAN CRAWFORD: Vint, Kieren might have some comments here.

>>VINT CERF: Oh, sorry. Okay.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY: Sorry. Yes, I was sitting down, because there are still comments coming in and I wanted to wait until the last moment.

I have two broad comments. One has come from the public on the Web site. One is with regard to RegisterFly. I see Kurt has answered some of that. And one is from Bret Fausett, who most of you know is an ICANN watcher.

>>VINT CERF: If Bret's comment is on triple X, there's time later on specifically for that purpose.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY: That's what I thought.

I'll take a comment on RegisterFly, is, what are we to do with the lost domain names we cannot renew and have not been able to renew with RegisterFly and eNOM?

Now, if you go to the chat room on public participation site, public.icann.org, there's a comment there from Kurt Pritz which is worth reading. I don't think it's worthwhile -- because, at the moment, we're rushed -- to read it all out. But I would encourage other people, if they wish, to, outside or in the room, if they wish to ask comments, to go to public.ICANN.org and click on the "public forum" link.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much.

So we'll take a break now until 11:10. And we'll reconvene at that point, when we will hear from colleagues from Puerto Rico.

(Break.)

>>VINT CERF: Is Marimar Lidin in the room, please? If so, could you please come to the stage.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you kindly take your seats? We will reconvene now.

We'll just wait for a moment while people find their chairs again.

It's a pleasure to introduce to you Marimar Lidin who is going to give you a brief introduction to what you can anticipate in June when we meet in Puerto Rico.

>>MIRIMAR LIDIN: Thank you, Mr. Cerf. Good morning to all of you again. I have been here since Monday during ICANN and I look forward to being able to answer your questions about Puerto Rico.

We are going to go ahead with our presentation and at the end of the presentation we will be glad to have any of your questions.

Here is a pre-registration that you already have within the WWW.ICANN San Juan Web site. It's already open.

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the United States, and therefore, entry requirements to Puerto Rico are exactly the same as entering the U.S.

We mention this because you will be able to already print out an invitational letter from the Web site and use it to take to your local U.S. embassy, should you require a visa.

There are 27 countries right now under the U.S. visa waiver program and these are mostly all of the EU countries, except for Greece and cypress and a couple others that I don't recall right now.

But 27 countries are under the visa waiver program.

Other countries do need a visa, and your local U.S. embassy can take the invitational letter to process that.

There's also a reservation code in the ICANN San Juan Web page that will help you with your reservations for ICANN San Juan.

Okay. For those of you who are not exactly sure where Puerto Rico is, it's right in the heart of the Caribbean. Puerto Rico is 9,000 square kilometers big. It's more or less three times the size of the island of Majorca. It's very mountainous in the central region. The north coast where San Juan, the capital, is is based by the Atlantic ocean, and the south coast is based by the Caribbean sea.

We will be meeting in San Juan, the capital city, and we'll take a look now at how beautiful and colonial and how Spanish, the Spanish flavor that we still have is very apparent.

Why Puerto Rico? In addition to the fact that you are going to meet there, it's a great destination for vacations and because of the dates, June 24th through the 29th when you will be there, why not make it a family vacation or a family gathering or just take a friend along.

The weather is very nice at that time of the year, because although our year-round climate is approximately 27 degrees Celsius or 85, 88 degrees Fahrenheit, at that time of the year it's still pretty much not that humid or hot as it does get more in July and August.

For those of how enjoy sailing, Puerto Rico has constant trade winds that blow constantly from the northeast which make it an ideal destination for sailing. And we'll be seeing a little bit more what the island has to offer.

As we mentioned a great place to go with your family and have some nice family bonding time.

Here we go. Top 13 must-see sites. Old San Juan is a colonial city which is a world heritage site.

The old San Juan is surrounded by Spanish forts and walls.

We have from rainforest to dry forest and a very pleasant surprise for those of you who do not know what a bio-luminescent bay is, we will be seeing it a little bit later.

Okay.

Why Puerto Rico again? Family, nature/adventure, golf, scuba diving, for honeymooners, pre/post cruise, this is very important as well. Puerto Rico is the second largest cruise port in all the Americas, including Miami, it's very nice to depart for the eastern Caribbean from San Juan because departing from San Juan allows you to not have two days sailing without getting to any islands as when you leave from Miami. When you leave on a cruise from San Juan, you arrive in a brand-new island each morning.

Our capital city, San Juan. As we mentioned.

The population of Puerto Rico is 4 million, but one and a half million of those live in the capital city of San Juan.

That's a very nice view of what our bay looks like, and that's our most important monument, the El Morro castle. A nice aerial view. That's what you see actually when you arrive on the plane because the airport is only about five kilometers south of this Fort.

That's another view of the walls.

All these walls in the night are lit, and there are very nice, romantic walks you can take outside the walls or inside the walls.

The cobblestone streets of old San Juan is something that is very well-known.

The city is over 500 years old.

This is the door, the main door entrance of San Juan.

The night life is very well-known in Puerto Rico. It's actually the happening place in all of the Caribbean. It's where people go out the most at night. Nice dining, a lot of salsa.

The shopping also. We have very well-known native wood carvings. But also, more recently, we are well-known for quality brands, international quality brands, especially in clothing that, in comparison to the prices that you find here in Europe, it's very, very interesting.

Okay. Botanical garden, rum distilleries, museums for children in Old San Juan. Lots of arts, lots of culture. Condado area is where the Caribe Hilton, the hotel venue we will see later, for ICANN located right where the old San Juan starts where the Condado area finishes.

Again, the north coast, some of the attractions there, nice golf. We have 23 golf courses in general, 22. 17 of them are champion courses. Greg Norman, Jones, they have all designed for Puerto Rico.

And this is very, very special. This is great to go with the family. This is the Rio Camuy cave parks. They are formed by the third longest underwater -- third longest river in the world that is still sunk, and you can walk around along the river and go down in a special little train and it's very, very nice.

This you have probably heard about. It's the largest radio telescope in the world. It's the Arecibo observatory. You can also visit it. It has a very interesting museum. It's run by the Cornell university, and you have probably seen it in films like "contact" and "golden eye."

The eastern part of Puerto Rico great for taking catamaran sailing. That's our rainforest, it's the only tropical rainforest within the U.S. forest system. It's less than an hour away from San Juan and it's filled with trails and flowers and our unique, tiny, native-free tree frog, called the coqui, sings in the day also in this rainforest whereas in the rest of the island you can only listen to it at night.

Our beaches are all white sand. We don't have volcanic beaches. All are white sand, palm fringed beaches.

And the Caribe Hilton has a nice small private beach, and after your meetings you can take a nice little dip right there on their beach.

Sailing as I mentioned is very big in Puerto Rico. Windsurfing, yachting, deep sea fishing for marlins also.

These are two sister islands that belong to Puerto Rico. Vieques and Culebra are known as the Spanish Virgin Islands, and they are the only islands left in the Caribbean which are still very much virgin. Tourism has not arrived yet massively, or even -- it's very, very secluded and very few lodgings, and they would be very nice to visit also. We can take you there on a ferry or on the plane. From San Juan it's only a 15 minute flight.

Again, that's a view of Culebra.

Vieques with a Spanish Fort as well. And our surprise, the bio-bays as I mentioned before. I want to stop on this slide, if we can go back to that.

You must be wondering what this is.

This is bio-luminescence which are caused by tiny, tiny dinoflagellates microorganisms which live in a few base in Puerto Rico. When you agitate the water, it glows in the dark, and it's amazing. It's something that you, once you do this, you will never forget.

Imagine swimming in this water, splashing and everything you touch glows in the dark. It's something really, really, really special.

The south of Puerto Rico is other cities with a more French, Creole flavor to it in comparison to old San Juan which is a Spanish military trial.

The fountains, nice Creole cities as I mentioned on the other side of Puerto Rico.

Ponce, our second largest city. Old coffee plantations which you can visit and some of them also have lodging.

Porta Del Sol, these are our 16 municipalities in the west of Puerto Rico. Famous for scuba diving, surfing, even whale watching.

For those of you who dive, Puerto Rico has hyperbaric installation facilities which makes it safe to dive there, and it has as you can see several important sites. 22 degrees average water temperature, Celsius, and very high visibility waters.

The surfing that I mention is very popular in the town of Rincon to the west. We celebrated there an international surfing competition.

The kayaking amongst the man groves is very nice for the whole family: spelunking, cycling. We have a very tasty, flavorful food. It is not spicy or hot but flavorful. And the Mesones is a group of restaurants we have around the island that are signaled from the car. We have toll-free highways and very, very modern infrastructure so it's easy to take a car and drive along on your own. This is something that differentiates us very much from the rest of the Caribbean. You can really get to know the people, the island because it's easy and it's safe to drive around on your own. And the Mesones are a nice excuse to stop, and the Mesones guarantee you can only serve there typical Puerto Rico food at family prices. The same go for our paradores. Some of these are located in the old coffee plantations that we mentioned in the mountains of Puerto Rico.

The best sunsets, of course, are always in the west.

And our host hotel, the Caribe Hilton.

Main gateways to Puerto Rico. If you are coming to Puerto Rico from Europe, then one of the best options is to go to Madrid where you have daily flights directly into San Juan.

And if not, daily main gateways from the rest of the world and Europe as well. New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Miami are all served by American Airlines, continental, delta, and U.S. airways.

Again, ICANN San Juan is your Web site. All of the visa requirements are already there as well, the invitational letter. And you can also check out our desk that we have at the entrance for all the Puerto Rico brochures or go to gotopuertorico.com.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much for a very complete presentation. I think we will all go to the Web site and find out more if we need to. But thank you very much for your presentation. We look forward to seeing new Puerto Rico.

>>MIRIMAR LIDIN: Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>>VINT CERF: Paul.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: Vint, can I say, we're really looking forward to that. That's great. But I also wanted to take a chance, because we finished a presentation during the break, about last night's football game.

See, I am getting used to it. Football can come with a round ball.

I would just like to put on the record the gratitude of the ICANN staff to Elliot Noss and make the point that Elliot made an excellent backstop for the ICANN staff team last night. And there are certain ironies in the world, but it was great to see Elliot as our goalie.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you, Paul and thank you Elliot.

We're behind schedule, I'm afraid, but we will try to catch up if we can.

Frank Fowlie is next, our ombudsman, and Frank, I will ask you to be as brief as you can be to help us get back on schedule.

>>FRANK FOWLIE: Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. I can be extraordinarily brief. My report is written. It's on both the ombudsman Web site and the meeting Web site. And I'll be pleased to take any questions later on.

I would point out two important issues. First of all, that the office will be continuing its midterm review through the next fiscal year and that next year my office will also be assuming the chairmanship of the United Nations expert working group on online dispute resolution.

And that I'm looking forward to going to Fajardo for the scuba diving after the meeting in San Juan.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you. That was brief. I appreciate that very much. You put us much closer to on schedule.

I hope you will stay in the room in case there are questions when we get to open microphone time, Frank.

The next report comes from George Sadowsky, who is the chairman of the Nominating Committee. And I see him on his way up now.

>>GEORGE SADOWSKY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I will follow the lead of the ccNSO in suppressing the desire to revert to PowerPoint because this is a fairly short presentation also.

As you probably know, the Nominating Committee is a committee appointed by -- the members of whom are appointed by the various constituencies in ICANN, and the advisory committees, the chair is appointed by the board. We are 23 people, 17 of whom vote. And this year we are looking for nominations for and actually selections to, because the word -- the title "nominating Committee" isn't quite right. It should be the selection committee. We're looking for three board members, two members for the GNSO council, one member for the ccNSO Council, and three members for ALAC coming from the regions of Latin America, Asia Pacific and Africa.

Over a three-year cycle we select eight of the 15 board members. Three of the 21 GNSO members. Three of the 18 ccNSO members, and five of the ALAC.

We didn't meet formally this period, which we generally don't do. We met for the first time in Sao Paulo. We got an early start this year. And our committee is now complete.

Those of us who are here, seven or eight of us who are here are meeting with the various constituencies, board members, and as a first, we met with the GAC. And I think that was very much appreciated.

We haven't met with the GAC in the past because we really don't provide them with any services but it's clearly important for them to know why we exist, what we do, and how we help ICANN to function.

The statement of interest was -- which is the document which interested applicants, fill out and sent to us, was published on February 1st. We have a provisional deadline of May 1st for the statements of interest.

And the one thought, if you remember nothing else of what I say besides this, is to think of ways in which you can help ICANN fill these positions with qualified people, whether it's yourself or your colleagues or someone you don't know but maybe you feel is real important for ICANN.

We are running a bit behind this year. The figure is we now have four statements of interest for nine positions. Last year, by the time line we got 90.

So we are somewhat behind and concerned. And if I hadn't met so many people at this meeting who are really interested in participating, I would urge you to panic. But I don't urge you to do that. I urge you to think about who you would like to see in ICANN leadership positions and encourage them to contact us.

We are going to be trying for more transparency this year in our processes. We're a bit after schizophrenic committee. We want to be as open and transparent as possible in defining what we do, our processes and procedures. We want to be opaque and totally confidential in terms of the candidates who apply to us. And in fact, every NomCom has a selective memory, a emergency room that is erased at the end of the year.

There are, obviously, members who serve more than one year. They carry those memories over. But information from last year is simply not available to this year's committee.

Two years ago we had what I characterized as a discouraged candidate effect. If we have, as we did last year, 90 candidates for seven positions last year, that means that 90% of the candidates, some of whom are very good indeed, would not be selected for whatever reason. Not enough positions, geographic balance, et cetera, et cetera.

So I would encourage you not to take a rejection in previous years necessarily as a rejection on a permanent basis.

We would very much like to receive candidate statements from you if you are interested.

I think that's all I have to say.

The information regarding the nominating process and what we're looking for is contained in multiple places. You may have attended a workshop yesterday on the NomCom.

We have on part of the ICANN site NomCom.icann.org and that's spelled N-O-M-C-O-M, single M in both cases. There are fliers in your registration packet. And you can approach any member of the NomCom for information and dialogue during the rest of this meeting.

And may I ask members of the NomCom to raise their hands if they are in the room, just so you are identified here. And I want to point out especially Wolfgang Kleinwaechter who is responsible for outreach. He is our point person. But any of us will be glad to enter into dialogue with you. So please help us to help ICANN.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much, George. And thank you again personally for your work and the work of the committee.

For a moment, I thought you had said that Wolfgang was responsible for outrage, but I understand you meant outreach.

It's just my hearing aids that are the problem here.

All right.

The next report now comes from Tina Dam on the subject of IDNs.

Tina, since we have had much discussion about IDNs during the course of the week, I hope that you will find it possible to be relatively brief.

>>TINA DAM: I will do my best. As you can tell, people have also listened way too much to me this week.

But I do have a couple of slides.

So yesterday at the workshop, after the IDN workshop, one of the board members approached me and said, you know, it seems that we keep having some of the same discussions over and over again, and it doesn't just count for the IDN topic, and we need to be a little bit better about ticking off some of the issues and saying this is decided upon and we need to move on to those things that are not decided upon.

So I thought that was a really good idea, by the way.

And obviously, staff has a role to help make that possible.

I thought I would start that on my status list today by listing a set of principles related to IDNs.

The first principle is the principle that takes precedence over all of the rest of the principles I'll read. And that's the global uniqueness of the DNS. That, domain names need to stay unique and have the same functionality regardless of where you are placed in the world when you enter them in whatever application you use.

Now, the next set of principles are not necessarily in a priority order. They all go -- sit at the same level.

We need what has been called future-proof solutions, which is defining the characters that are allowed and an ability for adding new ones to be allowed in IDNs.

There's a principle that says all characters used across languages in the world cannot be available in domain names. Not all can. There is a limit.

We must diminish user confusion as much as possible. That is, through technical development, implementation requirements, registry policies, and we can't avoid all confusion in the world so there needs to be some user education as well.

We need to use the IDN protocol standard. We need to promote and continue to promote multistakeholder involvement.

Those of you who have participated in the workshop yesterday I hope will see that that was one of the outcomes of that, which I thought was really good.

But last, it also is really important to understand a little bit more generally how ICANN works and the role that ICANN Supporting Organizations and advisory committees have. And the one point I listed under here is ICANN staff does not create policy. It has to be worked through in the existing processes, and staff cannot just make decisions outside of that.

So that takes me to the status report. And the status report I have divided up into three topics.

The first one is technical tests concerning internationalized top levels.

And as I think most people in the room and in the public Webcast and participation probably know at this point in time is that we conducted the laboratory test in conjunction with Autonomica. The test was successful, and what that means is that the software that was used in the laboratory setup can handle the strings that are equivalent to internationalized top-level labels.

We need to go from here to -- and I'm sorry, if you sit far in the room, for the small font on the slide. But we need to go from the technical laboratory test to a point in time where we can make a decision as to whether internationalized top-level labels can be inserted at root level in a technical, secure and stable manner.

And of course now I am going to fill out what's in between there.

There has been a lot of suggestions from the community in the last probably at least six months and here are some of them. That we should do full application testing. That we should go all the way out to user interface testing. That registry and registrar interfaces should be tested between registries and registrars and all the way across to the end user.

That there should be testing allowed for sets of strings so that users can decide what their preference is.

DNAME has come up again as something that some registries are using at the second level and would like to test and put into production at the top level.

Some people believe that none of these things should be tested and we should just go ahead. And of course there's more variety of suggestions.

It can be really hard to take all of these suggestions in and Figure out what should be in the phase II testing and how do we get to this goal. So I decided to consult with the liaisons to the board and ask for their technical expertise and recommendation on how we can reach this goal and which suggestions should be included and which should not and why they should not.

So we have come up with a couple of things already. The first recommendation from them was for staff to go and, probably with some consultants, to create an overview of what happens, really, from the time that a user enters an IDN user interface all the way to DNS resolution. And now that I am reading this slide I realize that of course it also has to go all the way back to show how the resolution is then displayed back to the user. For example, in cases of browsers.

And then you can take from that overview, narrow it down and look at where is it that we, indeed, to do more work.

The SSAC, the chair of the SSAC obviously is one of the liaisons to the ICANN board.

The SSAC has launched an IDN study. That potentially will take some of these pieces in. That needs to be mapped in with what we're planning to do.

And then of course the root server operators and their advisory committee needs to participate as well.

So as you can tell, this is not a finalized plan but these are the things that are under consideration. And I hope I'll be able to provide you a better plan and some time lines for it as quickly as possible.

The second topic is very briefly on the IDNA revision that takes place within the IETF.

IDNA is the protocol that handles the IDNs. And the revision that the IETF has right now on the table is based on the RFC 4690.

The proposal intends to, first of all, make it easier to understand how the protocol is working and how it should be implemented.

It intends to provide some clearer terminology definitions.

I know that I have been sitting in meetings all week and before this week as well where it is very clear that because the terminology can be difficult and people mean different things with different expressions, people are not actually talking about the same thing. And we really don't have the time to allow confusions like that to happen.

Then the protocol revision intends to make the protocol nondependent on versions of Unicode.

From a practical standpoint, in the way applications work, that is simply not an option to have it dependent on Unicode versions anymore.

It's looking at an inclusion-based model as opposed to an exclusion-based.

And then there are some very specific changes that need to be done to elements in the protocol to eliminate some of the errors that previously have been the case in right-to-left scripts.

Now, this follows the IETF process for RFCs, and it's open participation.

I've listed a link to the latest argument for proposal revisions.

Last subject is policies.

So, first of all, there is no formal policy development process that has been launched within the two supporting organizations within the ICANN community.

There are, however, many working groups that are focused on policy issues. And there's been numerous meetings, as Vint pointed out, on the issues reports that these groups have generated.

The workshop yesterday was I think the first time that we had the ccNSO and the GAC and the GNSO in the same room and in the same workshop focused on IDN policy issues alone.

I thought it was a really good workshop. We didn't exactly go through just the three topics we had listed on the agenda. But I think those three topics and a large variety of other topics was discussed. And it made at least the following elements clear.

First of all, that it might not be possible to separate internationalized top-level domains into ccTLDs, gTLDs, or any other categories. Now, what that, of course, means is that the ccNSO, GNSO, and the GAC IDN working groups have a large amount of overlapping issues that they all are considering, and they need to be solved together.

ccNSO, GNSO, and the GAC all have separate processes for how they solve issues and provide recommendations. So it's very clear to me that staff needs to talk to the chairs, of course, also to members of these groups, for figuring out a way to move this forward in a transparent, efficient, and fast process across all three groups.

So we've taken that task from the workshop.

And then the last thing I wanted to say is two things. First of all, apologies to all of those who need internationalized top-level labels, because we just don't have that capability today.

And a thank you to all of those who work really hard and actively to make internationalized top-level labels a reality. Of course, there's overlap between these groups.

And that concludes my report.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very, very much, Tina. And thank you for all the hard work I know you've put into making IDNs real.

[ Applause ]

>>VINT CERF: Incredibly, Tina has put us back on time with regard to today's schedule, anyway.

So let me ask Denise Michel to bring us now an update on the GNSO improvement process and the independent review schedule.

>>DENISE MICHEL: December 8th in Sao Paulo, the board approved a comprehensive schedule for the independent review of the key elements of ICANN. It's posted on ICANN's Web site.

The GNSO review was completed in September of 2006.

Next on the schedule, as you can see, is the Nominating Committee review, followed by the At-Large Advisory Committee review. Then the RSSAC, estimated to launch at the beginning of our fiscal year in July.

The objectives and purpose of these reviews are -- well, they're part of ICANN's ongoing commitment to continuous improvement. And they're intended to ensure an independent examination of the role and operations of all the key elements of ICANN. They'll be conducted in an independent and objective manner under management of the board and guidance of the Board Governance Committee.

Multiple opportunities for public comment are included in these independent review processes, including opportunities for public comment on the draft terms of reference for each review that provides the scope for the review, as well as extensive time for public comments on the results of the reviews that are posted.

The link on ICANN's home page, currently found under "current topics" on the new Web site, provide in one place information and status on all of ICANN's independent reviews. It also includes the process or the steps that each review normally goes through.

And I would call your attention to the fact that actually launching a review doesn't mean that the independent evaluator actually starts reviewing the entity. Rather, launching a review starts with the first step. And the first step is for staff to work with the entity under review to get their initial input and develop draft terms of reference for consideration by the board, then posting for public comment for further consideration.

Again, these steps that are involved in each independent review is posted on our Web site. They involve draft terms of reference, final terms of reference, normally a request for proposal, hiring of an independent evaluator, the conduct of the review itself, and then the posting and consideration by the board and the public of the review and any improvement processes that are considered afterwards.

So the status of the GNSO review is -- as I mentioned, it was posted for public comment and submitted to the board September 15th, 2006.

We've received both public and constituency comments on the review that was conducted by the London School of Economics.

Here in Lisbon, the board and GNSO Council discussed the LSE report in detail. And on Monday, the Board Governance Committee sponsored an open forum on the GNSO improvements and discussed those issues further.

The -- I'll call your attention to the Board Governance Committee report that's already posted on the Web site, linked to the Lisbon agenda, that also provides further detail on Board Governance Committee action. I'll note that the Board Governance Committee has recommended to the board the creation of a BGC/GNSO Review Working Group, to be comprised of current and former board directors, to provide more focused attention and help manage under the BGC the process for considering and recommending specific improvements for the GNSO.

The NomCom review, final terms of reference and the request for proposals was -- they were both posted earlier this month. We are actively soliciting proposals for independent evaluators.

Again, the Board Governance Committee has recommended to the board the creation of a BGC/ NomCom Review Working Group, again, to focus attention on these efforts and to help manage this review process. Their tasks will include vetting and recommending to the BGC an independent evaluator to conduct this review.

The At-Large Advisory Committee review is the next review on the schedule. Staff has solicited some initial input from at-large and draft terms of reference for this review will be considered by the board. And, if approved, they'll be posted for public comment.

Again, information and updates on all the reviews can be found on ICANN's Web site. Comments, ongoing comments, are encouraged and are accepted on the GNSO review to this e-mail address. And I'd be happy to take any comments or answer any questions.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Well, thank you, Denise. That was nice and terse.

We'll come back to questions -- in fact, let's -- yeah, let me get Dave Conrad to make his IANA report. And then we'll come to questions for the reports that have been presented since the break.

David is the general manager of IANA.

>>DAVE CONRAD: Technology.

Some technical people should get -- oh, there it is. Maybe.

There we go.

Hello, everyone, I'm Dave Conrad, the general manager of IANA, giving a quick status update of IANA.

This status update is basically describing things that IANA has been involved in since the Sao Paulo meeting.

Essentially, it's basically been business as usual. We have been undertaking a large number of process reviews and documentation of our existing processes.

We haven't really had any crises, or, rather, surprising crises. We get the daily crises on a fairly typical basis.

We did hire an additional person, Simon Raveh has been brought in as our software development manager. His job is to sort of shepherd the various software development projects that we have underway. However, initially, he's actually doing some of the coding himself.

In terms of facilities, IANA moved up two floors. Not sure if that has to do with our improved stature within the organization.

But our postal address didn't change.

This is what our old view used to be.

[ Laughter ]

>>DAVE CONRAD: A lovely view of the garage or McDonald's and a Chevron station.

And this is our new view.

[ Laughter ]

>>DAVE CONRAD: So it is a business nicer.

In terms of the names function that IANA performs, since Sao Paulo, we've had 80 root management requests. We've done the dot tel delegation. Currently, there are about ten redelegation requests in progress. Each one of those is unique. Some more unique than others.

We did some initial public comment periods for three consultations. Those were completed. The three consultations were for technical checks, for DNS delegations, glue policy dealing with the problem having to do with shared name servers. And then one that generated a bit of controversy, which was the ccTLD sunsetting consultation.

Just to be clear, these are just the initial phases of our policy reviews. We have several additional steps in which we present analyses to the board and to the community, accept additional input.

IANA is taking no action on any of these immediately.

In terms of numbers, we have updated all our internal procedures for the RIR requests. In conjunction with the RIRs, we're developing service-level agreements with the NRO. And that's still in progress. Since Sao Paulo, we've allocated seven /8s of IPv4 address space, meaning there are about 46 left. Ray Plzak gave a good presentation on what that actually implies.

And we did one IPv6 prefix allocation since Sao Paulo. But that was done for an IETF protocol request, the ORCHID protocol was defined by the IETF since Sao Paulo.

We don't actually anticipate a large number of additional IPv6 allocations in the near future, given the /12s that were allocated to RIRs just before the Sao Paulo meeting.

Protocol parameters. This is actually the area that IANA spends most of our resources in.

We've actually deployed a new automated private enterprise number allocation system. We've automated some of our statistics generation, as much as Barbara truly enjoyed generating pretty pictures all the time, we decided to automate that a bit.

And we actually signed a service-level agreement with the IETF community. If you're interested in what's entailed in that service level agreement, that's a URL you can actually find it at.

This gives a picture of the activities that IANA undertakes with regards to the protocol parameters.

In general, we are kept quite busy with the IETF-related functions. The last one isn't actually an IETF-related function, although it is somewhat related.

IANA is listed as the contact for, for example, the net 10, the RFC1918 address space, and for most of the reserved address space. So, as a result, anytime someone gets spam from, like, local host or from network 10, they yell at us. And we're getting about -- we got 13,000 of those since Sao Paulo.

Just because I have to present graphs, here's the mandatory graphs slide.

I won't spend a lot of time on it, because no one can actually read it.

[ Laughter ]

>>DAVE CONRAD: The important bit, or the interesting bit, perhaps, is, on the two graphs on the right there, you'll notice that the lines appear to be converging. That appears to indicate that we've reached sort of an equilibrium in terms of processing of requests.

The red line in those graphs are the queues, the depth of the queue.

So, basically, we're receiving, processing, and leaving in queue about the same number of requests every month. And that's been the case since -- when is that? -- about September.

So some successes. Well, the view is definitely better. I call that a success.

We have generally gotten positive feedback from the community, from all the various constituencies that IANA serves. One quote that we received is that "IANA is no longer the problem." Not saying what the problem actually is.

And we have had significant forward motion on a lot of our major automation and documentation projects.

Somewhat less success aspects, we've noticed that things generally take much longer than we expect or prefer. Editing and writing the documentation, and especially software development, takes quite a long time.

We've also been -- it's been suggested that we need to improve our communication skills. We really need to be much more careful in explaining the efforts that we're taking, particularly in the area of clarifying and disambiguating the policies and processes IANA has. It would also be useful to communicate a little better to the Internet at large so we reduce the 13,000 abuse notifications down to, oh, maybe 10,000.

By San Juan, we anticipate having the automated root zone management system, also known as eIANA, basically ready for beta testing, nonproduction. We'll be looking for people who would be willing to sacrifice their lives or their livelihoods to help us test this software.

We're in the process of deploying some software to help us DNSsec sign the infrastructure zones. These are the dot ARPA, IP6 dot ARPA, URN, URI, and IRIS dot ARPA. Basically, everything under dot ARPA. We have that software in testing right now. It seems to work. We'll be, hopefully, in production by San Juan.

And we're also going to be publishing the process documentation that we've been doing, what we call the book of IANA. As we're doing this, we expect this to cause a need for additional public consultation.

I would like to request that people not panic when they see these requests for consultation. They're just asking for input from the community. We will not make any changes to existing processes without full consultation with the entire community.

So conclusions. We've reached sort of an equilibrium in processing of requests. Our intent now is to incrementally improve that.

The automation projects that we're undertaking should help quite a bit in that area. We acknowledge that we need to improve our communications significantly. Part of that is in documentation of our processes and clarification of the existing policies.

And with that, I'm done.

>>VINT CERF: Well, thank you very much, David.

As I hope you've heard, many people have complimented IANA on the significant improvement in its responsiveness to the community's needs. And you're to be congratulated, along with your staff, for that progress. And I want to say that publicly for the record as well.

>>DAVE CONRAD: Yes, I'd also like to thank my staff for the exceptional work they've been doing.

>>VINT CERF: Thomas Narten, you had your hand up.

>>THOMAS NARTEN: David, while you're up here, I wanted to say briefly something I've said privately to the board and other people, that from the IETF perspective, the IETF obviously makes heavy usage of IANA services and the registries and so forth. And as you said, the -- we signed an SLA I think at the -- in December time frame. It went into effect on January 1. So there is a lot of hard work going on now trying to implement both the spirit and, probably more difficult, the letter of the law. And we're seeing results in specific areas that are working good. I'd just like to say --

>>SUSAN CRAWFORD: Slowly.

>>THOMAS NARTEN: Slowly.

[ Laughter ]

>>THOMAS NARTEN: Sort of stepping back from the 20,000-foot level, I'd have to say that sort of from an IETF perspective, I think the relationship now is as strong as it's ever been and that things are running more smoothly now than I can remember at any time in the last few years. So a big thanks to you, David, personally, and also to your staff, in particular, Barbara and Michelle.

>>DAVE CONRAD: And I'd also like to thank Thomas and Steve Crocker, who have been very helpful in working with IANA and helping to resolve some of the issues that existed between the IANA and the IETF.

[ Applause ]

>>VINT CERF: That concludes all of the formal reporting that goes on today.

So let me say how the remainder of the day should unfold.

First of all, although it was -- the published plan was to have an up to 40-minute discussion, 20 minutes pro and 20 minutes con on dot triple X, I'm going to invert the order. I'd like to first check on public comments or questions on reports that were just given so we can take those freshly in mind.

It's my intention to try to end the discussion of dot triple X in either positive or negative by 1:30, with the intent of staging some signings, many signings of RALOs.

So there are so many of them that it could take as much as half an hour to get the process to complete by 2:00.

So let me first ask if there are any questions or comments on the reports that have been presented since the break.

>>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Vint.

>>VINT CERF: -- from either the board or the staff.

Steve.

>>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Thank you, Vint.

Two very different things.

First of all, when it comes to the Nominating Committee, please, everybody, understand that our annual general meeting is about a month earlier this year than last year. So the Nominating Committee may have less time to process things. Therefore, it's important that you get your statements of interest in earlier.

Also, yesterday at the NomCom workshop, the idea was raised -- I was one of the people who raised it -- that it would be great if you could maintain the references of people that were submitted from last year so that the people who would be interested in submitting their SOIs wouldn't have to approach references all over again. In some cases, that would be an inhibiting factor to reapplication.

And, George, before you answer, I just want to get one more answer.

For the WHOIS thing, I don't know if there's any kind of a way of working in a canonical kind of address for, like, abuse or spoof or something like that, so that if some of the names are obscured behind an operational point of contact or whatever is adopted, a canonical kind of address could get to the right person or office.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Are you thinking of things like webmaster or postmaster dot whatever?

Okay. I understand.

George.

>>GEORGE SADOWSKY: Yeah, Steve, with regard to your comment on references, that is exactly what we will do.

>>VINT CERF: Okay.

Other comments or questions from the floor or the board?

Going, going. Kieren.

If this is from Mr. Fausett, his turn comes with triple X.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY: I'm coming up to announce that there are no comments. The reason I have gone out to announce that is to tell people that they can put in comments for later on, presumably with dot XXX.

>>SUSAN CRAWFORD: Speak into the mike, Kieren.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY: Sorry.

There are no comments, but the reason why I have gotten up here to say that is because people can still put comments in the public forum on public.ICANN.org.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much.we have another comment. It's Ron Andruff.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS: Hi, Adrian Kinderis.

>>VINT CERF: No, it's not. I must be blind this morning.

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS: Sorry, I missed it. I didn't hear that.

I get sting a lot, though. So if that helps.

[ Laughter ]

>>ADRIAN KINDERIS: My -- just an observation, I guess. In working how I am through my organization, especially -- particularly in the Middle East at the moment and dealing with the issue of IDNs, I'd like to say that first of all, Tina Dam has been instrumental in assisting us in the process.

But looking at the report from IANA there, it seems, you know, the progress they've made and the success they've had, I just think from at least our perspective, that Tina is a staff of one, pretty much, with respect to the IDNs directly under ICANN. And she seems to be fairly stressed, at least in -- or at least spread fairly thin.

So if I can provide any feedback, it's that, potentially, some support for her, for what it's worth.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: That plainly goes to Paul for consideration.

Please, Phil.

>>PHILIP SHEPPARD: Thank you. Philip Sheppard from the business constituency.

A general comment and question about the schedule of reviews we saw for the various different organizations and organs of ICANN.

One of the things that happens in any independent review is that if you like the results, then you know the selection of the independent reviewer was perfect. And if you don't like the results, of course, it was a useless selection and entirely inappropriate, et cetera.

I won't comment on the current couple of last reviews that we had. That's not the point of this question.

But one of the things we certainly found in our discussion with the LSE guys was, they said, "ICANN is exceptionally complicated, and therefore our learning curve to get to you guys and get to the point where we can start to ask useful questions was quite tough."

So I wonder if any thought has yet been put as to the balance between having fresh insight from a selection of different reviewers for different types of organizations versus the consistency you will get with using the same reviewer in terms of the learning curve that's there.

I'm not necessarily saying -- that's not at all a biased question to say that stick with the last guys you had, but just from the general perspective of that balance.

>>VINT CERF: So just one thought, Phil. That's not unlike the notion of having an auditor that you stick with for a while, and then you change the auditor.

Whether that works or not for our particular variety of supporting organizations might be subject to some debate.

Paul, you had your hand up.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: Thanks, Vint, thanks, Philip.

Just in terms of -- this is sort of a half answer.

In terms of the Nominating Committee review, there is terms of reference which have been out. There is a call now for an organization (inaudible) to help us implement. But there is also an excellent suggestion coming from George and others that there would be a committee -- looking for Dennis. What's the formal title of this group?

>>DENISE MICHEL: The Board Governance Committee/NomCom review working group will be providing guidance.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: You can imagine that was a carefully crafted title for that group.

>>WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Do we have an acronym?

>>DENISE MICHEL: We're still working on the acronym.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: But those people are specifically to be drawn from people with experience to help address the question you're raising, which is that mix.

But that's at the moment in the NomCom. We haven't thought about the other ones as much.

>>DENISE MICHEL: If I may, so the Board Governance Committee will be creating these working groups to fully vet the applications. And the scope of work will help guide the type of qualifications and independent reviewers that are handled.

And if you look at the list of reviews, you'll see that some are very unique. And unique attributes, and skills and knowledge base will be required for different reviews.

>>VINT CERF: I see several hands up.

Roberto and then Steve.

>>ROBERTO GAETANO: Yeah, I just wanted to say that this is contained also in the board governance review report that is posted. And I think that this idea of going with the specific working group to handle each of the upcoming review is something that we are going to -- that the Board Governance Committee has decided to do for all the reviews.

So at that point, I get it, from the comments from the floor, that we might want also to consider whether it is a good idea to stick with one of the previous, already experienced reviewers or to go to a new one.

Thank you.

>>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Okay. First of all, I have volunteered, but I don't know if I have yet been accepted, to serve on the Board Governance Committee working group to help vet and work with the NomCom and that's to get back at you for having nominated me

[ Laughter ]

>>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: But the other thing is I am very happy to see that our process is to advertise for proposals for organizations to do the review.

I had asked that we do that if we hadn't already planned to do that, because again, we want the choice of reviewers to be a very open and competitive process so that there's no appearance that anything is done choosing favorite organizations or anything is done under the table.

So that will be an open process.

And again, to repeat, it's not always clear that an organization who might be qualified to review one kind of Supporting Organization would be the best to review some other Supporting Organization or NomCom or whatever.

So we'll have to see.

>>VINT CERF: I have a question for Denise, I think.

Do we issue RFIs or have we ever issued a request for information to discover what reviewing agencies or entities might actually be available and interested? Or are we drawing from a sort of well-known collection of then?

>>DENISE MICHEL: No. To date, we have not issued any RFIs. Just the RFPs approved by the Board Governance Committee and the board. But I think Roberto would certainly take that under advisement.

>>VINT CERF: Let's see, Raimundo had his hand up.

>>RAIMUNDO BECA: Thanks, Vint.

I have also volunteered to be in those working groups. But I would like one second. It seems to me this has not been very clear but we should make that very clear that those working groups shouldn't report to the BGC. They should report directly to the board. Because if not, we are going to have sort of a scale of -- a long list of committees which are studying the same report.

If those working groups report to the BGC, the BGC is going to do a new review and then it's going to go to the board and then the board is going to make a final review.

Thanks very much.

>>VINT CERF: Are there any other comments on any of the topics that have been discussed since the break?

Well, in that case, we go on to the next topic, which is to do with the proposal from ICM for a new top-level domain, dot xxx.

I have allocated 20 minutes for the opposition to the top-level domain and 20 minutes for the proponents of the top-level domain to speak.

I don't know how many people are going to ask to speak on either of those categories, so I will warn you ahead of time that if we get a big long queue in either of the two categories that I will probably have to invoke some kind of a time limit.

We have a clock available to limit speaking times per person to two or three minutes.

But let me start by asking if there is anyone who wishes to speak in opposition to the triple X proposal.

You can come and queue up to the microphone, please. And if I could get some sense for how many of you wish to speak, it would be helpful. Either a show of hands or people standing to queue in the microphone.

The scribes are going to be asking for your names so that they can accurately record this in the transcript.

I am not seeing a huge crowd but it may accumulate over time so I will ask you to be as brief as you can so as to allow as many people who wish to speak to do so.

Would you please introduce yourself.

>>DIANE DUKE: Yes, my name is Diane Duke and I am the executive director for the Free Speech Coalition. It's the trade association for the adult entertainment industry. We are based in the United States but we have membership worldwide.

First of all, I would like to thank the ICANN board for allowing us this time to speak, and to speak of our concerns of the dot xxx sponsored top-level domain.

Let me be clear. As the only trade association for the adult entertainment industry, we represent the sponsorship community. It is our organization that sued the United States government on behalf of the industry and won in the U.S. Supreme Court.

It was our organization that ICM itself came to five years ago offering a portion of the proceeds from the sTLD in return for our support of their proposed domain.

ICM recognized us as the representative for the sponsorship community even then.

Today, we are here because the adult entertainment community believes that the views of the industry are being misrepresented on the issue of the dot xxx sponsored top-level domain.

Let me be clear. The adult entertainment industry, the sponsorship community, not only does not support ICM's proposal but it actively opposes the creation of a dot xxx top-level domain.

Five years ago when ICM approached the free speech coalition with a proposal that could increase our income by tenfold, we turned down that, recognizing the negative ramification that dot xxx TDL would have for the industry.

Today industry leaders as well as small webmasters have joined together not only to publicly oppose the creation of a dot xxx TLD but also to fund our trip to this conference, ensuring that their opposition is clearly communicated to the people who will be making this critical decision.

ICM will tell you that it already has met the obligation of sponsorship. Through interest received early in the process before some of the details and dangers had been made apparent and when financial wind falls were promised to many, ICM claimed to have industry support.

Support no longer exists.

ICANN has set precedents in this matter when dot travel failed to have support at the onset and gained it by the end. It was the end result that ICANN considered.

Why would the reverse not be just as, if not more, pertinent in this case?

What seemed to be support at the beginning has now not only dissipated but it's turned to outright opposition.

Moreover, as we heard earlier in this meeting, GAC is upholding the concerns that it stated in the Wellington communique that it does not believe the sponsorship concerns have been adequately addressed.

This came to the board as a form of formal advice. In its March 23rd letter to the board, Stuart Lawley stated that ICANN is listening to a noisy minority and thwarting the private sector's efforts to lead by self-regulation. Are we talking minority when the two leading organizations for the adult entertainment industry AVN and XBiz, have written letters explicitly in opposition to dot xxx. Are we talking minority when industry founders such as Larry Flint write letters in opposition? When major Web masters TriTech and LightSpeed fund our trip, not to mention countless smaller webmasters who have sent in donations as well as well wishes to defeat this self-serving, shallow, and greedy endeavor?

And these folks are standing front and center lending their names in support of this opposition and not hiding behind so-called privacy rights.

Even though they are clearly aware of ICM's propensity towards lawsuits and threats of financial ruin.

And how dare Mr. Lawley claim private sector self-regulation when he announced at the XBiz conference that he has never nor will ever be part of the adult entertainment industry?

Mr. Lawley and ICM, you have no claim to self-regulation when they are no part of the industry or the industry wants no part of them or their top-level domain.

The industry already has self-regulation restricted to adults and the ICRA filters. It funds that and is actively participating in such.

ICM will tell you that it has thousands of pre-reservations, evidence of industry support for dot xxx. Do I believe it has numerous preregistrations? Yes, I do. Do I believe that represents support for the community? No. Absolutely not.

At the XBiz conference in which Mr. Lawley participated in panel discussion I told him then as I tell you now, webmasters in the industry are pre-reserving URLs in order to protect their brand identity. Defensive registrations.

I told Mr. Lawley in front of that large crowd at the conference, that webmasters who purchase dot xxx URLs plan to purchase and park those addresses, steering clear of censorship and regulations imposed by the IFFOR board.

I asked Mr. Lawley at that February conference if purchasing and parking addresses would be permitted, and he replied yes.

This brings up an interesting point. Who benefits from a TLD that has no support of the sponsorship community?

A TLD where webmasters who do participate will purchase and park their addresses. It doesn't create a vital, active web presence in line with ICANN's mission and principles. It certainly doesn't benefit the sponsorship community.

Clearly, it will do nothing to protect children.

The only possible benefit to a dot xxx so-called sponsored top-level domain is the one that will be realized by ICM's bottom line.

And that is not reason enough for a dot xxx top-level domain.

In keeping with ICANN's mission and core values, I urge you to reject ICM's proposal for a dot xxx sponsored top-level domain.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much.

Do we have another speaker against the proposal?

Please identify yourself.

>>PHILIP CORWIN: Yes, good morning. Excuse me. Philip Corwin representing the Internet Commerce Association, which is a non-profit trade group whose membership is made up of professional investors in and developers of domain names.

We filed an extensive comment opposing the contract and took a rather different approach than most of the commentators in that we have no opinion for or against the creation of a top-level domain intended to host adult content as long as it remains entirely voluntary. We do not want to see the -- any mandatory directive where anyone must -- offering any type of content must only have it hosted at a particular TLD.

We did have extensive objections to the terms of the contract in that we felt that the contract would involve ICANN, through its enforcement responsibility, to oversee adherence with the contract in a host of responsibilities that are far afield from its technical management role and are really much more properly the responsibility of government and international regulatory authority.

So we thought the terms of the contract, which we understand grew in that way in an attempt to respond to the many content objections regarding dot xxx really took ICANN very far afield and really set some very undesirable precedents in terms of what subjects could be addressed in a registry contract and what functions a registry operator could ask registrants to pay for through the registry contract.

So our extensive comments are on the record. They are there for anyone to look at. But that is the substance of our objection to the present contract proposal.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much for brevity. Peter, you had a question for Ms. Duke and I didn't see you. Is she still here? Would you kindly come back to the microphone, please.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Thanks, Vint. Thank you for your presentation.

You raise an issue which troubles me in relation to this application and that is what happens when a portion of the apparent sponsored community is actively opposed to it. We haven't had that before. We have had sections where a community may have just been disinterested, but we haven't had to take into account opposition.

So I've got in front of me what I think is the definition of a sponsored TLD community. And all it required is the sponsored TLD must address the need and interests of a clearly defined community.

Why can't the members of your adult content industry who do want to be a part of the triple X and do want to try to sea if there are any potential benefits to this, why can't they form a community as a subset of your entire adult content community? Why does it make any difference in a portion of the community chooses not to be part of the sponsored community?

>>DIANE DUKE: There are two pieces of that question I would like to address, and one is I have yet to find anybody who is in favor of this. We have asked around and we have not seen, in all of our membership and all of the people we have been talking to, we have not been able to find a single business in favor of a dot xxx sponsored TLD.

The second part of that is the content of this lends itself toward government intrusion. In such, in the United States already there has been a bill introduced that if dot xxx is passed by ICANN to make it mandatory.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: I'm sorry --

>>DIANE DUKE: There's a direct threat to the industry.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: I don't think you understood my question. I didn't want to know whether you thought there were people who were or not. I understand you say that. Nor am I concerned about possible consequences that you say may happen from the introduction.

My question was really just about have we got a clear idea of a sponsored community?

We have got to test whether this application meets our requirements that there be a sponsored community.

You say that there are a large number of the adult content community who are opposed.

My question to you is, isn't a subset of the adult content community who do wish to take whatever advantage may arise from a triple X registration, doesn't that form a sponsored community under our tests? Even if a lot of the people who may have been in that community choose not to be and to go away and even to oppose it. Aren't we still left with a subset that forms a sponsored community?

>> Diane Duke: I would take that --

>>VINT CERF: I'm sorry, Ms. Duke, I want to intervene for a moment, Peter.

In a sense, you are asking her a question about our processes, and I'm not sure that that's entirely fair. We're the ones who have to decide what constitutes a sponsored community, so I'm not going to stop her from responding. I'm just puzzled by the question coming to a person who isn't part of our normal process.

Anyway, please go ahead, Ms. Duke.

>> Diane Duke: I guess if the goal for ICANN is to build a vibrant web presence with these top-level domains, if you do not take into consideration the majority of the community that it will be affecting, I doubt that your goal will be established, one.

And two -- or if you were looking at any other entity and the majority of that group, maybe churches are such, I would say that that would be a difficult....

>>VINT CERF: Let me try to help a little bit, Peter. A reminder about dot travel. When it was first proposed, there was strong opposition from one very major player in the travel industry, IATA. And the board, in fact, did not proceed with the dot travel proposal until the proposers actually came back with confirmation that the opposer in fact had joined the coalition, so to speak.

So in that sense, we have had to deal with this sort of opposition before, and the practice had been to confirm that the significant opposition had, in fact, relented.

I get the impression from Ms. Duke that that may not be the case here.

>>DIANE DUKE: Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Are there other -- oh, Paul.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: Thank you, Ms. Duke I wonder if I could ask you another question.

I'm just looking at your Web site, and I actually can't find a list of members.

>>DIANE DUKE: I'm sorry?

>>PAUL TWOMEY: I can't find a list of members.

>>DIANE DUKE: You won't find a list of members on our Web site. We do get to talk about privacy rights on that level.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: So I am just interested to hear from you as you are claiming that you are and you are claiming you are the only association. I know in my own country there's an EROS association which claims to be the same. So first of all I am saying you are not the only association. But I'm interested -- and they do put their members in, but I am interested to hear from you if you can give us some sense -- not that I'm not saying that you are not telling the truth, of course. I am trying to get the sense of who are your members, at what range, numbers or something, to given me a sense of how significant are you.

>>DIANE DUKE: We have over 3,000 members which represent hundreds of thousands of Web sites. We have webmasters, we have producers, content producers. We have retail establishments.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: And can you give me some sense of your -- this document you have read to us, is that -- I'm -- being the president of an organization like this, I know the difference between I write a quick e-mail versus as president I speak versus I speak with the endorsement of the board.

>>DIANE DUKE: I speak with the endorsement of the board and the membership.

>>PAUL TWOMEY: Okay. Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Could we have the next comment, please.

Amadeu.

>>AMADEU ABRIL i ABRIL: Okay. I am Amadeu Abril i Abril, loyal ICANN follower.

And let me say that if I look uncomfortable, it is because I hate what I am going to say.

First, I think that dot xxx is a bad idea, but who cares? Quite frankly, that's my personal idea for a number of reasons. But if I was sitting there I would not vote against because I think it's a bad idea.

We are not judging whether this can be successful or not beyond some minimum requirements of stability. And we are not judging the personal taste of Amadeu Abril or whoever.

The second question here is a major concern I have is concerning something Peter raised. Is this really a sponsored proposal in the sense that we intended that?

I think not.

So if this was not first sponsored TLD in that round that I was supposed to vote, I probably would vote against because I really think that this is forced into that category, and it's really not a sponsored TLD.

But today, I wouldn't do so because you have approved some others that, in my view, also fail to that other standard. And I would not like to be discriminatory in that sense. They don't fail any more than some others that you have approved.

Still, there is a third concern that really bothers me, and it's the question that we have some relevant opposition to the proposal from different areas.

One being part of the supposed community, the other being the GAC.

And what are we supposed to do here?

Well, my standard for approving the TLDs is it doesn't create any problem, it shows a stable technical and financial proposal to the scale that they propose to survive. And third, it has some support for the intended users. Some. And especially, it doesn't have, let's say, relevant support from the intended community, or the Internet stakeholders as such.

What I see here is GAC saying, GAC, not just one or two governments, saying that they don't like it for some reasons that may be good and for some others that, to say it politely, I fail to understand an intellectual framework behind them. But once again, it does not matter whether I understand or whether I agree with or not. The question is do we have some relevant opposition from, not Internet community, but, you know, a part of the process.

And then we have something they cannot avoid but part of the supposed community saying they don't accept.

So you have much more information than I have. And first thing, thanks for organizing this in this way that, you know, more structure for clear and open debate on that.

Second, my gut feeling is that I couldn't vote in favor of that given the state of the opposition I see from different parts.

But third, if you do approve that, please do us a favor and state some sense, not of the moral reasons, you know, the financial reasons for doing one thing or the other or the contractual guarantees you are there, but a sense of how you evaluate what's sufficient opposition from the community. Because if not, the risk in the next round for people understanding what's the public comment for, what's the GAC for, what really you need to express that something is a bad idea in order to create a new resource for the Internet?

This is ICANN creating this. It is not allowing someone to do something or not. We all are here to do this expensive process for deciding which public resources should be managed and then delegated to whom under which conditions.

Please do me a favor and be very specific on that because if not, we will run into some risk problems into the next round.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you, Amadeu. Let me before we take the next -- that's all right. Come to the microphone. How many other people are commenting on this? One more.

Okay. I will take these two. That's the end of the comments on opposition, and then we'll have comments in favor.

Please go ahead.

>>JEFFREY DOUGLAS: Thank you, Chairman Cerf and the board for the allocation of your time and the opportunity to address you. My name is Jeffrey Douglas. I'm the volunteer chair of the Free Speech Coalition, of which Ms. Duke is the executive director.

I realize that many or most of you have already made up your mind. I doubt that I'll be raising any issues that you have not considered. But I hope that if you do have questions, I may have the opportunity to address those.

As has been indicated, we believe the sponsorship community overwhelmingly opposes dot XXX. Those of our members who have come forward to oppose do it in order to attempt to persuade. The reasons that our policy the membership is not put on the Web site or others is because of the hostile governmental environment in the United States of America, so that, as a controversial organization, a listing of our membership is deemed to be contrary to the benefit of both the organization and our members.

But numerous of our members have identified themselves for the specific purpose of opposing this proposed top-level domain.

I'd like to address specifically concerns expressed by some board members regarding the subjectivity of the criteria which is potentially a basis for rejecting it.

In contrast to dot tel or dot mobi, the -- the difficulty with the dot XXX is that the content itself has inherent controversy in the possibility of regulation. That is, dot tel, dot mobI may be competing for space. Here there is a reason not to have a self-defined community, because it will endanger the entire community.

The creation of dot XXX will, of course, allow new means of censorship by multiple layers of government, especially within the United States. As mentioned, there are already two bills pending before Congress to mandate migration from dot com or another dot space to dot triple X for the purpose of censorship, and depressingly, the Congressional research service in January of this year analyzed those pending mandatory dot XXX bills as being potentially constitutional.

Additionally, something that has not been discussed adequately which is of grave concern to me is that there can be informal pressure to mandate through the credit card processing companies. That is to say, whatever pledges ICM registry has made to you that they will oppose, including to the point of litigation, a law that would mandate, whether at a county, state, or national level, migration to dot XXX, they have made no pledge nor, realistically can they pledge that they would oppose, could oppose, or in fact would not support a commercial force towards migration. That is, if the credit card processors that are the basis of the existence of the adult Web community were to mandate that if you were not a part of dot XXX, they would not process the credit cards, that would be at least as effective a force for migration from outside the dot XXX domain to within the dot XXX.

And, again, the consequences of a significant number of people being within the dot XXX means that, inevitably, there will be a ghettoization. I don't mean to demean the actual force of a real ghetto. But, for our purposes, having a wall around that community means there will be restricted access.

And the history of adult speech within the United States especially is a history of efforts to constrain access to that speech by consenting adults. We're not concerned here with inappropriate access. It's the rights of adults who wish to access it, to get access to it. And once dot XXX is established, they will lose access.

And there are a myriad means to allow that to happen. And I, as a lawyer who represents members of the adult industry and the coalition, bear the scars to show that those wars have occurred.

The other component of dot XXX that is unique from any other dot proposal, again because it's based on content, is that it, in effect, creates a second class of speech, a speech that needs to be overseen by apparently responsible adults, that needs to be treated differently.

If you could imagine a proponent of a dot religion saying that, "We are appropriate so that we can regulate responsible speakers of religion," that's identical to what the proposal is before you now.

As Ms. Duke indicated, there is a specific problem with this proposal. All the comments I've made before apply to any proposal for a dot XXX or dot sex or any kind of dot content.

A particular problem with this proposal is that the proponents are from outside the community and are outside of the community proudly. That is, they say that they will encourage responsible regulation because the adult community is inherently incapable of responsible self-regulation.

That is, of course, extraordinarily patronizing. But beyond being patronizing, it is, again, a dangerous concept, and a dangerous concept for ICANN to endorse.

If one could think of another perhaps less controversial form of commerce, I was thinking of the mortuary industry, a group that were heavily criticized decades ago. If someone came forward proposing an sTLD of dot mortuary, and the basis or an essential component of that argument is that morticians are incapable of responsible self-regulation, we, as critics of or who have distance from it are the appropriate ones to do it, I believe that the board would reject that out of hand.

But essential to this application is the component that foxes should not guard the hen house. It should be rejected as an absurdity.

>>VINT CERF: I'm sorry. You're running a little far over time now.

>>JEFFREY DOUGLAS: I apologize. I will immediately wrap. Thank you for alerting me to that.

One very briefly. The notion of nonresolution, nonresolving names.

If businesses from outside the adult community have a right to, at cheap or free basis, block an equivalent dot XXX because they're outside the community, but members from within the adult community do not share that same right, that is, if I have an X-rated Web site as a dot com, if I am declined -- denied the same opportunity that a non-adult business would have, shoes dot com wants to block shoot dot XXX, but I, representing man dot com that's an X-rated Web site, would not have that same ability to block at free or no price a man dot XXX, again, the adult community is being placed in a second-class position. This has not been fully resolved, because ICM registry requires the ability to address these little problems only after the contract has been agreed to.

These are concerns that need to have been addressed, can't be addressed under the current format. And since they are outside the community, they cannot be relied upon to address those favorable to the community. And to address very briefly the question that was posed --

>>VINT CERF: I'm sorry. But I have to move to -- thank you.

Khaled, I think you're the last speaker.

>>KHALED FATTAL: What I was going to talk about is not either for or against, and I walked in in the middle. I don't want to interrupt your process. If you wish for me to wait until --

>>VINT CERF: No. That's an interesting transition. We go from against to something, to for.

Let me -- you came in late. We are discussing dot XXX, just in case you weren't sure what you were commenting on.

[ Laughter ]

[ Applause ]

>>VINT CERF: If you're not for sex -- oh, well, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

>>KHALED FATTAL: Well, Vint, when I'm done, I will ask you if my comments were actually of value to the board and to ICANN, and then you can give me your opinion if maybe I was listening.

My name is Khaled Fattal. I am chairman of MINC, the multilingual Internet names consortium. But I'm speaking to you today as an Arab, also as an Arab-American.

The arguments we're hearing today, very valid, and I think the board in its wisdom will be undertaking, listening to them, and rendering an opinion and perhaps a resolution.

But I would like to draw another thought to you. And this is why my points are neither for nor against, perhaps a challenge to ICANN board to consider the ramification in what these deliberations are about.

One, if the process was purely from the two goalposts of whether an application has fulfilled the requirements or not, then I think it's a simple process for you. You can determine, and I'm sure you have the wisdom to determine whether it has or has not.

But there are other bigger issues at hand. And this is not an issue of just privacy or the rights. But let's consider the issue of IDNs or the multilingual Internet. And speaking as an Arab here, I can tell you, I can speak on behalf of the Arabic community. We met yesterday, and I think if you were to poll the streets of the governments, the private sector, you will get 90-plus percent that they would not be in favor of having anything to do with the adult or pornography in Arabic.

So perhaps the goal post that I would throw the challenge to the board is, the next time around when the process of application is put forth, perhaps a consideration is, how would that also affect the other communities that this process aims to serve?

And perhaps one of the fundamental issues is that one IDNs are implemented, and existing TLDs that have been authorized will be able to go and deploy them, certain communities would really have serious concerns, because, as you all know, there is no Arabic DNS today. We have been calling for it and working for it for years in this process. And I know we have a lot of support from you on this. But the reality is, if we have, for example, a dot XXX and the IDN is implemented and the extensions in other languages are in, it is foreseeable that the Arabs will end up with an Arabic adult Internet long before we have an Arabic Internet.

So -- the point I'm trying to say to you is, this process, I hope, can learn from a lot of the things we've been telling you about over the years in private and in public, so that when the processes of what should be authorized or not authorized, or what should be resolved to be agreed, it should factor in other ramifications, especially that we are all considering turning this ASCII Internet into a multilingual Internet so that we can help and assist the non-ASCII world of becoming participants in this forum.

So now I can ask you, Vint, to tell me if I was listening to the original discussions. Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Yes. I think you were. And thank you very much for those comments, Khaled.

We're at the point now where we would switch over to positive side of support.

Let me ask how many people are going to be speaking in favor?

I see Stuart, I see Michael. I see Ron Andruff. I see the gentleman there whom I don't -- whose name I don't know. And I think we have one comment from Bret Fausett.

Bret actually put his comment in earlier this morning.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE: Vint, if I comment I don't want to be pro or con.

>>VINT CERF: Okay.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE: I would like to talk about process. So perhaps that is a transition between -- or I can wait until the end.

>>VINT CERF: Well, --

>>MICHAEL PALAGE: I can wait until the end.

>>VINT CERF:Let's do that. Actually, it might be more relevant to do that.

So let me ask the -- actually, let me get Bret Fausett's comment, because he put it in very early in the session.

So I'll ask Kieren to speak to that and then Stuart.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY: Speak slowly and clearly, and no English slang, I'm told as well.

Bret Fausett posted this on the participation Web site, so as general manager, I suppose I'll take it on myself to read it.

I will read it carefully, because he's a lawyer and I'm sure he's phrased it carefully. He would like to point out he has no affiliation with ICM registry who are the people applying for dot XXX and no financial interest in the outcome of the board's decision.

On an issue as debated as XXX, I imagine that many board members already have staked a position pro or CON on the merits of this new gTLD proposal.

For those who are still considering this proposal, I would encourage you to vote in favor of a new XXX top-level domain for at least three independent reasons.

Number one, no technical impediment exists to the creation of a dot XXX top-level domain. Neither the independent reviewers nor those submitting comments about XXX have identified any technical impediment or issue of security and stability that would prevent the adoption of XXX.

Point two, precedent recommends adoption of dot XXX. According to ICANN's independent reviewers and any objective review of their respective applications, both the proposal for XXX and the prospective registry operator for XXX meet the criteria for sTLD selection at least as well as the other sponsored top-level domain proposals that have preceded it.

TLDs such as dot travel, dot cat, dot jobs, dot Asia, dot tel, and dot MOBI. Each of these TLDs had its own problems and received objections from various parts of the Internet community.

ICANN was quite correct to select these new gTLDs over the objections of those who believe that geographic locations should not be gTLDs and those who believe the concept of travel was too broad and employment too narrow.

ICANN even approved dot MOBI over the objection of Tim Berners-Lee. ICANN should continue to show its leadership in the development of the Internet's infrastructure by treating dot XXX in the same straightforward, apolitical manner in which it has treated the other TLD applications.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, XXX is a regulatory hook that will enable improved content labeling. On its merits, XXX deserves addition to the root zone. When it is adopted, XXX will not be a short-term solution to parental concerns about keeping age-appropriate content away from children. Nothing magic will happen the moment that XXX is added to the root zone. Those who criticize XXX, however, because it is not an immediate turnkey solution to a problem, are missing its long-term benefits.

Along one path, XXX is a regulatory hook on which governments can hang content restrictions to make parental content filtering more effective. Along another path, XXX is a strictly regulatory zone which content providers can use to ward off these same governmental mandates.

Either path will yield only modest changes in the short term, but in a longer window of five to ten years, XXX ought to prove its merit as an effective labeling scheme.

As both a longtime ICANN observer and as a protective parent of three young children, I encourage the board to vote in favor of this proposal.

And that's Bret Fausett's statement.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

>>VINT CERF: Appreciate -- if there are more, I'm going to ask you to hold them.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY: Okay.

>>VINT CERF: I have committed 20 minutes of time to ICM. And that begins now. So, Stuart, you're on.

>>STUART LAWLEY: Stuart Lawley, president and CEO of ICM Registry.

Over three years ago, ICM submitted its application to operate the sponsored top-level domain for responsible adult webmasters. Since then, ICM has gone well beyond what was required of any other sTLD applicant and well beyond what was reasonably required in reference to its application.

To demonstrate its compliance with the RFP criteria.

Specifically in relation to the shopper evaluation criteria, ICM has demonstrated firstly that dot XXX will bring concrete new value to the global name space and the Internet community as a whole by facilitating badly needed voluntary industry self-regulation, by creating a forum for the sponsor community to work together with other impacted stakeholders around the world to develop industry best practices that are informed by the expertise of child advocates and the free expression community and enhancing the ability of Internet users to control their own online experience.

Secondly, ICM precisely defined the sponsored community for dot XXX as a self-identified group of responsible webmasters, adult webmasters, who wish to work together to implement industry best practices in a specific, easily identifiable virtually marketplace, while providing a forum for interaction and cooperation with other community stakeholders affected by the adult content industry.

ICM demonstrated the community's need for a voluntary sTLD to create an easily identifiable virtually marketplace in which to create and enforce industry best practices, to engage in diverse stakeholder community around these best practices, and this need is not being met elsewhere.

And to enable responsible adult webmasters to market a reliable, fraud and phishing-free experience to consenting adults, consenting adult consumers of legal content, thereby producing for them enhanced, more reliable revenue streams for the registrants.

Thirdly, not only did ICM demonstrate the appropriateness of the sponsoring organization and the policy formation environment ICM was asked to provide -- and -- sorry, ICM was asked to provide and, in fact, did provide a signed contract with the family online safety institute to address the board's request for ironclad performance guarantees.

FOSI is a non-for-profit organization that's fully independent of ICM and whose founding members include the largest and most well-known e-Commerce players from around the globe and whose independence in this matter are beyond question. These include AOL, AT&T, British Telecom, Cisco, the GSM association, Microsoft, Telemex, and Verizon.

Further, in response to concerns about the adequacy of ICANN's own policy formation environment, which served as the model for IFFOR, ICM provided structural guarantees to ensure that all policy commitments made through the RFP process would be fulfilled in the form of direct contractual recourse against ICM by ICANN for any failure to fulfill these commitments.

Fourthly, ICM demonstrated the strong support of the specifically defined sponsored community.

Strong demand for dot XXX by adult webmasters, which has been documented repeatedly in the last three years and which includes substantial recent support in the form of over 77,000 prereservations, this demonstrated support far outweighs the opposition generated by webmasters who are potentially not part of the defined community.

And prereservation is still ongoing, with hundreds coming in daily.

Here are the facts with the ICM sponsored community.

By the end of February, over 76,000 adult Web site names had been pre-reserved in dot xxx since June of last year.

We launched the industry pre-reservation service at a time when ICANN had rejected our contract, so to many participants in the marketplace, we were on life support, if not dead and buried. But since then we have got 76,000 registration, and we offered to accept reservations from webmasters or their authorized agents operating adult sites in other ICANN-recognized top-level domains. We didn't advertise or market this service. We literally just made it available on our Web site.

The pre-reservations are not speculative. Over 71,000 of the pre-reservations are for unique strings which are consistent with regular registration patterns. The pre-reservations are not defensive. Less than .1% of the pre-reservations were submitted by webmasters who have expressed opposition to dot xxx. ICM has documented these pre-reservations. We provided ICANN with the documentary evidence of all the pre-reservations and even the ALEXA rankings for a random selection of the com, net and org sites corresponding to the reserved strings to say whether these are small, medium or large players.

Separately from this pre-registration data we supplied ICANN with details of 1217 supporters who said they wish to register since June 1st, 2005.

Visitors to the ICM registry Web site can provide information in order to stay up with ICM registry news. They provided their name, e-mail address and country. 1217 subscriber voluntarily describe themselves as supporters and wish to register. Only eight said they oppose the application.

We gave you a confidential copy of this information while public posting of this information would be inconsistent with fair information practices, even someone unfamiliar with the adult industry, and I assume most of you are, based on nothing more than a cursory review of the documents will clearly understand that this reflects adult webmasters who were, one, interested in dot xxx; two, voluntarily visited the ICM Web site; three, voluntarily provided personal information; and four, selected from a drop-down list overwhelmingly support dot xxx's wish to register.

These supporters hail from all around the world. From Australia to Zambia, with Latvia and 70 other countries in between.

In addition, nearly 300 additional webmasters have asked about registering in dot xxx. We have received people who didn't come to the Web site but sent in generally supportive e-mails, over 300 of them. And we've given those e-mail addresses to ICANN.

The original application included strong written community support. In connection with the independent evaluation process, we submitted letters of support from industry members, with combined points of presence in more than 35 countries, responsible for generating a substantial share of the global online and adult entertainment revenue. And associated with many thousands of adult content webmasters.

None of these supporters are affiliated with ICM in any way, have any financial interest in the stake or the outcome of this process.

Even the sponsorship evaluation team noted that these letters reflected strong support from industry members.

The opposition to dot xxx is substantially overblown.

ICM affirmatively disclosed the existence of a minority but vocal opposition to dot xxx years ago, in particular in our board presentation to the board in Marina del Rey, Argentina in April 2005.

It's been so many years.

As you will hear more about from Bob Corn-Revere, the webmasters who oppose dot xxx number in the hundreds and constitute only a fraction of the estimated tens of thousands of adult webmasters. They have affirmatively misrepresented their strength. They have posted numerous times under different screen names, e-mail addresses, they have used automated tools to generate postings under false e-mail addresses to route around the ICANN verification process, as well as many other unsavory activities that we have, by and large, when we spotted them, disclosed these fully to ICANN staff.

It's long past time to acknowledge that ICM has passed every test to establish this established in the sTLD RFP, and surmounted every barrier erected in the course of this RFP process. In short, ICM defined the sponsored community of responsible adult webmasters with particularity. ICM demonstrated the support and increasing coalescence of this sponsored community, its need for the TLD, and the benefits expected to flow from that.

We demonstrated the support and appropriateness of IFFOR as a sponsoring organization and worked diligently and creatively with ICANN staff to respond to each and every concern regarding the policy formation environment, and to provide extraordinary assurances that it would fulfill the various policy commitments outlined in the application and in the course of the RFP process.

In contrast, in the past three years, a few hundred webmasters opposed to dot xxx have manipulated the public forums, overestimated the size of industry opposition. I would like to now ask Bob Corn-Revere, an acknowledged and highly respected expert in free expression and a zealous advocate of such to address this in further details.

I would then ask for just a minute or so to close after Bob has spoken, if that's okay.

>>VINT CERF: Yes, it is.

Please go ahead, Bob.

>>ROBERT CORN-REVERE: Thank you, and good afternoon.

My name is bob Corn-Revere. I am partner at the Washington office of Dave advice, Wright, Tremaine, and I am outside council to ICM registry.

I want to say a few words about some of the substantive issues and substantive objections that have been raised to the dot xxx proposal. In particular, I'll talk about whether or not it actually will assist in individuals being able to select or deselect what content they want and also whether or not this is likely to lead to censorship.

But I want to really discuss those issues in the context in which Mr. Douglas raised them and in particular in the context of whether or not there is an overwhelming opposition by an organized sponsoring organization that really should be standing in the shoes of ICM registry as they tell it.

So to do that I do want to say a few words about the free speech coalition. And I want to acknowledge up front that I feel a little uncomfortable doing that, because I often work with the free speech coalition on matters involving free speech in the United States. They are one of many groups that have taken valuable stands on a variety of issues involving legislation in the United States.

That being said, they are not the only group. And I think it is a misnomer to stand before the board today and have their representative describe it as the trade association for the adult industry.

I think that's true in the United States, much less on a global level, I don't think that the free speech coalition represents the world.

>>SUSAN CRAWFORD: I'm sorry, Bob did you mean to say that's not true in the United States?

>>ROBERT CORN-REVERE: Pardon the syntax. It is not true to say they represent the adult industry as a whole in the United States and certainly isn't true to say they represent the world.

For example, you can't compare the free speech coalition to a recognized trade association like the motion picture association of America which represents all the major studios, nor could you compare it to a group like the international air transport association which has industrial members.

Instead, it is a small California-based group that got its start as legal defense fund in the early 1990s. Although it has grown and then receded over the years, that largely has been in response to various legal challenges that have happened over the years.

As I say, their work in this area is valuable but it hardly qualifies them as the only trade association in the area.

Moreover, it's important to recognize that the free speech coalition isn't an Internet-based group. It represents the adult industry on a number of issues broadly, but that includes gentlemen's clubs, adult toy manufacturers, Web sites have come in later but they in no way represent the majority of the membership.

Ms. Duke represented their members today at about 3,000. I have no reason to really question that, but suggest that that really is attributable to a 2005 court case that said that anyone who signed up would get the protections of an injunction that was issued against various federal record keeping requirements. So the membership of the free speech coalition surged in 2005 from its usual level of a few hundred members to what we hear today as a few thousand members.

Again, we don't know what the makeup of that is it might be individual members because it does take individuals. But to butt putt that in perspective a little bit, it's reported there are 9,000 members of the adult industry in the San Fernando Valley alone. So I think viewing this as a global organization -- and it may have international members, I take no position on that -- but to bill it as the only organization that can represent people who want to sign up for dot xxx is simply incorrect.

In that regard, it is true that free speech coalition was one of the groups, and one of many, that ICM contacted as part of its application process. Unfortunately an agreement was not able to be reached largely because free speech coalition demanded and could not get complete control, exclusive control of the sponsoring organization.

Even at that, it's probably useful to recognize that the position of free speech coalition has, well, probably the best word is evolved over time.

In an article about the free speech coalition published in the Cardoza Arts and Entertainment Law Journal in 2004, the executive director at the time was asked about the proposal for the dot xxx domain. At that time, she said, "What are your thoughts on special domain for this type of material?" The executive director said "It's just a personal choice. I think we probably made a bad decision in trying to debate this in a big way and put it out to our members. We had a general membership meeting on it. Right now we are neutral on it. I encourage people who think it would work for them to do it but we are not going to endorse it one way or the other."

Now, clearly, the free speech coalition has changed its public position.

But it's not clear to what extent that represents most of its members or what percentage of its members since there is a matter of active debate.

Finally, let me address some of the substantive objections that have been raised.

Largely, and unfortunately we haven't been able to engage in a direct dialogue on this, these are issues that I don't think the members of the free speech coalition even believe themselves. Whether or not a label will help children and whether or not it will lead to censorship. As a theoretical matter, any labeling proposal, were it's through a domain name or others, could encourage regulators to regulate the material. Everybody recognizes that. And in fact, free speech coalition has endorsed the proposal of the adult sites advocating child protection, the so-called RTA or restricted to adult label.

And in the RTA Web site, where free speech coalition probably lists itself as a supporter, many of these same arguments about whether it would be helpful or harmful are addressed and debunked.

For example, the question is asked, won't labeling my site set me up for censorship? The response: Site labels, key words, domain names, even certain types of images can all be used by ISPs or online intermediaries to filter out content. As for government censorship, if certain government lawmakers could get away with making all pornography illegal, they would, but they can't. Even the age verification provisions in the Child Online Protection Act were kept tied up in the court for years. Are you worried with the government ordering all ISPs to block porn sites or all users, that is not a realistic concern.

That concern became even more unrealistic last week when the federal court in Philadelphia struck down again the child online protection act.

Finally, as to the substantive issues, I should mention that Jeffrey Douglas mentioned to you that the congressional research service did an analysis of legislation out there to indicate whether or not that would likely be upheld to make an adult domain mandatory if adopted in the United States.

I did bring along that copy of the congressional research report and nowhere in it can I find a statement that says this is likely to be upheld in the United States if adopted.

In fact, in its summary conclusion, it says that if a court viewed it as a content-based restriction on speech that it would be constitutional only if the court found it served a compelling governmental interest by the least restrictive means and goes on to say it is unclear whether making a dot xxx domain mandatory would violate the first amendment.

We have given extensive reasons in our application materials indicating why it would not be upheld. I think that really is just not a realistic issue.

Finally, Ms. Duke mentioned the XBiz conference in Los Angeles. What we did not mention was at the end of the session when the conversation was drawing to a close she asked Stuart if the dot xxx proposal is approved, will you work with us and the answer is yes.

So people disagree about a lot of things but at the end of the day this would provide a structure for people to resolve those differences within a sponsoring organization.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you, Bob. And Stuart you are back now for a moment.

>>STUART LAWLEY: If I can finish up and if anybody has any questions on the contract, Becky Burr is here to answer those.

Over three years ago we submitted the application to operate the sTLD for responsible adult webmasters. The sponsorship evaluators were no big fans of the ICM proposal. But then again, the sponsorship evaluators rejected eight out of the ten applications ICANN received. And five of those eight applications are now in the root or shortly will be in the root.

The board's direction to staff to enter into commercial negotiations with ICM registry on June the 1st, 2005 was identical in every respect with the direction given to the board on dot Asia, dot cat, dot jobs, dot mobi, dot TEL and dot travel.

The record plainly shows that the vote reflected the board's determination that the ICM application met the RFP criteria.

I hope that the members of the board who now dispute the meaning of that vote will review the written record and consider the ways in which it strains credulity to suggest that the board would first spend hours discussing ICM's compliance with the sponsorship criteria and then direct a resourced constrained staff to enter into time-consuming contract negotiations and finally act on the proposed contract as it did on May the 10th, 2006 without first determining that the application was adequate.

Wizard of Oz fans may be persuaded to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain but the rest of us have an idea of what's really going on.

ICM registry did not ever and does not now suggest that the creation of dot xxx was a no brainer.

ICM acknowledged and went out of its way to address and respond to each and every concern voiced by the board, by the GAC, by business users, and other constituencies and members of the ICANN community.

ICM will operate the domain in accordance with its commitments to you.

ICM registry did not ever and does not now suggest that triple X enjoyed the support of each and every member of the overall adult entertainment industry. Indeed, from the earliest days, we went out of its way to point out to you the existence of industry opposition.

But ICM did show that dot xxx enjoys the documented support of a sizable community of responsible webmasters.

And ICM will work hard to ensure that those opponents are included in the IFFOR policy-making process if they wish to be so. And we defend the right of those opponents not to register in dot xxx.

ICM did not ever and does not now suggest that dot xxx will be a silver bullet to prevent children from stumbling upon adult content, but it did show that the creation of dot xxx will bring concrete new value to the name space and the Internet by facilitating voluntary industry self-regular and by enhancing the ability of Internet users to control their online experience.

Creation of dot xxx will not undermine important expression and association rights recognized in international law and treaty, nor will it ghetto-ize responsible adult webmasters.

It will provide a reliable fraud and phishing-free experience to consenting adult consumers of legal content, and thereby enjoy enhanced and more reliable revenue streams as a result.

The ICANN board debated and adopted the RFP criteria, and established the rules under which sTLD applications would be considered. ICM met your criteria and followed your rules.

The registry agreement before you is not just another ICM proposal, but the joint product of ICM and ICANN staff arrived at through extended thoughtful and thorough negotiations.

It is time for you to approve that agreement, not just because failure to do will likely embroil ICANN in another legal contest but because it is the right thing to do.

That ends my presentation. I'll answer any questions.

>>ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Just some clarification, Vint.

>>VINT CERF: Two issues here. I have how many other speakers? I have Ron Andruff.

Stuart, would you -- and we have another one there. And we're very short on time.

>>ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Mine is a clarification question, please.

>>VINT CERF: Go ahead, Alex.

>>ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Mr. Lawley, I am completely lost by your reference to the Wizard of Oz. Can you either tell me that there was no (inaudible) in that statement and I should be able to (inaudible) by just reading the Wizard of Oz and find know who the man behind the curtain is? Or maybe relate it to Don Quixote or some of those things that people in my country were reading at the age where you were reading the Wizard of Oz.

>>STUART LAWLEY: When Becky Burr comes to the microphone, she is the Wizard of Oz expert, so she can explain in more detail.

>>ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Can you explain the statement that you made.

>>STUART LAWLEY: The wizard of Oz, there's a man behind the curtain that's controlling the situation and they keep saying to go out and get the wicked witch's broomstick and then you will get what you want. And they go off. They say bring the broomstick back and you need to kill the wicked witch. Are you sure you want us to do that?. And then they go out and do that and bring back the broomstick, and then there's just one more thing to do.

>>ALEJANDRO PISANTY: And the man behind the curtain would be?

>>VINT CERF: It might be Paul if it's the wizard of Oz.

[ Laughter ]

>>STUART LAWLEY: There may be several men behind the curtain.

>>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: In the volumes of information which your legal representative had submitted to the board, your representative had made a claim to refute the claim of the people who ran XBiz that there was a packed house listening to your presentation and you submitted pictures which showed a nearly empty house to refute their claim. But I did indeed look at the photos on XBiz Web site and it did appear to me to be quite a packed house with a few people having to stand. I do admit, though, that during the course of the presentations, you could see people leaving, so that toward the end the house was maybe only half full. But could you explain that discrepancy, please.

>>STUART LAWLEY: I think briefly, I attended that meeting, so did Bob Corn-Revere, and we had also attended the 2257 conference in the morning and other conferences there, and those rooms were literally jam-packed with know seats available and standing room only around the sides. And the point that we were trying to prove, and we just went off to look at the sites to see if anyone had taken any pictures, and even one of our visitors, Stephen Balkin showed the room half empty halfway through.

I think one of the comments was submitted by a lawyer who said it was standing room only, jam-packed, and we said actually it wasn't, and we said it truly wasn't jam-packed, standing room only. And even some of the opponents, notably bad doing is his handle, said he was embarrassed -- sorry, there was enough room to stand up and do jumping jacks around the room. So we were trying to debunk the hype, to what degree, whether it's three-quarters full, half full, two-thirds empty, is not absolutely the point. It's to say it wasn't jam-packed, standing room only.

>>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Let the record show that I took screen shots from what I saw that did show that there, if any, were maybe one or two empty seats and there were a few people standing and that they tended to refute the implications of the pictures that you submitted showed.

>>STUART LAWLEY: Those pictures were taken by another adult webmaster resource site.

>>VINT CERF: We will just go back and forth on this and won't get anywhere.

Are there any other questions at this point for Mr. Lawley? Susan.

>>SUSAN CRAWFORD: Very briefly, Mr. Lawley. How do you think the global Internet community feels about pornography?

>>STUART LAWLEY: I think most -- the global Internet community understands that it exists, that it's there, and by -- to do nothing is not an answer. And whilst I have just said this isn't the silver bullet, it's a start and a move in the right direction.

So I think people understand it's there, and nobody has come up with any great ideas about how to engage in responsible self-regulation on a global basis, not just a national basis, so users can make their own decision to select or avoid this content.

>>VINT CERF: Let me try to understand where we are here. We are now running into the time we had allocated for the RALO pictures and also Ron Andruff is waiting to speak.

Peter you are next. Is there anyone else who wishes to speak?

Yes. And Michael.

We have a problem, we have a lot of people who want to speak to this.

Lots of people who want to speak to this. We are way over our time.

I'll take four comments now, two minutes each, starting with Peter.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: I just want to put to you the question that I put to Ms. Duke.

How do we determine the nature of the sponsored community when -- and let's put aside for a moment the proportion of it -- but a proportion of what might appear to be the sponsored community comes out in active opposition to it? How do we -- how do we weigh that? And how is it that this group be can be just self-selecting to whether or not they're in it or not as opposed to a predefined sponsored community, which is what I think this thing was originally set out to be.

>>STUART LAWLEY: Yeah, the definition is those members of the adult entertainment community that wish to identify themselves as such and work together in this virtual marketplace. And, in effect, the bottom line of what we're trying to say here in a nutshell, is that the dot XXX extension will give an immediate flag to -- from the industry's perspective, to would be-surfers of some kind of, these guys are operating under a code of conduct. I can go to that site. I'm not likely to stumble by accident into child pornography. I'm less likely to download viruses. I'm more likely to be treated under the code of conduct and not get cheated on my credit card.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: You're doing what Ms. Duke did, talk about the benefits of joining.

I'm trying to work out whether there is, in fact, a community, if it's self-defined and if an operator could be in it one day and choose not to be the following day. Do we have a sponsored community if it's this loosely defined?

>>STUART LAWLEY: That's those what I mean to choose to register, just like dot travel, out of all the people in the travel business, 25,000 of them have decided to register. We already have 75,000 people who said, yes, I'm interested. I want to register and use this domain. That's a big enough community, in my opinion.

>>VINT CERF: I said four, Peter was one.

Ron has certainly been waiting.

>>RON ANDRUFF: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

As Amadeu said a few minutes ago, this is a very uncomfortable topic for many of us. And also, I would say it's as much uncomfortable for me.

But I think there's a couple of points that are important.

I fully support Bret Fausett's statement. This is a very difficult one to define. It's very obvious. We don't know if there's a community or not a community, and both sides are hiding behind a statement of privacy.

But the bigger issue, in my view as an individual, is that as the body responsible for envisioning a future Internet, we have to take a stand at some point in our processes to establish a place where parents can have comfort that they can regulate, they can determine that their children will not be able to see these things if they so choose.

If we don't create that space, then we have a problem that will continue to exacerbate itself.

So I'm not necessarily for or against. I'm just saying, as a community of ICANN, representatives of the future Internet, we have to look at this and find a place where we can make sure that parents don't have to sit beside their children when they're on the Internet, but they can allow their children to have access in a more controlled environment.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you for your brevity.

We'll take the next one from Kieren. I'll take Bertrand de la Chapelle after that. And Michael is the last speaker.

Briefly, please.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY: Yes. Okay. So this has been posted in response to Bret Fausett's comment on the participation Web site. It's been a man called reed Lee, I asked if he has any interest. He is a lawyer he says without pay as president of the First Amendment lawyer's association, he says without pay, on the board of directors for this free speech coalition. I think this is important, considering the conversation we're having to make sure you know who you're talking about.

I have reduced these comments down slightly. That's a very bad idea with a lawyer, but I've done it anyway because of time reasons. However, his full statement is available on the public participation Web site, which is available to the.

This is prompted by Bret Fausett's statement in support of XXX. Would you like me to cover what his three points were?

His three points were, no, legal impediment exists. Two, there is a precedent recommending adoption of it. Three, dot XXX is a regulatory hook that will enable content labeling. In reference to that, no one has suggested XXX would destabilize DNS in a technical sense, but widespread opposition has arisen to what Mr. Lee says is inevitable attempts to regulate the content.

Also, Bret Fausett's applaud -- apparently applauds dot XXX is a regulatory hook and says exactly what motivates the opposition against dot XXX.

Dot XXX was considered a voluntary proposal. There's been no consideration of how it would be used as a regulatory hook.

ICANN should not go down this road, at the least, it should avoid doing so without careful consideration and widespread consultation.

And I hope Mr. Lee doesn't mind me cutting off there.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you very much.

Bertrand.

>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Vint.

First of all, I want to make a very clear point, that on that specific occasion, I'm not absolutely -- I'm absolutely not speaking as a French government representative, but, let's say, as a member of the global Internet community, on a pure private basis. This is very important.

And I must say that I welcome very much the fact that in the process of addressing policy issues, ICANN and the discussions we have here actually are one of the rare places where an individual, on an individual basis, can actually come and give his own input on a global policy issue.

Now, I won't speak in any way in favor or in opposition. I fully endorse the fact that I'm approaching this from a procedural manner. And to see how this could be addressed.

Fours quick points.

The first is this demonstrates perfectly that the introduction of new TLD is not just a technical, commercial, or syntactic question. And, in particular, if I refer to the proposals for the adoption of new TLDs, it is obvious that the dot XXX may be controversial, but that in itself, most of the criteria that have been studied would not help resolve the range of issues we're addressing. Second.

This introduction, has an obvious public policy dimension. It is not a public policy issue exclusively. It has other dimensions -- commercial and whatever. But it has a huge public policy dimension which is not the case of most of the other TLDs that have been studied before.

In that case, where there's such a big public policy dimension, it is obvious that the kind of contradictory debate that we're having today is of the utmost importance.

The kind of exchanges that we've had, that we've heard here, give light on a certain number of the elements that I'm absolutely certain the written contributions could absolutely not highlight. And I want to ask a question to the board, as I am new in this process. It's only my second time in an ICANN meeting.

Has there ever been in the course of the last three or four years another meeting like this one?

Third, it may seem strange to a lot of people that, actually, you seem to have the communities or the groups in almost the reverse position. We are hearing vocal arguments from the community that is supposed to be the sponsored community saying, "We don't want this," or at least some say that.

And on the other hand, as Bret Fausett has said, if this is a regulatory hook, we should have at least some members of the governments who would be jumping in favor of this, because it would provide a regulatory hook in the future.

So it's a bit strange that, actually, some of the positions are reversed. And this only shows one thing, apparently, is that this is not a sponsored TLD in the strictest sense of the term. Or if it is, it is a special type of sponsored TLD that deserves special treatment. And in that respect, I fully support what Amadeu was saying earlier. It has to be addressed as such.

Now, the two last points I would like to make.

This is not -- and it has been mentioned, if you listened carefully in the previous comments -- this is not about a TLD introduction. This is about a labeling scheme.

I don't know if people have paid enough attention to the technical modalities of this application, irrespective of whether you're in favor or not. It is important that everybody understands that the technical system that is proposed is to actually force a labeling on domains that are in the other TLDs for people who register in the dot XXX.

To my knowledge, I don't think that there are many applications for new TLDs that are supposed to have a reverberating impact on all the others.

So the question that has to be taken into account -- not the only one -- is whether a labeling scheme for adult content is interesting, not interesting, whether this would help make it possible.

I heard and I understand that even the Free Speech Coalition in other environments and with other structures have been part of labeling schemes. So I just want to stress the technical link and the impact on other TLDs.

And the last point is, we've been talking about sponsoring communities. And it is one aspects. And I think the board and the staff has been provided apparently with a lot of information that it isn't in a position to evaluate.

I think when we're dealing with TLDs that have strong public policy dimensions, the question that has been asked -- and particularly by Susan in a blunt way -- about the global community, is not so much whether it is in favor of adult content, or in a position. The key question is that the communities that are concerned are the sponsoring communities and the other stakeholders, which are the users of the Internet in general.

And in that respect, the question is exactly about the intended benefits or not of this, but on a very specific point, I don't think any -- enough attention has been put to the IFFOR structure, because this is the structure that is supposed to be handling the bulk of the day-to-day work. And in that respect, if this is about -- this is not just about a sponsored community, but if it is about involving all the stakeholders, as a matter of fact, the IFFOR structure is supposed to be, if I understand well, a sort of multistakeholder governance structure for this type of content.

And if that is the case, then the point that has been raised by comments of whether this brings ICANN into the day-to-day management of content or not will very much depend on how the IFFOR structure will be set up, which I don't really know in detail.

But the important point is, that's my final element, what Bret Fausett is saying, irrespective of whether you think it's a good proposal or not, is, I believe -- and, again, this is a personal feeling -- it is a regulatory hook. It's a danger for some. It's a benefit for others. But as it's a labeling scheme or it's intended to be as such, it should be analyzed as such as well by the board.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you, Bertrand.

Mike, you have the last word. But will you please keep it as brief as you can.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE: Not a problem.

[ Laughter ]

>>VINT CERF: I'll take that as a threat. But go ahead, anyway.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE: My name is Mike Palage, and I make these comments in a personal capacity.

As I articulated in an article, "Please keep the core neutral," that I coauthored with Avri Doria, regardless of what final action this board takes, it is essential for ICANN to communicate and educate all stakeholders, including governments, about distinction between technical management, i.e., adding a row to a table, versus legitimate content regulation by sovereign governments at the edge of the network.

As many people know, I previously worked on ICM's original application in the 2000 proof of concept round. Wow. However, I ceased my relationship with ICM shortly after my election to the ICANN board. Consistent with my actions during my board tenure to abstain on any matter involving ICM based upon this prior involvement, I will abstain today from rendering opinion on whether the board should vote in favor or opposition to the contract.

What I will focus on, however, is process and how the credibility of this organization hinges on the board getting it right.

Therefore, notwithstanding the chairman's statement during the GAC/board open session about a final up-or-down vote taking place tomorrow, I would urge the board to make an informed decision based upon fact, not a mere decision because it is expedient to do so because you wish to avoid the risk of being labeled a content regulator.

As many of the board knows, I expressed my significant reservation about the integrity of the ICANN sTLD RFP process back in 2004 when the ICANN staff notified the board that the sponsorship evaluation committee would be disbanded and that the board would be required to make decisions originally tasked to these experts.

Back in 2004, I called for a panel of experts from within each of the proposed sponsored communities to make a determination regarding the applicant's compliance with the original criteria.

That proposal was rejected, and the board started to make one-off determinations on the applicants' compliance with the RFP criteria.

The volume of the material received from all sides in this matter should give you reason to pause, because I submit to you that you only have two sides of the story, his side, and her side. And what I think you need to preserve the integrity of this institution is the truth.

While I have the highest regard for my former colleagues of the board, I would submit to you that none of you are experts regarding the online adult content industry.

Unless there's something you didn't share with me during my three years on the board.

[ Laughter ]

>>STEVE GOLDSTEIN: Hey, there's a new guy on the board, you know!

[ Laughter ]

>>MICHAEL PALAGE: Paul, we were in Marina Del Rey a couple weeks ago where we were talking about the new TLD process. And for those board members who sat in on the new TLD process, one of the common themes we talked about is the need to diffuse the board from issues and the need to delegate to experts. That's what I'm calling for here.

Please, find the truth, something to rely upon. The integrity of this organization depends upon it.

Thank you.

>>VINT CERF: Thank you, Michael.

[ Applause ]

>>VINT CERF: Well, --

[ Applause ]

>>VINT CERF: Sometimes finding the truth can be quite a difficult task, especially in this particular matter, where many, many pieces of information are hidden in one way or another.

We come to an end to this session about 15 minutes late.

We now have a very rapid-fire opportunity to authorize RALOs, so I'd like to ask the people who are preparing to do that to assemble the table, place it in the middle, and get going on that. We'll try to get this done in rapid order.

The board should stay, if you can, because we're witnesses to all of these signings.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope some of you will stay to witness these events.

>>STEVE CONTE: We're about to begin this. Can we have some quiet, please.

[ Public Forum II concluded. ]