ICANN Public Forum
 Part 2
 28 June 2007
 ICANN Meeting
 San Juan, Puerto Rico
 
 
 >>VINT CERF:  Ladies and gentlemen, we are not quite prepared to start.  We have some technical problems with the projectors, and until we can get them working properly, we won't have text on the screens nor the presentation material.  So if you'll bear with us, we'll get started as soon as possible.
  (Pause)
 
 >>VINT CERF:  Good morning again, ladies and gentlemen.
 Considering it's now 15 minutes past our start time, I'm going to begin this meeting, even though we won't have the visible transcript.
 I'll ask the scribes to continue capturing the transcript, please.  And it will be, of course, available later on for examination.
 And as soon as we get the projectors going, we'll be back to our normal mode of operation.
 The public forum format is different now than it has been in the past.  In particular, the materials which normally would be presented here on the spot instead have been posted onto the ICANN Web site.  But because the committee meetings in particular in some cases have taken place very near in time to this meeting, some of the material was only posted yesterday.  The likelihood that everyone in the room has had a chance to read those minutes is probably small.
 Because we're late and because we didn't build into the schedule time to make a detailed presentation of those committee minutes, what I am going to ask each committee member to do is to very briefly tell us if there is anything notable that they think the ICANN community should notice about those posted materials.
 Just a highlight to make sure that there might be something of special interest.  And we'll certainly take questions from the floor in any case.
 But that's probably as much as we can manage to do in the short time that we have available.
 So I'm going to ask Vanda Scartezini first, is there anything in the audit committee report that we should draw attention to?
 >>VANDA SCARTEZINI:  Good morning.  Thank you.  I believe that one important point was the approval for the board changing the banking administration, the banking account, to give the financial control more facilities for investments, more -- reducing the cost of transferring currency -- difference of currency around the world.  So I guess that was one point that was very important.
 The second point is the review of travel expense, because travel is a very important issue in our finances.
 So we discussed and it's already running a new agreement with the ICANN company to deal with all the travel and facilitate the travel for staff and board and fellowship groups and so on.
 The rest of the work was, you know, formal audit stuff.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Vanda.
 Roberto, is there anything in the Board Governance Committee that you want to draw attention to briefly, please?
 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  Yes.
 Besides the fact that it is always useful to have a look at the summary of all the activities that the Board Governance Committee has in its hands right now and that I don't want to summarize, because you have them listed in bullet points, I think that the most important issue related to the Board Governance Committee is the GNSO improvement working group.
 The report contains a tentative schedule for the further activities of this working group, up to the approval by the board of the changes.  And I think that that is something that you want to have a look.  And I welcome comments on that, as -- of course, as well as activities on the GNSO working group as a whole.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thanks very much, Roberto.
 Demi Getschko, could I ask you to just alert anyone -- those of us here in the room and others watching to anything significant in the conflict of interest committee report.
 >>DEMI GETSCHKO:  Thank you, Vint.
 We met yesterday with a full quorum, and we examined the issues.  But I think it was --
 >> Microphone.
 >> Demi, can't hear you.
 >> Speak into it closely.
 >>DEMI GETSCHKO:  All right.  Now it's better?
 >> Yes.
 >>DEMI GETSCHKO:  Then we met yesterday with full quorum on the set of issues.
 And I think that this routine, nothing unusual.  But, anyway, the results of these five issues we examined are already on the Web page of ICANN.  You can consult if you want.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Demi.
 Raimundo Beca, could you say if there is anything of significance in the finance committee report that you'd like to draw attention to.
 >>RAIMUNDO BECA:  Thanks, Vint.  I think that the facts are there in the report.  There's really not too much to add.  But perhaps only something about the way which we are working with the high level of communication between the staff, which is working in the operating plan and the budget, and the finance committee.
 And this means that the -- well, it was always my feeling before, even having been a member of the finance committee, that we are not -- there was not always such a level of communication between what the staff was doing in the budget and what the finance committee was debating and the board was informed.  And this time, this happened in a very different way.  And it will show that the scope of the operating plan was discussed by the finance committee and was proposed and recommended to the board to approve them, and then we have, on April, the approval of the scope of the operating plan.  And then the numbering of both of them was made, with an approval by the board.
 Then the draft of the budget, which is an obligation of the -- of our bylaws, the draft of the budget was discussed by the finance committee.  So what was given to the public was not only construction by the staff, but it was something discussed by the finance committee.
 That's all.  Thanks.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much Raimundo.  It feels like our processes are becoming more regular and more predictable, and I think that's a good thing.
 Susan, is there anything in the meetings committee proceedings that you'd like to draw attention to?
 >>SUSAN CRAWFORD:  Yes, Vint, thank you very much.  In fact, continuing with that theme of making processes more regular and predictable, the meetings committee has been doing a lot of work on trying to experiment with and change the way we do meetings so that, in advance of a meeting, participants will have a much clearer idea of what the themes are for a particular meeting, what the agendas are, and that we set up the schedule in a more -- increasingly professional and structured way.
 So I want to alert the community that we are actively seeking comments on meeting structure and meeting planning, and that there will be changes and expectations -- changes in expectations for the Los Angeles meeting in October.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Susan.
 One thing I would observe about the meeting schedule this week is, as many of you know, we tried to put reporting information that would be useful for the rest of the week into our schedule as early as we can.
 A thing which is -- which has become more apparent is that people would like more advanced warning about what agenda items are going to be show up at particular face-to-face meetings.  And although this is a planning challenge, I would observe that we do have a seasonal rhythm for some of the topics, particularly the budget topics, strategic planning, and operational planning.  Those we should be able to put into agendas well ahead of time.
 So I'm going to suggest that the board and the staff work towards creating agendas for the face-to-face meetings as far ahead as possible and fill them out as time goes on, rather than trying to put them all together at one time at the last minute.
 This will also be helpful for the board meetings themselves. 
 If we have a planned agenda far enough in advance, not only will the board know what's on the agenda, but the public will as well.  So this kind of advanced planning we think is a useful step for us.
 Thank you, Rita -- thank you Susan.
 >>SUSAN CRAWFORD:  We all look alike.
 >>VINT CERF:  Yes.  I did it again.
 Let me ask Rita if there's anything in the Reconsideration Committee -- I'm sorry, Peter, did you want to say something?
 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  No.  I'm just trying to turn my microphone off, actually.
 >>VINT CERF:  It doesn't work, Peter.  So you'll have to move the microphone away from your heavy breathing or whatever it is you were worried about.
 Rita, is there anything in the Reconsideration Committee proceedings which you want to draw attention to?
 >>RITA RODIN:  Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
 There are no reconsideration requests pending before the committee.  So in keeping with this theme of making processes clearer, the committee had a discussion about how we might continue to improve the Web site and the interface for people to actually file for reconsideration requests and/or for independent review.
 So that continues to be an ongoing discussion within the group.  And, again, we'd welcome any feedback if anyone has any comments or suggestions on how we can make some of those processes more clear.
 Thanks.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Rita.
 Let me now go on to the reports coming from advisory committees and supporting organizations.  These are live presentations, and so the first one is -- that's scheduled, anyway, comes from the Address Supporting Organization, Ray Plzak, if he's in room.
 Yes, I see him waving his hand.
 Is this the part where I'm supposed to talk to the hand?
 [ Laughter ]
 >>RAY PLZAK:  Part of my presentation.
 There we go.
 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  And good morning to members of the board and liaisons.
 This is our report of activities since the last meeting, which was in Lisbon, about -- actually, it's almost three months to the day since I last addressed you.
 Going to give you a brief update on status of the Internet number resources, and then have a discussion about IPv4 depletion, IPv6 migration.  This is a follow-on to our last presentation to you on this matter.
 Then we will have a report from chair of address council, Sebastian Bellagamba.
 So I am doing a rather -- I have abbreviated this report to just show you some salient features.
 The status of the IPv4 address space by /8s is as indicated here.  However, slide that you should pay attention to, and I will come back to later, is this one, that approximately 19% of IANA pool is what is remaining as of the end of March.
 Regarding the allocations of IPv4 to LIRs/ISPs by the RIRs since January 1999, you can see that depiction on this chart.  AS numbers, the distribution is as shown here.  With regard to IPv6, this is the distribution from the IANA to the RIRs.  You will note that four of the five have asterisks by their entry.  That indicates that the previously to this adopted policy, that the IANA had issued blocks of addresses at /23s.  And they are contained within those /12s.  
 The distribution amongst -- by the RIRs is as shown.  For those that wish to do more with these statistics, the RIRs update their allocation statistics every day, and so by going to these Web sites, you can find information and actually download the statistics to do whatever machinations with them that you desire.
 So now let's move to the topic that is becoming rapidly, if it's not already, the topic de jure, which is IPv4 depletion and migration to IPv6.
 It's important to note that the real requirement here is that users need access to services and that this access is provided by a healthy Internet.
 It is also a requirement that the healthy Internet needs contiguous address space.  Contiguous address space is needed so that new networks can be built out, and that existing networks can add new subscribers, new customers.
 So the current source of contiguous address space really is IPv4.  And the supply, as I have shown previously, is diminishing.
 If you look at this chart, this is the same chart that I showed you last March.  This shows you a forecast.
 Now, there are some people that said, well, we could extend the life of IPv4 by recovering address space.
 Well, I invite you -- this is something you can do at home, is to look at that red line, and anywhere along that red line add the number 10 or 20, and you will determine by keeping the same slope of that line that it does not move that much further out to the right.
 So the effort required to recover this address space, at the same time, would actually produce -- you would use more time recovering than you would extend the life of IPv4.
 So while recovery is something that can go on and it can be useful, it should not be seen as the solution to the problem.
 So these dates are still relatively firm.
 I will point out that someone says, well, gee, three years ago you were saying it was 2015, 2020.  Well, at that time, the consumption rate was slower than it is now.
 That's not to say that something could slow the consumption rate down now and extend this life out.  But the point out is that the end is in site and we need to do something about it.
 So, what's the solution?
 The obvious one is get a new source of contiguous address space.  And the answer is that supply is IPv6.  The RIRs have been allocating it since 1999, and it is available.
 But the demand for IPv4 continues.  And the migration, if you will, to IPv6 is either no to slow.  It is not moving at a pace that would be more comfortable to alleviate the situation we're talking about.
 The fact is that today there are organizations attempt to go reach e-mail and Web servers via IPv6.  The fact is that at some point in the future there will be organizations that will have no choice but to reach mail and Web servers via IPv6.
 And this will happen when the service providers that these customers go to only have IPv6 because that is all that the ISP was able to get from the RIRs because the RIRs are no longer capable of handing out contiguous address space.
 So, consequences.
 Well, for those IPv6-only people, they no longer have access, whether it's the whole network or specific users.
 But more importantly is their fragmentation of the routing table.  If you want to break the Internet, this is the way to do it.
 The use of NAT would increase several ways.  One is from a recovery activity, by recovering small pieces of address space and then putting them someplace else outside of their block of address, it would make a difference.
 A conceivable scenario is that an ISP has handed out perhaps four /24s class C address space to classfully minded people to a customer, and now say I cannot allow you to have all that address space.  I am taking back two of them.
 This forces that customer who now uses the NAT to deal with his servers, a network address translation device.  This, in turn, causes one entry in the routing table to become three, possibly a total of three depending upon where the space was taken from.  This increases the routing table.
 This also forces everyone who is using that routing table, which is the entire Internet, per se, to increase the size of the table.
 The other way that you could produce the use of NATs is the growth of another market activity system.  In this system, someone would go to a particular person that says, "I have some IPv4 address space, and I am not using it anymore.  Here, I will sell it to you, I will give it to you, I will transfer it to you," whatever.
 That block of space is now retrieved from a larger block, and the same thing happens again.  In order for it to be visible on the Internet, it has to be advertised as a more precise entry.
 Again, you are growing a routing table.
 So I cannot emphasize enough, if you want to break the Internet, that is the way to do it.
 So what to do?
 Well, we need to raise awareness beyond the Internet.
 We need to reach out to the general community.
 We need to facilitate the deployment of IPv6.  And we, as responsible persons on the Internet need to implement IPv6-accessible services.  Our mail and Web servers need to be reachable by via IPv6, as an example to the rest of the community.
 So what this means is that if I have a large network and I don't have to convert that entire network to IPv6, that is not necessary.  What I have to do is make sure that my services are available via IPv4 and IPv6.
 I need to stand up an IPv6 capable mail server.  I need to stand up an IPv6 capable Web server.
 I don't have to convert my entire network for people to get to my services.
 And that is what is important.
 So the cost of doing this is actually less than people would think.  But they have to get into the mode of operation.
 It would be very nice to see, for example, if you see a television advertisement for a company like Amazon or eBay or somebody that says, oh, by the way, you IPv6 guys can get to us too.
 That is the level of thought that has to be pervaded throughout the community, beyond the Internet community.
 So what have the RIRs been doing about this since we last talked?  Well, two of us have issued direct advisories about the fact that at a point in the future, we will not be capable of handing out, allocating and assigning, contiguous blocks of address space.  The LACNIC board in its advisory, in fact, has even put a date to it.  The ARIN board has not.  The other RIR boards are considering similar actions and we are also considering a collaborative action to be issued by the NRO.
 We have upped the production of educational material.  We have upped our outreach activities.
 For example, you can go to the ARIN site or the LACNIC site.  You see a much more detailed IPv6 resource page.  We intend to expand those.
 We will be expanding our awareness activities.
 For example, this morning -- excuse me, yesterday morning, the chairman of the ARIN board spoke to the Burton group.  That is a collection of a large number of businesses.
 The people at this meeting don't know things about the Internet at all he can September that they get bothered by Spam in their e-mail and somebody in their organization is operating a Web site.  But those are the people that need to understand that their services need to become available to IPv6.
 We are facilitating the deployment of IPv6.  We are doing this through some policy actions.  There have been a lot of policy discussions going on, and this is where the policy discussion needs to take place.  It needs to take place in the RIR communities, because these are the persons that are responsible for the management of the distribution system.  And so the policies that regard how the distribution system is managed should be dealt with by the people who have traditionally done it and done it very well.
 We are also doing it through administrative actions, we are considering various types of administrative actions.  What those things will eventually be, I don't know.
 But, for example, when someone comes to ARIN now and asks for a large block of IPv4 space, the first thing they are going to be told by us is, by the way, if you are planning on growing, when you come back to us next time we are only going to be able to give you IPv6.  Do you have plans for IPv6?  If not, you better start because I am not going to give you any more IPv4 space the next time you come back.
 That's an administrative action.
 We will probably be a little bit more tough in some of questions we ask.  Okay.  At some point in time, some people might find it too painful to ask for IPv4 space, but find it much easier to ask for IPv6 space.  But those are all administrative things.  Those are things we're doing.
 So we have all implemented IPv6 accessible services.  Our Web and mail servers are all available via IPv6, with the exception of AfriNIC who is in the process of doing it now.
 So what should you the ICANN board do?  You need to reach out to the community as well.  You, from your position, should issue an advisory about the similar manner that the RIRs have done.  You should use your resources.  You have a significant portion of your budget dedicated to education and outreach, and you should use that to support IPv6 deployment activities.
 And lastly, you need to make sure that not only the ICANN Web site but all the subsidiary Web sites and mail servers of ICANN are IPv6 reachable.
 So I will now turn this over to Sebastian Bellagamba for a report of the policy activity.
 >>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA:  Thank you, Ray.  Good morning.
 I will go through just three slides in order to keep you up-to-date on the current policy discussions in the RIRs.
 We, since we met in Lisbon, some different policies have been discussed, implemented, or abandoned, or doesn't reach consensus in different regions.
 You have here a slide on IPv4 policy discussions.  In the African region, we have the -- we talk about the IPv4 (inaudible) policy at our last meeting in Lisbon.  It doesn't have reach consensus in the African region.  It is being discussed in the APNIC now.  It has been abandoned in the ARIN region.  And so the LACNIC region, and hasn't reached consensus in the RIPE region, too.
 IPv6, we are trying to make our policies more perfect and good in order to achieve the transition to IPv6.  You have here a summary of what's going on in the v6 arena.  And we have, as other policies, we have basically the most important news since we met last March was the introduction in the LACNIC region of two proposals for global policies.  One is regarding v4, IPv4.  You have all the information in the Web sites.  And the second one is regarding the distribution of AS numbers.  Both policies, and both proposals for global policies have been approved in the LACNIC region.
 In the rest of the regions, several other discussions are being held.
 This is a summary of our next and coming public policy meetings.
 The next one is the APNIC region in New Delhi, India and you have the dates for the rest of the meetings there.
 If you like to -- as you know, the -- our policy development process is open and transparent.  We have archives for every single e-mail that is sent to every single mail list.  You might find it in this URL, every information you need.  Otherwise, you may refer to the NRO Web site where all these URLs are there.
 Thank you very much.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much.
 >>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA:  We go back for a minute to Ray for a closing.
 >>VINT CERF:  Ray, I see you are back on stage.  I hope this is quick.
 >>RAY PLZAK:  Very, very short, very closing thought.  And this is probably preaching to the choir.
 We are all in this together.  The Address Supporting Organization is supposed to provide support to the global community, for the management of the IP address space, and also to provide advice to the ICANN board.
 We stand ready to do that.  We have done that.  And we are also perfectly willing and capable and would love to spend some more detailed time working with ICANN staff in formulating educational outreach materials and advisories.
 And with that, I would add one last comment that this is like Y2K in one regard.  It's not the doom and gloom of Y2K.  But when everybody did Y2K, they had two things in mind that they were doing.  One was make sure that they were able and ready to do the Y2K jump.  And the second thing was to make sure that the people that they could communicate with understood what was important and that they were compliant as they went forward.
 And so we need to have a similar attitude as we move forward.
 So with that I say thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Ray.
 I have one immediate thought that I would like to suggest.  This is off the top of my head.
 I have been looking for some way to characterize IPv6 implementation to characterize it with the same degree of urgency as the Y2K emerged.
 There is one.  If everyone has IPv6 capability as well as IPv4 capability before we run out of IPv4 allocations, if everyone achieves that, then having dual-mode operation on the server side and dual-mode operation on the client side means that everyone will be able to communicate.
 And once we get everyone up on IPv6, then we don't have a problem anymore.
 So the deadline is actually to finish IPv6 deployment before IPv4 runs out no order to achieve continued, full interoperability of the Internet and avoiding things like application layer relays and other stuff.
 So we might say, almost arbitrarily, that you will be safe and be part of the global interoperable Internet, if you implement IPv6 by 2011.  You know, by the end of 2011, to pick a date.
 I don't know whether that will work, but I only suggest it because if the key is interoperability across the Internet, that's the only way to achieve it as we move into this v6 realm.
 >>RAY PLZAK:  One quick comment, and that really is your services must be available.
 Now, your entire network that may be behind it doesn't necessarily have to be converted, but your services must be available.
 >>VINT CERF:  Except that what you leave out in that formulation is peer-to-peer interaction and things like that.  So I think it's easier for everybody to understand that get your v6 running before we run out of v4, end of story.
 Anyway, we can discuss that.
 >>RAY PLZAK:  Okay gentleman thanks very much, Ray.
 We will come back to questions later.
 All right.  Well, trying to move ahead as quickly as we can, the next report comes from the ccNSO, the country code name supporting organization.  I'll call on Chris Disspain to give that report.
 >>CHRIS DISSPAIN:  Good morning, everybody.  Thank you, Vint, I'll be brief.
 Our recent meetings report is currently still being finalized.  We've had two very full days and haven't yet finished it, but we will and will send it in.
 The highlights:  The joint GAC/ ccNSO IDN ccTLD questions paper is being signed off, and Janis Karklins, chair of the Governmental Advisory Committee, will formally send the document to the board later on this morning.
 The ccNSO has received a position paper from the APTLD, the Asia-Pacific regional organization, endorsed by the European regional organization, and being considered currently by Latin American and African regions, putting forward a proposal for an interim release, if you like, of IDN ccTLDs.  And I suspect that the ccNSO will be getting that to you as a ccNSO position in the not-too-distant future.
 We will also very shortly be sending you, I believe, a report on the regions, there being a review of regions due.  And we have been doing some work on that.  And we will have a report to you shortly.
 Couple of other things.
 Meetings work.  These meetings work.  Especially if you put effort into enrolling people and bringing them along.
 The Caribbean nations had a policy discussion day on Saturday, and thanks to the efforts of ICANN staff, there were a significant number of Caribbean nations at that policy meeting.  And it was very, very successful.
 They stuck around and came to ccNSO meetings and so on.
 As a result of that, two membership applications to join the ccNSO were received from the Caribbean region.
 And as a result of just general people being here at the meetings, another two applications have been received.
 So we have had four membership applications at this meeting.  Which I think demonstrates that being -- having the meetings and actually being here works.
 The final thing I wanted to say was that I'm not sure how many people who aren't in the ccNSO know that we are now up to our fourth, I think, tech day.  We run a tech day at every ICANN meeting.  It's happening right now.  And it's, I think, our fourth one.  If not, it's maybe the third.  And it is extraordinarily successful.  More and more people attend every time.  And it's chaired -- it's run by Eberhard Lisse, whom most of you all know, and I just want to say if you are interested in the techie stuff at all, it's not just for CCs.  You can come along and find out what we are doing.
 And that's it.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much for your brevity, Chris, and of course for the hard work of the ccNSO.
 I would like to call on Janis Karklins now to offer the report of the Governmental Advisory Committee.
 >>JANIS KARKLINS:  Thank you, Vint.  I cannot promise that I will be brief.
 [ Laughter ]
 >>JANIS KARKLINS:  I am bound with the text which GAC adopted yesterday.
 I will read it out.
 The GAC met in San Juan during 24 June to 28 June 2007.  33 members and one observer participated in this meeting.  And the GAC expresses warm thanks to the Puerto Rico top-level domain operator for hosting this meeting in San Juan.
 In San Juan, the GAC revisited the joint ccNSO and GAC issue paper, selection of IDN ccTLDs associated with the ISO 3166/1 to other codes at the request of the ICANN board to help clarify the issues related to the use of IDNs in the ccTLD space.
 The GAC also had face-to-face meeting with the ccNSO on the paper.
 The GAC has subsequently submitted the issue paper which will be submitted to the board at this meeting and which is attached to this communique.
 The GAC recognizes that policy, administrative and technical challenges remain in the establishment of IDNs at the top level of domain name system.  The GAC recognizes the work on IDNs is ongoing in a range of other fora.
 The GAC reiterated the effective policy coordination will be necessary to advance the implementation of IDNs, including cooperation among communities with languages that use overlapping character sets.
 Recognizing that a policy development process will be required to consider the questions raised in the issue paper, and understanding that this process may take up to two years, the GAC also acknowledged that it may be necessary to adopt a parallel process to enable a limited introduction of IDNs to begin addressing the need that currently exists in some territories.
 The modalities of parallel process need to be carefully considered.
 The GAC met with GNSO council and discussed the state of play of the work of the WHOIS working group.
 The GAC appreciates interaction on these issues intersessionally and recognizes that provisions of GAC principles have been considered.
 At the same time, the participation by GAC representatives in the working group intersessionally represents a challenge due to different working methods.
 The council provided update on PDP on new gTLDs.  The GAC appreciates the work undertaken to reflect elements of GAC principles on new gTLDs in the last report.
 On ICANN procedure handling WHOIS conflict with the privacy law.  The GAC welcomes the opportunity to respond to the draft ICANN procedure for handling WHOIS conflict with the privacy law.  Since the draft procedure was produced in December 2006, the GAC has prepared the principles regarding gTLD WHOIS services.  These principles provide the framework for dealing with potential conflict.
 We recognize the importance of effective conflict resolution mechanisms for the WHOIS regime, and we expect to see that an integral part of the GNSO proposal for a future ICANN WHOIS regime.
 We also provide formal advice on the conflict procedures based on the GAC WHOIS principles at the meeting in Los Angeles.
 The GAC recommends that the board reviews the draft procedures in light of this substantive contribution.
 In the interim, specific cases should be referred to the relevant national government for advice on the authority of the request of delegation from ICANN gTLD WHOIS policy.
 Mr. Chairman, well attended meeting by three communities -- GAC, SSAC, and ccTLD -- focused on two themes, distributed denial of service attacks and deployment of DNSsec.
 The SSAC briefing on the GAC and -- to the GAC and ccTLD operators offered an opportunity to discuss types of DDOS attacks, including recent attacks on the infrastructure of a national state.
 It was noted that these type of attacks give rise to serious security concerns.
 GAC notes that some developing countries may require additional support and resources in order to improve their ability to resist such attacks.
 It was also noted that further reflection on possible policy responses should be continued.
 The effective cooperation between all actors in the event of such attacks is important.
 The GAC welcomes the SSAC technical presentation on DNSsec and wishes to discuss the topic in more depth, probably at the next meeting.
 On IPv6 deployment, the GAC members shared national experiences on the deployment of IPv6.  These exchanges provided valuable information on how government could engage in national activities in the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
 The NRO made the presentation on the depletion of IPv4 addresses and emphasized the need for governments to set an example by implementing IPv6 in the electronic delivery of their services, such as e-mails and Web sites.
 The GAC also took note of the NROs recommendation for action by ICANN to support IPv6 deployment.
 The GAC believes that the approaching exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and the smooth transition to IPv6 is a matter of increasing public policy importance and intends to closely follow the developments in this area in the future meetings.
 On ICANN board and GAC cooperation, the GAC highly values the work of the ICANN board/GAC joint working group which strengthened cooperation with the board.  The GAC expresses its sincere appreciation to Alejandro Pisanty, co-chair of the group, for his tireless efforts and leadership.
 The GAC considers that the working group has attained its initial objectives and, therefore, proposed in conjunction with the board to define the terms of reference for the work ahead.
 To that end, the chair and vice chairs of the GAC will carry out this work on GAC's behalf.
 The GAC considered that the Rio de Janeiro Internet governance forum in November an important opportunity to engage in discussions related to WSIS follow-up and Internet governance and to reach out and disseminate information about ICANN and its Supporting Organizations and advisory committees.
 The GAC stands ready to provide all necessary input to that end.
 The GAC had extensive discussions on transparency and accountability principles with members of the board and senior ICANN staff, taking into account the importance governments attach to these issues.  Further GAC input to the draft management operating principles will be provided at the Los Angeles meeting.
 On fellowship program, Mr. Chairman, the GAC strongly endorses the fellowship program and applauds its implementation.
 It offers assistance in disseminating the information about the program to government representatives through available channels of communication.
 The GAC proposes to implement the scheme that will use the experience within GAC to assist the development of those on a fellowship program.
 Given the potential benefit of a long-term membership for active participation, the GAC considers that the program should seek to promote continuity of attendance of fellow members.
 On retiring country code ccTLDs, the GAC held discussions on ICANN staff paper dated 5th December 2006 on retiring country codes, and recognized that the retirement of ccTLDs will inevitably raise significant public policy issues.  For this reason, the GAC will seek to work closely with ICANN in developing any policy proposals concerning procedures for retiring ccTLDs.
 On other issues, Mr. Chairman -- and that brings me very close to the end of this report -- the GAC would like to acknowledge the contribution of Pankaj Agrawala over the past two years following his announcement that he will no longer be serving as a GAC representative of India.  Pankaj served as a vice chairman of the GAC, chair of GAC IDN working group, and a member of the president's advisory committee for IDNs, and has made a significant contribution to the GAC's work on IDNs.
 Mr. Bill Graham from Canada was elected to serve as interim vice chair of the GAC.
 And to conclude, the GAC warmly thanks all those among the ICANN community who have contributed to the dialogue with the GAC in San Juan.  And the next GAC meeting will take place during the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles from 27th October to 2nd of November.
 That brings me to the end of this report, Mr. Chairman.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Janis.
 That looks like it was a very busy meeting.
 >>JANIS KARKLINS:  Yes, indeed.
 >>VINT CERF:  A lot got done.
 I also would like to observe that the resilience of this organization is demonstrated by the fact that people come and go, but ICANN persists.  I think that's a generally good thing.
 [ Laughter ]
 >>VINT CERF:  The next topic is the report from the GNSO.  And that will be offered by its new chair, Avri Doria.
 >>AVRI DORIA:  Good morning.
 This is the GNSO Council status for the San Juan meeting.
 Basically, we -- I'm going go through basically a lot of the efforts that we've got going on.  And I've put them in order of initiation, or when the GNSO began working on them, just so that we can keep track of that.
 And, of course, the grandparent of them all is WHOIS.  And it will be first.
 Then I'll go through new gTLDs, contract conditions, reserved names, domain tasting, IGO resolution, and some other status.  
 On WHOIS, there's a WHOIS working group that's currently working on details of the OPoC proposal that was contained in the task force report, basically, reviewing the roles, responsibilities, and requirements of OPoC, issues related to noncompliance, determining which third parties have access to the full data, determining if data display is different for different registrants, dealing with the difference between legal persons and natural persons.  The working group is making progress.  Consensus is being reached on many of the issues.  Many of the issues have a ways to go.
 And the final report is due 27th of July.
 On new gTLD PDP.  The PDP is nearing completion.  Related working groups have completed their work.  That's the IDN working group, the reserved names working group, and protecting the rights of others working group.
 I'll talk a little bit more about reserved names in another slide.
 The group has discussed the GAC principles and reported to the GAC on our progress in terms of incorporating their concerns.
 The staff has begun testing the recommendations against implementation, which has actually been very useful in terms of making us look at the policy recommendations in terms of the reality of what an implementation may or may not look like, sort of like a running code obligation.
 And the committee and staff are working together to put it -- or working to put it all together.
 In terms of the PDP recommendations themselves, in the updated draft of 16 June, there are basically six general principles, which have all been stable.  There are 19 recommendations, 16 of which have been stable.  Three are still very much in discussion.
 And there were 15 implementation guidelines that are all stable.
 We will continue to go through.  There's no guarantee that that which is stable remains stable, but the expectation is the things that are stable will remain that way.
 At least there's the hope.
 Our goal, our intent is for the committee to complete the consensus work in August, to get as far as we can in a consensus process, and where we can't reach consensus, to record the differences and levels of support.
 The council will vote in early September on the PDP, on the recommendations themselves.  And then we'll go into public comment, and a copy of the report will be forwarded to the GAC, in September, with the intention of having it to the board in October, in time for L.A. consideration.
 This was all basically calculated with the help of the staff, using all the bylaws and the board requirements for how much time it takes to move something.  And there's essentially a -- approximately, a 60-day gap between the time when we can finish something and you can start talking about it.
 So this is going to require a lot of effort to reach consensus on sort of the balance.  And the open issues were basically dealing with the balance between protecting rights of others, freedom of expression, norms of public order and morality and disputes and objection mechanisms, all very simple things to combine and come to some sort of rational conclusion on.
 And then, basically, the other effort is to rationalize the policy and implementation design and make sure that the two of them are not discordant.
 On contractual conditions, the final report was finished on 20 April.  It has been discussed by the GNSO Council.  That was done yesterday.  There is a pending report from staff on implementation impact for each of the majority-supported recommendations, which is due shortly.  And at the next GNSO meeting, we will vote on those recommendations.  And at that point, it will be forwarded on with the 60-day cycle to the board, so you will also have that before L.A.
 On reserved names, we had a Reserved Name Working Group.  And in terms of the results of the Reserved Name Working Group, there were basically considerations to do with new gTLDs, but there are also considerations to do with existing gTLDs.  There sort of is a general feeling that we should have sort of the same reserved name conditions for both new and existing.  So there's work that needs to be done in both of these areas.
 Some of the issues include the relationship between IDN gTLDs and IDN ccTLDs.  This is obviously only in the new gTLDs category.  Allocation methods for single letters at the second level, not at single level.
 At the second level, there's basically, within the reserved working group, a decision that those could be opened for use, but there were questions on whether the first come, first served allocation method was the right one on such a relatively precious resource, and therefore there still needs to be a discussion of what is the proper way to deal with those, if, indeed, they are -- there is an agreement to open them.
 And then there was a status of further work being done on the ICANN and IANA name category.  There's a long list of names in that category, and the question that the Reserved Name Working Group came up and asked staff is, are all of these still necessary?  Do all of these still need to be reserved?  And that's a question which they are working on and will come back to the GNSO with an answer. 
 The reserved name group itself is closed, but the council has the issues.
 There was an issues report on domain tasting which was requested by the ALAC and asked for by the GNSO in response to that request.
 We received that on 14 June.  It was discussed.  There was a workshop.  And also it was discussed in an open forum meeting.
 The council has decided to create a small ad hoc group of GNSO representatives to direct and consider further research on domain tasting, to work with the staff to gather further information and data about domain tasting issue, and make further recommendations on effectively scoping a PDP, to consider the further research and term of reference, receiving a status report on non-PDP mechanisms regarding domain tasting, and to consider whether to launch a policy development process on domain tasting at the September GNSO Council meeting.
 So, basically, we needed more information before actually going into the PDP process.
 IGO dispute handling.  There was also an issues report requested by the GNSO Council on this.  The report was received on 14 June.  The GNSO decided to accept the staff recommendation that a PDP not be initiated at this time.  Staff was requested to do further study on creation of a dispute resolution process for IGOs.  And the council will reconsider initiating a PDP in three months, after that study is completed.
 Yes.
 >>VINT CERF:  I'm sorry to interrupt, Avri.  Would you tell everyone what IGO stands for, please.
 >>AVRI DORIA:  I apologize -- in fact, when I wrote it there, I said, I have to remember to say the words.  For international intergovernmental organizations.  Thank you for reminding me.
 So the GNSO will reconsider initiating a PDP in three months after that study is complete.
 Other status.
 We elected Chuck Gomes council vice chair.  It's a new role in the council.  If you notice, the last item, we passed a resolution thanking Bruce Tonkin for his service.  And it was in pretty much response to Bruce's leaving that we looked around and said, my word, we really do need both a chair and a vice chair to do what Bruce had been doing.
 So we instituted that.  And after having been in the role of chair for less than a month, I'm really grateful that we have elected a vice chair.
 We have two replacement councillors.  In the intellectual property interest constituency, Cyril Chua replaces Kiyoshi Tsuru; and in the registrar constituency, Adrian Kinderis replaces Bruce Tonkin.
 And as I said, we passed a resolution thanking Bruce for his service and contributions.
 That's it.  Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Avri.  Again, a great deal of work going on in the GNSO.
 The next report comes from the root server system advisory committee.  And that's presented by Suzanne Woolf.
 And Suzanne, do you want to offer this from your chair rather than from the lectern?
 >>SUZANNE WOOLF:  Yes.  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I will be very brief.
 Just get the technology hooked up.
 Just a little bit of synchronization effort there.
 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.  I'm here to provide a very brief update on activities of the root server system advisory committee.
 This will be very short, because the committee has not met since the last ICANN meeting.  But we have some progress on some small items of news and future work to discuss.
 As most of the people in the room know, the RSSAC is one of the original ICANN committees.  It includes root server -- root name server operators, the RIRs, and other interested parties, serves as a forum for interaction with those communities and ICANN.
 With respect to issues regarding the operation of the root name server system.
 Recent work, just to update a few items, we've finalized a report with SSAC on IPv6 addresses for the root name servers so that -- so we can enable queries to them over IPv6 transport in the public Internet.  I can't really add to Ray's really powerful call to action in the RIR update a few minutes ago except to say that this is a very important topic, and -- thanks -- and we are very pleased that we think we are making our appropriate progress on this issue.
 The piece of enabling and enabling the growth of IPv6 in the public Internet, the piece that relates directly to the root servers and the root zone is very small, but it's critically important.  And we're happy that's something we can make progress on going forward.
 DNSsec also seems ready in the operational infrastructure.  We've requested a technical update from IANA on next steps, making sure we're all clear on what we need from each other to keep that moving as well.
 We've similarly played a part -- done -- we have done consulting -- my apologize -- on IDN.  I'd like to say a few more words on that.
 There's been a great deal of discussion on IDN at this meeting, so I'd like to just review the RSSAC perspective on it.
 First, it's important to note that the deployment of IDN is an extremely large and complex undertaking, as so many of the working groups and advisory committees and so on have been discussing this morning.
 The DNS part is only one piece, and the role specific to the root servers is even smaller.
 However, recognizing the importance of these pieces, I'd like to summarize the statement that came out of RSSAC as originally drafted in Prague and submitted to ICANN in the last few weeks.
 As a technical matter, there is no problem with the proposed test that relies on standard NS records in the root zone.  We'd like to be kept informed on plans as they go forward, and expectations as they progress, which staff and other organizations we've discussed this week have been working very hard at.  And I'd like to express appreciation for that, because coordination is so very critically important on these matters.
 Outside of our narrow scope regarding the root specifically, RSSAC is comprised of significant expertise in DNS.  As operators, implementers, and protocol writers, we're happy to consult on technical aspects of IDN deployment in the DNS.
 At our next meeting, likely agenda items include ongoing work on formalizing and documenting committee processes and certain operational best practices.  ICANN has also notified us that RSSAC is on the independent review schedule.  But we're very early in that process yet and look forward to further discussion on it.
 And just for a very quick last word, we will be meeting next at IETF, July 22nd, in Chicago.  We expect to be discussing IDN, as per conversation with ICANN; operational matters, as usual.  And I'll provide the usually URLs for further information to interested parties.
 And thank you for your time.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Suzanne.
 I'm assuming that all of the presentation materials that have been shown this morning will eventually show up on the Web site, ICANN Web site, so that people will be able to get access to references.
 I hope "eventually" is very brief.
 Let's go on now to the security and stability advisory committee meeting and Steve Crocker.
 >>STEVE CROCKER:  Okay.  Thank you.
 I need to project here a little bit.
 Is there a --
 Thank you.
 Everything went dark here.  I had it on the screen and everything was fine.
 Wonderful.  Well, it'll come back, I hope.
 We had a very busy week.  We had an internal meeting with presentations from Richard Cox of Spamhaus, on fast flux.  And that was educational to us.
 And we also had Pat Cain from the Antiphishing Working Group.  The Antiphishing Working Group made presentations at a number of different constituencies, and, among others, visited the SSAC.  And we heard their activities and some of the -- their plans with respect to DNS.  I wish -- I really do want these slides up here, if I can.
 There.  How annoying.
 Yes?
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  Can I maybe make a suggestion that we change the order of presentation and that you e-mail the slides to somebody else who can use the --
 >>STEVE CROCKER:  Oh, I have -- I can do that even faster.  Can you project?
 >>VINT CERF:  Well, while that's going on, I'll take Paul Twomey's suggestion and ask whether we could have -- well, actually, it turns out there are no presentations, Paul.  This was the beginning of the public comment period.
 So --
 >> (inaudible).
 >>VINT CERF:  I'm sorry.  The At-Large Advisory Committee was supposed to start.
 So let's -- so, however, do you need --
 >>JACQUELINE MORRIS:  No.
 >>VINT CERF:  You don't have presentation slides?
 In that case, this does work.  Thank you, Paul, thank you, Jacqueline.
 >>JACQUELINE MORRIS:  No.  I just have my notes here so I can see what I'm doing.
 Good morning, everyone.
 Come on.  Am I having trouble now?
 No, I don't need to present.  I just need to -- it to wake up from sleeping.
 Okay.  I remember it.  I can talk until it wakes up.
 The ALAC has done almost all of the -- the interim ALAC has done almost all of the interim ALAC tasks in the past six months.  We've finally finished building all of the regional organizations.  The last one will sign its MOU today.  That is the North American regional organization.
 [ Applause ]
 >>JACQUELINE MORRIS:  They have already elected their two members.  One is Beau Brendler, from the United States; and the other one is Robert Guerra from Canada.  Wendy Seltzer, who will be the last appointed ALAC member remaining on the ALAC at this time, will be leaving us after that MOU as an ALAC member.  I hope she will stay around in ICANN to keep assisting us with her unique way of looking at things.
 We have received our 100th application of ALSs.  We have just under 20 in almost all the regions and 24 in Latin America and the Caribbean so far.
 One of the things that has happened is, since we have finished, hopefully, the form -- since we finished the actual formation of the noninterim, the real ALAC, we can spend -- take a lot of the resources that we have been putting towards that and start finally paying attention in much more detail to the policy processes that go on within ICANN.
 What we've done --  We do need to still continue building the structure and doing outreach and getting more and more ALSs and more people involved.  But it's no longer the only thing that we will be looking at.
 To this end, we've already started.  We've requested the issues report on domain tasting, which was the first one that an advisory committee had asked for.  So there was a lot of work with staff to try and figure out exactly how it needed to get done, and very particularly, we want to thank the other constituencies that worked with us on that, commercial and business users, intellectual property, and gTLD registries, the staff who assisted, and especially Maria Farrell, who was tireless with helping us get the process done and getting the report done, and assisting us with the presentation that we did on Sunday.
 We also last night sent a comment to the 2007/2008 budget along the lines of the non-PDP mechanisms that were suggested in the issues report.
 Other things that we've started doing:  We have started working closely with the NCUC.  And we presented two workshops, one was the gTLD workshop, and the other was the freedom of expression workshop.  On IDNs, ALAC welcomes the new technical and policy developments in IDN.  We support balanced and reasonable fast-tracking approaches on the IDN implementation.  We call for a more effective and formal consultative mechanism with the Internet community in all the IDN processes.  We will also be having a workshop on IDN later today, at 2:00 p.m.
 ALAC has also created internal working groups.  We have one on IDN policy formation.  We are forming one on WHOIS policy, and one on registrant/registrar relations.
 And we'll do more ad hoc working groups as necessary.
 We are currently ready to undergo the ALAC review, which is a little strange on the timing in that we start the review of the interim ALAC just as we declare it dead and start the new, the real ALAC.
 But I'm sure that they will figure out a way to make the results of the review more applicable and hopefully they will assist us with going forward and not just looking back.
 One of the things that we -- we are very new, it hasn't even started yet.  It will be at 12:00.  And we do have to get results quickly.  We have to get all the ALSs involved.  We have two regions here today -- in this meeting, Latin America, which is having a general assembly after six months of formation; and North America.  And they have been coming up to speed on what ICANN is and the issues involved.
 We need to educate all the end users on the issues.  A little difficult sometimes, because they're very technical and we have to translate to layman's terms sometimes.
 We have to work on systems so that we can get timely and quality feedback, and to assist us in making sure that we have a viable two-way dialogue.
 Other things that we've gotten to help us work, in the recent past, we've finally gotten a WIKI work space.  So all our documents, all our meetings, the recordings of our meetings, everything is available there, so everybody can see everything that we're doing while we're doing it.
 We do still have the public mailing list, but we've moved it to another mailing server, so it's not as difficult to access.  And we are also translating into Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese.  So language, at least in those languages, will not be a problem to participate on our mailing list.
 And we are developing a new Web-based membership database to decentralize the ALS application process so that the regional organizations can take more of a role in that, and developing a new at-large Web site.
 And that is it for now.  Thank you very much.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Jacqueline.
 I must say that as I listen to all these reports, my sense is of a really substantial amount of work going on in all of the committees and the supporting organizations.  We're entering a time in the Internet where there is a lot of work to be done, many major changes taking place, with IDNs, IPv6, and the like.  So this is going to be a very important time for the Internet and its users, I think, and for our work associated with it.
 Thank you very much, Jacqueline.
 >>JACQUELINE MORRIS:  Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Steve Crocker, are you now prepared?
 >>STEVE CROCKER:  Yes.  Particularly with the assistance of Roberto here.
 We are all set.  Thank you very much.
 So next slide there.
 So as I said, we had an internal meeting.  The first three bullets there will be slides on.  So let me skip to the last part.
 In addition to the major pieces there, we had some interactions with the ccNSO, with the ALAC, and I'm pleased to report that we now have a liaison from the ALAC, Robert Guerra has joined us.  It's a pleasure to work with Jacqueline on this.  And I'm equally pleased to see the vibrancy and growth of the ALAC.
 Another extremely pleasant and noteworthy event is that we are meeting here in Puerto Rico.  Puerto Rico is one of the few top-level domains that is up and running with DNSsec.  It's a signed zone.  And I think that's quite noteworthy.  It's a modest sized zone of a few thousand as opposed to some of the much larger ones.  But I think that the team here has really distinguished themselves by getting out in front.  So I want to congratulate them, Oscar Moreno, David Saltano, and others.
 I mentioned that we had heard from pat CAIN and Richard Cox from the antiphishing group and Spamhaus.
 Janis has reported about our presentation to the GAC.  It was a pleasure to be invited, and I think it was very helpful to open up the dialogue.
 We had been making presentations to the GAC some years ago, and then we started having our own public forums of our own.  And I hadn't paid close attention, but since the GAC tends to meet in its own sessions for long periods of time, we had somewhat fallen out of interaction with them.  So I think this is a good precedent.
 And as Janis suggested, we'll probably do something similar again in October.  And I'm looking forward to that.
 In our own public presentation, we presented some work on WHOIS.
 One very specific and very narrow question, do the listing of e-mail addresses in WHOIS lead to Spam?  Some people would say, well, but of course.  Why would you even bother thinking twice about that?  But there have been some suggestions that, no, that doesn't generate a source of Spam.
 The short answer is yes, it does.
 We have also an IDN security and stability study as part of the enormous contribution of work going on in IDNs.  That work is still going on.
 Next slide.
 Here is the graph of results, under four circumstances.
 The big bar, foreground on the left is what happens to an e-mail address that is unprotected with no redelegation.
 If you insert some barriers by using a registry that has protection -- for example, requiring a human to read a difficult-to-understand picture and type something in as a way of getting access -- then it reduces greatly the amount of Spam.
 The scale on the left, the vertical axis, is exponential there, not linear.  So each of those bars is a factor of ten.  Over a three-month period for e-mail addresses that were not used for anything else we got about 10,000 messages for an unprotected one versus single digits for ones that were protected through two levels of variation.  Anybody who wants to fine-tune the experimental results and decide how big out same size was and fiddle with that is welcome to rerun the experiment.  But these results are large enough to not be very controversial.
 Next slide.
 We looked at the recent attack in Estonia, and, more broadly, at DDOS attacks.
 Next slide.
 We made a very brief presentation.  This is taken from what we presented to the GAC.  These slides are available.  I won't spend a lot of time on it.  The short story is Estonia was put under attack.  It's a very advanced country with respect to the use of the Internet.  But because it's a small country, it does not have, say, the robustness of, say, the U.S. or other large industrialized countries.
 So they suffered a bit.  Most of the attacks were from the outside, and they were able to stem the attacks by controlling the traffic coming in from the outside that was attacking government sites and others.
 Next slide.
 All these slides are now part of the -- posted for you to see.
 Next slide.
 There was quite excellent communication and cooperation among the technical community and the government ministries and the communications companies, the Internet service providers and others.  And some outside experts came rapidly and helped.  And so the result was pretty good.
 That wouldn't necessarily be the case in all circumstances, but it worked out okay for Estonia.
 Next slide.
 Here is our traditional slide of who the members are.  And then on the next slide, a number of others, as invited guests or liaisons or points of contact from other groups.  I'd be happy to take questions but I want to keep this fairly short.
 >>VINT CERF:  Well, thank you very much, Steve.  It turns out that it is, in fact, question time because we've gone through all of the reports that were scheduled.  And impressively, we're only about a few minutes -- actually, we're a little bit ahead of time.
 I notice that I've stolen the microphone away from the floor here.  So I'll return it so that people can raise questions.
 You've got another one.
 Okay.
 Just as a reminder, the subject matter during this part of our discussion is related to the reports that have been given or the reports that are on the Web site.
 >> Hello my name --
 >>VINT CERF:  You need to speak up.
 >>MAREDUDD AP GWYNDAF:  My name is Maredudd ap Gwyndaf.  I am here for the dot cym top-level domain for the Welsh language and culture.  I would like to say a few words, first of all, about the language and culture of TLDs in general.  Our languages and cultures will benefit greatly from being represented on the Internet.  We are all not-for-profit organizations, so we are not doing this for any financial gain but for the gain of our language and cultures.
 We are all well-defined communities.  We have dot gal here today who are from the Galician language and culture, there's dot bzh for the Breton language and culture and then there's also the Welsh language and culture, and we are all a well-defined community.  The way we work is similar to dot cat for the Catalan language and culture.  And as I'm sure you know, in ICANN they haven't had any challenges yet.  They have had no problem with defensive registrations, with cyber squatting and they are no threat whatsoever to any other TLDs.
 All these language and culture campaigns have the support of companies, organizes, institutions, individual as our government and the community.  But the problem for the moment is we don't have a definite timetable for ICANN.  This makes it very difficult for us.  We have been working hard for this for years.  And the timetable keeps changing, so things are getting more and more difficult for us.
 We realize the difficulty facing ICANN and that over the last few years you have been working very hard on this.  But we do think you have the responsibility to at least give us a certain deadline, which you will keep to.
 We don't want to just come here and tell to you hurry up with this.  We are ready to work with you in any way possible to make sure we get this -- we get the RFP as soon as possible.
 Perhaps one idea, way we could do this, since there are no threats or challenges, or we don't foresee any threats or challenges, perhaps there is a way we could submit our bids before the TLDs and you could use this as a way of testing the new process.
 With dot CYM for the Welsh language and culture, we already at home have the support of companies, institutions and individuals and a worldwide Welsh organizations.
 Yesterday, the Welsh government, the soon to be created new Welsh government, voted to support the dot CYM TLD.
 So now we are waiting for ICANN, and please will you help us and give us a definite timetable and then keep with the deadlines.
 >>VINT CERF:  Paul Twomey.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  Thank you, Vint.  Thank you for the presentation as well as the question.
 And I notice, just perhaps to the translators, that the word Dutch might be changed to Welsh.
 Yes.
  [ Laughter ]
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  They do a magnificent job so that was not meant to be -- just a help.  Translation.  The work we get from our support staff here in terms of transcription I think is world class.
 The -- perhaps we need to just clarify and I know this is difficult, if one is preparing for a TLD, one needs to have a business case and plan and, as you said, a definite timetable.  But I wonder if you can put yourself in our shoes, in ICANN's shoes, for perspective.  
 First of all, it's been important to try to establish for the community and for the media some sense of a goal of timing, and we have been talking about a goal of timing for quite some time.  I am on record as having talked about goals.  When I am asked when will this happen, I say it's not yet certain but potentially and hopefully it will be sometime towards the end of first quarter of next year.  That's comments I've made some 12 months ago, but they are about goals.
 In planning for goals, you have to also, at a staff level, certainly start the parallel process of actually doing what your project name would look like, and Kurt Pritz yesterday presented some sense of what the project plan would be like to try to meet that sort of a goal.
 And he and I were pretty much online.
 When I talked about it, I thought about advertising the TLDs, the process has starred started and that's purchase in accordance with the presentation Kurt made yesterday.
 But here is the point.  There are dependencies in the process and dependencies with the community.  And in particular, the policy process is not yet completed.  So it is not possible for the board or the staff to set any definite date.  We can only plan around a goal, because the dependency is still sitting with unfinished work in the policy work with the community.
 So at the moment we are not going to able to say to you it's June 2nd.  We will not be able to be in that position until the dependencies have been sorted through, and I think Avri is going to be in a better position to share that.
 When the policy work gets completed we are going to have to work through the implementation plan and that's been a parallel process to date.  But the implementation plan is going to come back to the community for feedback.  And potentially there are going to be aspects of the implementation plan which might question aspects of the possibility of the policy.  There might be issues in the policy that's determined by September 13th, I think is the date.  But there might be aspects when we look through that in implementation when we have to come back to the community and say as far as we can figure out, you won't be able to do this.  There's no practical way of doing what you want.  And that will have to be reviewed again.
 That's from my perspective incredibly important because the last two rounds where we have introduced new TLDs, we have tended to take implementation as a follow-up behind the policy.  So the policy said please have a new round.  And then the staff has gone off and worked through implementation, it's brought it to the board for approval, and then 12 months later, people have been unhappy about X or unhappy about Y because only then have they really come to realize what the implementation plan was.  It's been always a very detailed thing.  People didn't really read through it, et cetera.
 We are going to try to avoid that cycle in this exercise.
 So we are going to come back with the implementation plan and talk it through very carefully with the community so everybody understands it and so there's sort of a buy-off, if you like, on an implementation plan that's implemented.
 So that's a long way of saying we are working toward a goal but we are not yet at this stage where we can give a definitive date and I suspect we will not be until at least Los Angeles.  Maybe even a bit a longer.  I think it will be later than Los Angeles.
 >>MAREDUDD AP GWYNDAF:  I realize it's very difficult, all the work you have to do as well.  But I just would like to you realize that on our side we also have our business plan, we have to go to investors.  And it's very difficult for us unless we have certain dates.
 And if they keep moving, it makes things more difficult for us again.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  One of the reasons why the policy presently calls for four month -- or the implementation program is thinking about a four-month advertising space is partly directed to the point you are making.
 Now, I recognize you may prefer to have more than four months, but at least we are tying in four months of advertising before any calling for actual strings or verifications.  So we're partly thinking through the problem you are talking about.  We're conscious of it.
 >>BRUCE TONKIN:  Just to clarify, it's Bruce Tonkin speaking, the only time you will get a definite date and a definite cost, and I guess as chair of that committee at the time, I think we have had the same question asked at every meeting for the past two years:  How much is it going to cost and what date?
 Now, the answer to both of those questions will happen when that advertising gets done by ICANN.
 So the steps are the GNSO council has to finish its policy work, the council will vote on a policy.
 It will then present that policy to the board.  The board takes input from the Governmental Advisory Committee, the At-Large Advisory Committee, Security Advisory Committee, the ccNSO.  The board may then get some advice that's contrary to what the council has put forward.  The Board would then have to send it back to the GNSO council to consider if that advice is contrary to its policy, and then finally the board would vote on it.
 After the board votes on it, then the staff have to finalize the implementation, which is getting all the legal agreements finalized, finalizing the RFP. Then it would do an advertising campaign.
 At that point where it does an advertising campaign it will say, it will cost X dollars and the call for papers, if you like, or the call for applications will be on this date.
 And as Paul said, that would give you, give everybody in the community, an even chance at that point when it's fully advertised, everyone is then operating on the same piece of information.  Everybody knows the date, everybody knows the cost, and everybody has enough time to prepare their application at that point.
 So I think that's the best answer that ICANN can give at this stage.
 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:  Dirk Krischenowski from the dot Berlin community.
 We are here now for the seventh ICANN meeting, and we are going to stay here in the ICANN arena.
 And we have been here to make ICANN and Internet community feel confident with us personally and the idea of creating a city top-level domain for the Berlin community.
 City top-level domains are what we see as special category besides the category of linguistical and cultural TLDs.  Both add value to the name space and have meaning for the concerned communities and the Internet community at large.  That has been shown by the dot cat and dot EU, for example, and will be shown by the Asia as well.
 Moreover, city TLD strings are easy to identify by lists, lists which are available at a United Nations, are available at united cities, local governments, organizations, or are available at least by the countries in which these communities or cities are.  And they are comparably simply to proceed through the gTLD mechanism, which has created by the GNSO, and they are really simply compared to what was discussed in the GNSO what might come up in the future.
 Therefore, we would request the board, the ICANN board, the GAC, and the GNSO to seriously consider a fast track for the city TLD applications.
 But we also want to urge the ICANN board and GNSO to stick to the time lines which have been communicated in the past and where the communities which want to apply stick to.
 There was a -- January 2007 time line and some four weeks ago, a time line by Paul Twomey which was presented in Tokyo and communicated on the ICANN Web site.  And now, with your comments, this time line seems to disappear.  And no one knows if it's 2008, 2009, 2010 or if it's ever going to happen.
 But my last point, it's a positive one.  I'd like to hand over -- I'd like to hand over some souvenirs to Vint and Janis and Avri which reminds you on the first three city initiatives, Paris, and Berlin.  And I am going to hand this over now
 [ Applause ]
 >>SUSAN CRAWFORD:  Vint if I could make a brief comment.
 >>VINT CERF:  Where is Starbucks when I need them?
 >>SUSAN CRAWFORD:  I wonder if I could make a brief comment here.
 We seem to have created a sufficiently elaborate process for the introduction of new gTLDs that everybody wants an exception.
 That's what we've just heard from our last two commentators.  So I think the board should note that and consider strongly what we do when we get the advice from the GNSO about this new gTLD policy.
 Thanks.
 >>VINT CERF:  I'm sorry, Roberto had a comment also.
 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  Yeah, well, it's really a question rather than a comment.
 From your --
 >>VINT CERF:  Excuse me, Peter, your microphone is live.  So when you are chatting --
 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  Sorry.
 >>VINT CERF:  -- it interferes.
 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  From when you were describing the situation, one point was triggered a thought in my mind.
 When you say that the list of the cities is available and it's fairly clear and so on, the problem is that that list is very clear, but it's also very long.
 So I think that the moment that we introduce the concept of having geographical TLDs for cities, we have to be ready also to accept the possibility of having every city in the world applying, which might have a problem.
 But I think that we can make a distinction by trying to figure out what the added value of a specific TLD will be for a city.  And you have pointed out over the years now what will be the advantage in terms of improvement of the commerce, tourism and so on.
 But I was thinking about something that could give us the possibility of evaluating better the applications, which is the infrastructure that it creates.
 So my question is, what will this bring to the city of Berlin or to other cities that are competing?  Are you thinking about having the registry based in Berlin with a local provider, the local services?  Or are you planning to outsource this to one of the few who are providing registry services for the large majority of the gTLD in the world?
 And in that case, there will be no added value in terms of adding also competition and adding business models and so on.
 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:  I can directly answer.
 As with other country registries like India, India has -- the sponsoring organization is located in India.  It's an Indian entity, and they have Afilias running the back-end services.  I think this is a very good model and this will also apply to most of the city TLDs.  In our case, it will be CORE managing the back-end services.  Not only the back-end services but our organization is based in Berlin and with the city TLDs, the organization, the sponsor, has to be located in the city.
 And this is -- the back-end is just a technical thing which has nothing to do with the community.  It can be also DENIC or Afilias or NeuStar.  And I think New York and Paris will go the same way.  They will choose also one of the established back-end service providers.
 >>VINT CERF:  Okay.  An administrative point.
 We have a long line of people here.
 If we're going to get through this many people with comments, we need for you to keep them brief.
 This is not a criticism of anyone.
 But also, I suggest to you that we won't have time to complete all the work and also have a break.
 So I'm going to suggest that in the interest of keeping as many comments as possible, that I'm going to skip the break.  If you need to leave, you should do that and come back.
 We'll press on all the way until noon with the -- not just with comments but also with the remaining reports to be done.
 Izumi.
 >>IZUMI AIZU:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  My name is Izumi Aizu from ALAC, Asia-Pacific.
 I have three questions to the subject of IPv4 depletion and IPv6 migration.  It's a very nice question from individual Internet users.  Do we need to do anything, something, or just stay back and let the business or technical community take care for the migration or depletion?
 That's the first question.
 Second is maybe as some civil society hat.  Is there a clear need for protecting the public interest in addition to securing the government e-mail and Web site reachable?  If so, what are they?
 The third question is, is there a possible plan to announce a certain date globally?  On that day on, there will be no IPv4 available or not allocated from either RIRs, NIRs or ISPs.
 If that happens, things may or the preparation may become somewhat easier, so we know exact date.
 Having worked a lot on the Y2K eight years ago, we had a single date.  But if you don't know when exactly or when the -- you know, Japan's expiration is January 2009, if you go to, say, New Zealand you get 2012, I rather migrate to New Zealand and then come back.
 So this is a very awkward situation, perhaps, or question, but I wonder if someone can answer.
 >>VINT CERF:  This is Vint.  Although it's pretty clear to me that the rate of consumption will vary from one place to another, it seems to me that we be -- everyone would be benefited by trying to align to a particular target date.
 I know that there was an IPv4 count-down that was proposed in the RIRs and rejected.  I think here I'm looking more for an IPv6 count-up, if you like, hoping to encourage everyone to adopt by a given date.
 But I don't know that there's any better answer for you than that, Izumi.
 Dave Wodelet.
 >>DAVE WODELET:  I would just like to comment, you heard the presentation made earlier by the ASO.  Where the debate is taking place is in the regional registries.  And so I strongly encourage you and everyone else to become an active part of that and to work in that forum to look at the options we have here.
 As far as when things are going to run out, we are probably going to see sometime between 2009 and 2011, the last allocation being made by the IANA to the registries.
 When the individual registries are going to run out, you know, there's a lot of assumptions in that.
 I can probably safely say from what we see now that we're looking at probably sometime between 2012 to 2015 when it's going to be a problem.  For one of the registries.  But it may go till 2015 for some others.
 Does that help?
 >>IZUMI AIZU:  Yeah, but how about my first question?  For the individual Internet users, is there any need to take action or just stay back and let you guys work?
 >>DAVE WODELET:  For the individual Internet users, you are part of the registries.  You are part of that process.  And so anyone globally can participate with that process.
 >>VINT CERF:  Yes, Raimundo.
 Oh, I'm sorry, it was Thomas and then Raimundo.  Thank you.
 Thomas.
 >>THOMAS NARTEN:  Just to answer quickly, what can an end user do or should they do something, yes, you should be concerned because this can hit you at the end of the day.
 And one thing to think about is take a look at IPv6 and see about getting it, see about using it, see about demanding it from your ISP and in your products that you by.  Because at the end of the day, market pressures are what is going to force this to happen.
 When people get scared and they start -- are willing to pay money to see this stuff actually happen.  And there is no bigger market than the end user, the consumer.
 >>VINT CERF:  Raimundo.
 >>RAIMUNDO BECA:  I would say that end users are mainly ISPs.  The ISP's job is to go to the RIR, to make -- to be a part of the debate, see how are things are happening, and see how RIRs are coordinating their work among them.
 This is not happening on an individual basis, case by case.  It's happening in a very responsible way in every RIR, and they are having a high level of coordination among them.
 >>IZUMI AIZU:  Having seen the domain tasting, I hope there won't be the kind of sleazy guys taking it before in advance a block and then reselling them premium price.  That's, I think, is kind of public policy issues that I think we really need to tackle as well.  But I stop here.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you, Izumi.  Mike Palage.
 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:  Thank you, Vint.  My comment is directed to Steve's presentation.  Got your attention.  Thank you, Steve.
 First I'd like to, if you will, acknowledge the work of dot PR in signing their zone and the efforts of other TLDs to do that.
 And my question is directed on the ICANN correspondence Web site, there was a piece of correspondence dated June 12th which was a communication from RIPE NCC.  And in this communication, the following statement was included:  The lack of progress towards the deployment of DNSsec is undermining the stability and security of the Internet.
 Now, the fact that I sort of found this statement from a rather important stakeholder in the ICANN process sort of buried on the correspondence Web site was something that I thought should have perhaps received a little more attention or notoriety perhaps on the front page.
 For those of my former colleagues, I had discussed, if you will, the signing of the zone back during our Vancouver retreat at the annual meeting where I talked about this particular issue.
 So as trying to be part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem, I'd like to, if you will, call upon the board and perhaps Paul, if I could get your attention, during the Saturday session, you talked about the wonderful collaboration that was occurring when Chris Disspain gave his presentation about how the GNSO and the ccNSO is working together.  Perhaps the issue of signing the root, who holds the key, signing key, access to it, these important issues that impact both the ccTLD community, the gTLD community, and obviously have public policy considerations that the GAC would be interested in, perhaps the board might consider moving forward with some type of initiative to allow for this important public-policy discussion to take place.  So providing that forum for interested stakeholders to take place is something that hopefully you might be able to take action on.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you, Mike.
 >>WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER:  Thank you very much.  My name is Wolfgang Kleinwaechter.  I want to give a short report about the workshop we organized on Tuesday on GL TLDs.  It was a presentation of one existing project, dot cat, and three emerging projects, the three which are dot NYC, dot Paris, and dot Berlin.  And we had comments from nearly all constituencies of ICANN, from governments to the business constituency, noncommercial, and at-large.  By the way, the workshop was co-organized by the At-Large Advisory Committee and the noncommercial user constituency.
 Two speakers have already raised some issues, so I can be very brief.
 The title of the workshop was more consumer confusion or more consumer choice or more consumer opportunities?
 And the discussion showed clearly that there would be more consumer choice and more consumer opportunities.  There would be not so much consumer confusion with new city gTLDs than some people expect.
 The second point was, probably this is a special category.  And we should think about a little bit clearer, because cities and regions are well defined, better defined than other generic words, and probably would be helpful what already was mentioned by Dirk Krischenowski, that something like an ISO-3166 list would be helpful to identify.  When Jon Postel was looking around how to manage the different countries, he was investigating a huge number of different lists and ended up with this list which was the largest one.  And to say, you know, then we have countries and territories.  So the Isle of Man got a ccTLD, because island was theirs, but Scotland got no ccTLD.  There are some problems with this list, but the list was very helpful.  Some on the list discovered was late that they were on the list, like E.U., but they were on the list and they had a right to get it.  So I think this would make it much easier.  If an applicant is on the list, then he could get a TLD for a!
 region or a city, and there are numbers of lists available.  In Europe, we have the committee of the regions, you know, which has a long list of regions in Europe and all over the world.  There are city lists.  And, you know, if we look into this, this would make life much easier for ICANN, because they have not to make decisions yes or no.  If it's on the list, that's fine.
 And the second point, this has to be built in partnerships.  Dirk has mentioned some options, you know, with technical background services.  It's also an opportunity, probably, for ccTLDs to have additional services for TLDs on the city level.  You know, if dot CZ in the Czech Republic would offer dot Praha.  As additional services, this would broaden the opportunities for ccTLDs, so it could be done in cooperation with the new registry and in already existing registries.
 And the final point, there are concerns, but I think life is always full of risks.  If you put the risks first, then you will nothing achieve.  So you have to take a risk.  You have to move forward.  And this will be -- create benefits for the community.  Then you will have some problems, but you can settle the problems.  I think there are not such problems which cannot be solved.  But if you stay where you are, then you miss opportunities in the future and probably you provoke on the edges tendencies and actions which could be counter productive for the whole community.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you.
 I see several hands up.  Bruce's was up first.
 Did you have a comment?  And then Rita.
 >>BRUCE TONKIN:  Yeah, just a very quick comment.
 You've mentioned a list of names, and then you've said that's all you need.
 But you don't have a list of applicants that would have those names.  So that's where you need an allocation process.
 So the new gTLD process doesn't require a list, in fact, as it's currently drafted, although the current version of the policy does support the introduction of city-based TLDs.  There is no such restriction.  And then it has a mechanism of dealing with a situation where an applicant is deemed not appropriate by that community.
 So I want to separate the difference between a list and the applicant.
 So even with ccTLDs, they're not just automatically given to someone.  I can't apply for dot PR, for example, for Puerto Rico just because Puerto Rico is on the list.  I also have to be the right applicant for that name.
 >>WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER:  That's certainly right.  But this can be done.  You know, what we discussed also, and RCI like 5091, a lot of things could be taken from this RFC and specify if you apply for a city, one criteria is, you have to consult the public authorities.  So I think this is the criteria.
 If you ignore that you cannot come from where and ask for -- you have to come from somewhere else and consult the Chinese government.
 >>VINT CERF:  We have a number of responses coming from the board.  So Rita had her hand up first, then Peter, then Paul, and Raimundo.
 >>RITA RODIN:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  Wolfgang, I just want to reassure you and the community that the board has heard very clearly this week through many of the workshops and other discussions that have gone on that there is getting a consensus across constituencies that we need to have some processes for the introduction of both new gTLDs that are not IDNs and IDNs.
 It's always easy to say that there's an easy list and there's an easy way for ICANN to proceed.  But I want to assure that you we've heard the message and this is something that the board intends to discuss and try to look at all of the positions and all of the issues and come up with some sort of a path forward.  So thank you for your comments.  But I just want to make sure everyone's aware that we're clear on your message.
 >>VINT CERF:  I'm going to call on Peter next and make one observation.
 The new gTLD process is where a lot of this discussion should be going on.  And so it seems to me that a bit of this debate might be aimed at the GNSO.
 Peter.
 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  Thanks, Mr. Chairman.  I want to respond also to Wolfgang by saying the board is aware that we need to take risks in moving forward.  We have no resistance or unwillingness to do that in a proper fashion.
 And I also want to respond to your suggestion, or perhaps my take from your comments, that there's some sense that we're not moving forward.
 I've been very impressed while I've been at this meeting with all the progress that has been made by the reports in the GNSO committee, by the very good seminars on issues such as the appeals and dispute resolution process, and it's been made clear to me what a problem that's going to be.  And also the -- all of the work that's been going on, in fact, at this meeting.
 So the suggestion or the implication that we're somehow not moving forward, I think, needs to be resisted.  We've made lots of progress.
 >>VINT CERF:  Paul Twomey.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  Thank you, chairman.  I wonder if I can actually follow on from what Peter has just said.
 I think there's no doubt that the board is fully open and always is fully open to hear the concerns of the community.  And people should feel free that they can share those concerns.
 But to pick up on the point of progress to be made, if we wish to pursue this process quickly, then I suspect one of my observations is that many of the points being made here this morning actually need to be made in the GNSO process now rather than necessarily to the board.
 If we want to get the deadline completed for the policy work, then this input needs to be done at that stage so that we can accelerate the completion of the policy from the GNSO, the consultation of the supporting organizations, and then the consideration of the implementation.
 So I'm just exhorting people to please -- I know when one has an interest and you want that interest heard, you want -- and the board's certainly open to listening to it.  But at the moment, the key point where these points need to be made is in the GNSO policy process.
 >>VINT CERF:  Roberto.
 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  Yes.  I would like also to elaborate a little bit on what Rita has said, that there are a lot of situations in which we have -- the process is easy because we have lists and so on.  We have heard from the ccTLD community that we have an easy solution for the IDN, which is assigning just one per country or territory in the ISO.
 And now we hear about the list of cities.
 I'm concerned in terms of the cities, as I said before, as the magnitude of this list.
 I'm just trying to get an example of this.  We have an authoritative list of airports.  It is authoritative.  I believe it's managed by the ICAO, but I might be wrong.  But there is an authoritative list with codes, three-letter codes for every airport in the world.
 So it's going to be easy to implement a TLD for every airport.  However, the solution that was found to this problem many years ago, in 2000, actually, was to delegate a top-level domain, which is aero, and have all the airports as second-level domains under that top-level domain.
 I'm just trying to figure out whether we can handle the problem tackling that from a different point of view.  It's just -- it doesn't mean to be a solution.  I'm not proposing a solution.  I'm just bringing more food to the discussion, that I agree with Paul that its location should be the GNSO in the development of the PDP, because there's no way that the board, now that the process for the introduction of new gTLD has been launched, is going to start making exceptions and taking shortcuts for things that are apparently easy to implement, but they will become seriously complicated the moment that there will be exceptions to a general policy.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you, Roberto.
 Let's take the next comment from the floor, please.
 >>MANUEL VILAS:  Hello.  My name is Manuel.  I come from the dot gal initiative.  We want a domain for the Galician language and culture.  We support the ideas that were provided by the Welsh organization.  
 I want to say that there is a huge expectation among our cultural communities about when we are going to be able to present our proposals, and that in our case, there is a huge Galician diaspora all around the world.  So dot gal will be very relevant to make the net more multilingual, as the dot cat is doing.  So you have to take this into account.
 And I would like to say that we are going to work together with other linguistic communities in order to provide ideas about the RFP.  And I want to ask whether we will be able to provide these ideas and when and how we are going to be provide these ideas.
 >>VINT CERF:  Rita, did you -- Susan.
 >>SUSAN CRAWFORD:  My name is Susan.
 >>VINT CERF:  I'm sorry, Susan.
 >>SUSAN CRAWFORD:  We've heard from the GNSO that they are working as hard as they can to complete their policy work in time for our consideration in Los Angeles.
 As our CEO has said, it's difficult for us to predict exactly after then when the new process will begin.  But I personally, and many members of the board here, are very interested in pushing this process forward.  We cannot give you a firm commitment today when it will begin, but we are all working concertedly towards that process.
 >>VINT CERF:  Okay.  Let's have the next comment from the floor.
 >>THOMAS LOWENHAUPT:  Hello.  My name is Tom Lowenhaupt.  I'm here on behalf of connecting .NYC, we're interested in getting the NYC TLD for residents and organizations in New York City.  I've attended many of your meetings this week.  You have an incredibly thorough and comprehensive process in the works to decide on this.  And it seems that there are some potential glitches along the way, some little roadblocks.  And I just -- it would seem to me that the cultural and linguistic groups and cities are a group that can possibly be expedited, because you know from the experience of cat that these things can work in one area.  If cities have TLDs, problems will be resolved locally.  They will not come to -- if dot NYC existed and there were some questions about who or what was on there, they would come to dot NYC and not to ICANN to resolve that issue.
 And you know who the organizations are.  There will be very public -- they will be very public, the organizations that present this.  And to facilitate that, we've -- in your processes, we've published a recent paper entitled "towards city TLDs in the public interest," which you can find on connecting NYC's Web site as well as some other places also.
 To find out how we operate this will be of vital interest to you as well as we in terms of the governance process.  So we're going to be having a conference in early November on the issue of governance of local TLDs, and our experiences there will be passed on to you and we hope they assist new making your decisions.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you.  That's bound to be very useful input.
 Amadeu.
 >>AMADEU ABRIL i ABRIL:  No, my name is Rita.
 [ Applause ]
 >>VINT CERF:  My, Rita, how you've changed!
 >>AMADEU ABRIL i ABRIL:  Well, as you are calling everybody "Rita" today, I thought I also have the right.  I was born the date of saint Rita, which is May 22, by the way.  So I have some right.
 Anyway, I want to say other things, but I changed my mind, and a small comment and three general requests to the board in the evaluation -- when the evaluation time comes, we know sometime, and we're thinking already now.  
 Regarding the comment, for instance, what Susan -- or it was Rita, Vint? -- said about exceptions, no, I don't think that the board should make any exception.
 I think that, as Paul said, we need to be very careful in completing the policy for everybody, in completing the RFP for everybody, and in completing the draft construct for everybody, even if probably the nexus may show differences and the scales will show differences according to different TLDs in the concrete negotiations.  Because dot tel makes very different things than dot mobi, than dot com, and therefore their (inaudible) must be different necessarily.  
 Okay.  That's absolutely correct.  But we know also that the real devil here will be dispute resolution.  And coming to dispute resolution, I would simply point out that what, for instance, Maredudd or what Manuel was saying regarding language and culture, you have already the criteria in the current draft of the GNSO recommendations.  What happens when the community comes, what happens when there is a community or not a community, and someone that has the same string but doesn't come from a specified community, what happens when two from the same community comes here?  
 So there are some things here that you have the evaluation process instead of the challenge.
 But now -- therefore, probably when the policy (inaudible) is complete and the draft is done, you probably would consider that for some of them, you really have the challenge already in place, because there are special (inaudible) for this.  
 Now, the true request.
 The first request is that for these sort of TLDs, you are very vigilant to whom you delegate that, much more than you were in the 2004 process for sponsored TLDs.
 This is a public interest thing, and therefore you need to do -- I mean, if you have doubts, don't allocate it.  If there reasonable two different candidates, it's not which one is slightly better than the other.  You simply should say that you cannot work on those conditions.  And it's (inaudible) that you're going to make mistakes than allocating a language and cultural TLD and even a city TLD when there are serious doubts.  So I'm preaching here for an especially stringent criteria here because there are public-policy issues not just running the DNS infrastructure.
 The other special request is that you please take into serious consideration the possibility of different shady pricing for applications for IDN TLDs that come from non-OECD countries.  Treating unequally what's equal is discrimination.  Treating equally what's really different, it's also discrimination.  And running a registry and applying through ICANN is a very expensive game.  Europeans, North Americans, probably Latin Americans can play that game.  Not in other parts of the world.  If you need to come back to existing registries for money, if you -- you should ask the other ones to pay slightly more.  If we should suppress the gala dinner for several consecutive meetings to help, we do it.  Please take that into serious consideration, because if not, we will really be discriminating.
 >>VINT CERF:  Okay.  Thank you, Amadeu.
 [ Applause ]
 >>VINT CERF:  I have Paul Twomey's hand that is up.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  Thank you, Vint.
 I wonder if I can just make an observation as we think through the implementation issues.
 The question that Amadeu raises has been raised in the GNSO, so there's been a parallel process question on the implementation.
 Can I just make the following implementation observation.
 Our community, particularly those who specialize in the sale of domain names at the second level at the moment in the generic are very, very clever people who understand business incentives very clearly.  So while I think there's a lot of sympathy for the proposition put forward, it would be important for Amadeu and others to help when we think through implementation as to, if you could implement what you're proposing, how do you do it in such a way that you don't put a distortion that results in people that you're not really intending to help utilizing that mechanism to -- because it's an economic incentive built into the process.
 So I'm just -- just to share a bit more implementation thinking about how do you achieve the outcome without resulting with an unintended consequence.
 >>VINT CERF:  This is the uh-oh factor.
 Peter.
 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  Yes.  Just want to say I think there's a parallel to what Amadeu is saying in the ccTLD delegation and redelegation process that I think we can learn from.  I think your point, Amadeu is we have to be very careful where there are competing applicants for social or cultural or linguistic TLDs.
 We do the same thing in relation to ccTLD delegation, where there's competing applicants, if you like, for a ccTLD.  And the general principle is, the staff go back and require the parties themselves to sort it out.  So I think that's the kind of thing you're suggesting, rather than picking winners, that we require some kind of cooperation amongst the community to sort that out.  And I think from our point of view, that's going to be very much an easier way than picking winners and risking losers, and also supporting Paul's point about unintended consequences.
 >>BRUCE TONKIN:  Peter, that's also in the current draft policies, just for clarification.
 >>VINT CERF:  Let me make one other administrative comment.
 We now -- the queue is continuing to grow.  We won't complete all of our work if we allow it to grow and still get all the other reports.
 I'm trying to balance the valuable interaction we're having with the other work.
 I'm going to close the queue with the party who is at the end right now.
 I saw that.  I saw that.  You're going to get the last worded in the queue.
 But thank you for your patience and cooperation on this.
 Again, I'll ask that everyone be expeditious in making their comments, and the board members.  Next comment.
 >>PHILIP CORWIN:  Good morning, Philip Corwin, counsel to the Internet Commerce Association, representing domain name investors and developers and the direct search industry.  
 And I want to begin by commending ICANN and the staff for the excellent work at this meeting and to say that we very much appreciate -- we were contacted in advance of the meeting by a consultant to the GNSO, suggesting that we consider creating a new constituency group for professional registrants.  And I've discussed that with Avri Doria at the meeting, and we are giving that very active consideration as to whether that is the best way for us to continue to constructively engage in your process and meaningfully contribute to it.
 I'm going to briefly address three issues.  The first is the process just beginning for dispute process for intergovernmental organizations.
 I think we recognize that we're at the very beginning of that process in the GNSO.  I think we share some of the concerns I heard in other constituency discussions that this has the potential to create an ICANN-administered international trademark court, and question whether there's authority for that.
 We understand that right now, it only would cover 280 names and abbreviations.  But, of course, things can always expand down the road.  But, really, beyond -- and we have many questions about that forum, certainly, the composition of the arbitration panels, the standards for deciding disputes.  And since the driving issue is that the government disputants not be exposed to national courts, the question about what appeals rights thereby, if any, for aggrieved registrants who are not happy with the initial decision.
 Within that proposal is a much broader proposal for creating new rights for governments to object to when new gTLDs to names of geographic and national significance.  And we're not even sure what "national significance" means.  In the United States, what that means, is that the U.S. government could dispute apple pie, bald eagle, 4th of July.  We -- that's a very amorphous term.
 But more than that, it -- this proposal which contemplates migrating that process back at some point from new gTLDs to existing has the potential to expand the UDRP dispute process far beyond the scope of traditional trademark law.  And we certainly find that extremely problematic and will be participating in that discussion.
 On domain tasting, we supported the PIR proposal for pricing for dot org, and we were happy to see that that has effectively shut down abuse on dot org.  We recognize that may not be the best or most effective approach for other top-level domains.  We certainly support the GNSO decision yesterday of expeditiously conducting some additional research, getting the additional data needed without too much -- and then without much delay moving on to establish a PDP.  And while we have no position on the best way to proceed in the end, whether it's through consensus policy or the budget process or whatever, we do support the taking of effective action by ICANN to curb intentional abuse of the add grace period.
 And, finally, on the registrar accreditation agreements, we are happy to see ICANN moving rapidly to strengthen registrant protections in the post-RegisterFly world.  And we are in general agreement with the principles that have been put out for discussions for strengthening the RAAs.  We look forward to reviewing specific proposed contractual language for changing those agreements.  And we hope that that language can be put out for comment in advance of the L.A. meeting so that perhaps some action beyond mere discussion of those proposed terms can be taken at Los Angeles.
 And thank you very much.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much.
 Could we have the next comment.
 >>WERNER STAUB:  My name is Werner Staub.  I have a comment about the new gTLD process.
 Generally, many people have said here that ICANN is always slow.  I would like to point out that it's not always the case.  In the new gTLD, when everything was given to staff, we consistently had a timely response.  Remember in 2000, there was a very short timeline, staff produced the RFP within the allotted time.  The same thing happened in 2004 when basically staff was given a task, and it was ready in time.
 We, of course, had work to do as a committee.  There's a time that committees have to work.  There are times when authors have to work, basically, without being -- always referring back to the committee.
 In this specific case, however, we have now proliferation of serial concepts.  One has to be done after the other, when it is not necessarily something that has to be done one after the other.  Some things can be done in parallel.  And when I just heard that the response to the problem path about lack of planning ability was, oh, yes, there's going to be an additional waiting time, well, that's not a very good consolation.  This is precisely one of those things that should happen in parallel.  It would perfectly be able to say that the advertisement of the new gTLD process can coincide with the approval of the board of the policy, because that is what is really going to define what is going to be happening.  And you can still, in that time, which may even be more than four months, but during that time that runs in parallel with the advertising, you can still, then, define the rest of the nitty-gritty about what happens in -- if somebody comes with a dot Nazi or a dot KKK.  !
These are not the things that we have to be concerned about for the -- those who are lining up.  It is not acceptable that necessary TLDs are held back because we discuss about what's going to happen for all the unnecessary cases.
 >>VINT CERF:  I think that we -- I'm not sure I completely agree, although I understand the point.  I'm just thinking about the last round that we had with the surprise that is took us a long time to resolve.  And I wish that we had had a resolution process already agreed.  That would have made it more expeditious.
 Annette.
 >>ANNETTE MUEHLBERG:  Annette Muehlberg from the At-Large Advisory Committee.
 Our chair just pointed out, yes, we did have this workshop on gTLDs, together with the NCUC.  And it really became clear that not consumer confusion is the issue, but it's really users' opportunity.  And those gTLDs would be one of the nonrestricted TLDs users could actually use.  And now I am very happy to see that there is a lot of progress going on and that I do appreciate it.  The GNSO appreciates it.
 So I'm wondering, what's the problem now?
 So can staff, can board, can the committee, whoever it needs, come together and come up with a quick procedure for L.A?
 >>VINT CERF:  Okay, thank you, Annette.
 Paul.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  I'll cede to Bruce.
 >>BRUCE TONKIN:  Just a quick answer, and I'll add to this on behalf of Avri Doria.
 I do believe the new gTLDs' meeting in the committee this afternoon and it is open for observers.  So you should go there and say, "Make a decision and move forward."  Because that's what the board's waiting for.
 >>ANNETTE MUEHLBERG:  Of course, we have the same meeting -- we also have a meeting at the same time.  But I will make sure you get that.  Okay.
 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  Vint.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  Can I make an observation, chairman that --
 >>VINT CERF:  Yes, and then Peter.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  While I do appreciate the request for parallel processing, and there is an intense amount of staff parallel processing going on around implementation, one of the things that we have been asked for by the community is to make sure that the RFP and the contract work is being done in process.
 It is just not feasible if the community wishes to have common -- basically common contracts for TLDs, it is just not feasible for us to have a process -- the staff can't achieve the -- let's go ahead with the ones who want it now, and then -- and advertise that, and then -- but, by the way, you'll get four months to get ready, but at the last minute we're going to change the contract on you because of the comments that we received in that four-month period.  I suspect people's investors will not be amused to find out the contractual terms that they have put forward their money commitments and what have you change at the last minute because of a parallel process on policy.
 So when we come out to actually putting an RFP out, when we come out in saying, now is the time when you can put forward an application, I suspect you'll find all the investors are going to want to ensure that there is certainty in what they are now responding to.
 And so I don't think it's going to be feasible to run a parallel process of, here it is for the people who are presently lined up, and then we'll worry about the problem cases in problem.  Because we'll change the contracts at the last minute otherwise.
 >>VINT CERF:  Peter.
 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  Yes.  Partly in response to Annette, but also more in response to (inaudible)'s comment earlier.  The board hasn't actually received a formal proposal from the committee or the staff as to a time line.  But you can rest assured that we're not going to delay.  We're going to look at that timetable ask make sure there aren't things that can go side by side to make sure this goes as rapidly as possible.  We understand and share the community urge to get this done at a reasonable pace.  But, obviously, we have to take into account the thing that Paul is talking about.  We are at this stage, I think, reluctant to start running parallel tracks where things -- some can start, and we wait to solve other problems and find that the problems we solve when we have to go back to the first ones and change them.
 But I think we can give a commitment that when we get the timetable, we're going to make sure that that moves as rapidly as is reasonable.
 >>VINT CERF:  Rita.
 >>RITA RODIN:  Thanks, Vint.
 Just very briefly, to reiterate something that Peter and Paul both said.  The board has not gotten reports yet.  And so I think we all need to remember that in some instances, everyone talks about bottom-up consensus policy, and the board's sitting in an oversight role.  And then when people want things to happen more quickly perhaps than they like, then they said, "The board should make a decision."  We will, but we need to make sure that the processes are in place to get us a report so we can then act.  Thanks.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you.
 Could we have the next comment, please.
 >>ANDREW MACK:  Sure.  Thank you.  My name is Andrew Mack, with (inaudible) Global Consulting based in Washington.  And because we are a group of consultants that focuses on emerging market stuff, I want to go back to IDNs real quick.  First thing, I want to compliment Ike for taking the IDN issue so seriously for what is clearly a lot of work that is taking place in the last few meetings.
 At the same time, having listened to Tina's report and others, it seems like this is going to be a lot more complicated than at least I initially imagined.  There are issues that we have been talking about, multiple scripts for a particular language.  We were just talking the other night about IDN e-mail and what that's going to do to the system.  I think it's going to be pretty challenging.
 So on the one hand, we are really, really enthusiastic about everybody's push to move faster but recognize we want to be realistic to make sure whatever gets pushed forward, gets pushed forward well.
 I guess my question is this.  Since the first IDNs or at least some of the first IDNs that are likely coming forward are going to come from the ccTLDs, is ICANN doing all it can to help the ccTLD operators be successful in this.
 It would seem to me that the focus on supporting the operators would be time and money really well spent, that it could help us address the speed questions, and that it could provide some really important learning for us as we move forward with the wider gTLD IDN roll-outs.
 So I'm wondering what we are doing to try to expand this work now to get ahead of the curve.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  I'm sorry, I am doing two things at once here.
 What are we doing to expand this work?  Well, you just heard all of the activity that's going on, so I'm not sure I understand what additional expansion you had in mind.
 >>ANDREW MACK:  I guess I'm just wondering whether there's a way to focus more on specifically the relationship with the ccTLDs that are likely to be into this.  Is there support ICANN can offer them that would be in addition to this process that we've got right now?
 >>VINT CERF:  The honest answer is I don't know that there's more that can be done.  I will say that there are a set of serial problems that still have to be solved -- for example, with regard to IDNs.
 Setting that aside, we have to have a gTLD process that we all agree to before we start asking for RFPs.
 The one thing that we might conceivably do is decouple the script question from the new TLD question by assuming that there could be some safe scripts that -- say already accepted ones, that could be considered before we get all the others into the system.
 But other than that, I'm not sure, to be honest.
 Peter?
 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  There is a partial answer, if you like, in that it was the board that stimulated the process that's lead to the result that we saw today.  It was the board that asked the ccNSO and the GAC to begin this process by preparing a list of questions of what are the likely problems.  But I see Chris Disspain is back in the room, and if there is more that the board can do to support the ccNSO in IDN development, perhaps we give Chris a couple of minutes to let us know.  
 We have been working with the ccNSO, monitoring what's going on.  It was the topic of our breakfast with them at the moment.  So I think we think that we are working as much as we can with the ccNSO to help it develop the -- and the GAC to help them develop the IDN TLD process, but, Chris, are you feeling unsupported?  If so, what can we do to help?
 >>CHRIS DISSPAIN:  No, we're not.
 We've sent you some stuff and we are waiting to hear back from you.
 We need to work together to work out what to do next.  And so far, everyone, the board, the other constituencies, the GAC have been communicating well and working together very well.
 >>VINT CERF:  Well, in fact, a deeper observation is there are a number of people very interested in new TLDs.  We are hearing it all this morning.
 And the coordination is increasing among the groups that have an interest in that.
 And that, if anything, will help speed things up.  Because by having all of us coordinated in this work, we won't wind up with a long serial chain of, "Oh, gosh, I didn't think of that because I didn't talk to that group."
 >>CHRIS DISSPAIN:  That's exactly right.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thomas Narten.
 >>THOMAS NARTEN:  This isn't really directly responding to your focus on operators, but I think it's worth reminding the community that there was a test -- an IDN test plan posted earlier last week, and the goal of that is to let -- to actually allow real strings be put into the DNS and be able to test those in real applications and see what happens.
 And that's all about learning what happens and seeing if we -- we learn from those experience that can feed into making the system work the way we actually want to make it work.
 So I encourage people to look at that.  That's one thing I haven't seen a lot of talk about here so far.
 >>ANDREW MACK:  Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Okay.  Next comment.
 >>ROBERT HUTCHINSON:  I am Bob Hutchinson from dynamic ventures.  I have a question about DNSsec.
 I have been hoping that DNSsec would reduce the growing threat of cache poisoning and pharming and fraud, but DNSsec calls for layering security protocols into the DNS procedure, which has been proven to be expensive and time consuming, and its implementation is also leaky and is seemed to be years from deployment in all zones.
 Today I'm seeing technologies like SSL, extended certificates in my browser.  Excuse me.
 Other higher-up-the-stack technologies are working to prevent phishing and pharming.  And are adding much of the value that DNSsec was designed to provide.
 I would encourage ICANN to be cautious about pushing DNSsec in the name zones.  We've got indications that there are problems with denial of service distributed attacks in DNSsec implementations, and I'm wondering, Steve, whether we could look again at the overall charter of DNSsec.
 >>STEPHEN CROCKER:  Well, thanks for the comments.
 The points that you have raised actually have been discussed rather extensively, repeatedly over a long period of time.  It is, indeed, true as you said that there are other security mechanisms that have been brought into service, and to good effect.  And that's all to the good.
 But it's equally through that DNSsec is an important part of the overall security strategy.
 Yes, it takes a while, it's just the nature of things that it takes a while to add this.  But in fact, that process is underway.
 This year, we had the formal roll-out of Sweden's DNSsec operation, Puerto Rico is signed, Bulgaria is signed, and I think there will be, over the next few years, rather more involvement from the top-level domain operators as they develop the capabilities to do that.
 There's a separate issue with respect to the root which is a bit of a distraction at the moment, but that will fall into place.
 And there is software coming along on the other side, on the resolver side, and make its way into the operating system.
 So I have been working on this for a long time, and I share the discomfort of everybody else that it always takes longer than you want.
 But that said, I think it's an important part of the equation.
 It's not the sole piece of protection, and it certainly doesn't protect against everything.
 There's corresponding things that have to happen eventually in the routing system and elsewhere.
 And the other point that you raise is does it have a down side consequence with respect to, say, DDOS attacks.
 I think the answer, frankly, is no.  I understand a bit about where such fears come from, the size of the answers that come back under DNSsec are longer than they are otherwise.
 But I think if one looks closely at the data about what constitutes a DDOS attack and how much load is -- how massive those attacks are versus how much extra load is created by DNSsec, the differences are really quite incidental and so forth.
 So I'm not persuaded -- I mean if the force of your suggestion is let's veer away from the course that we have been on and not do DNSsec, my answer, I'm afraid, is a rather firm no.  We need to proceed as rapidly as forcefully as we can down the path that we are on.
 >>VINT CERF:  Suzanne.
 >>SUZANNE WOOLF:  Sure, I would just like to add to Steve's comments very briefly two further points about DNSsec.
 First of all, that I would rather see us deploying what protection DNSsec does provide than have the things that DNSsec would protect against become the new vector, as it were, as those other measures you mentioned become more effective.
 We need multi-variant kind of protection because we are up against complex and very rapidly changing threats.
 The other point I'd make is that a lot of the value proposition for DNSsec is in uses we haven't seen yet for people being able to put signed data into the DNS to enable other technologies and other innovations.
 So it's not all about protecting against things we know about today.
 >>ROBERT HUTCHINSON:  Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  I think we need to move along.  But thank you for raising that as a question.
 Could we have the next competent, please.
 >>XUE HONG:  Thanks.  I am Xue Hong, Yale Law School.
 I want to return to IDN issues.  I have three comments from the perspective of Internet users.
 The first one has been expressed by many people.  That is, we should keep the balance between the long-term solution and short-term solution.  Although it's very important to have a long-term strategic solution on IDN, it is also important to take the risk and move ahead.  Especially if we Internet users have been waiting for so long time, so many years.  It's not acceptable to further delay the process, especially long-term delay.
 The second point is that I suggest we should keep the balance between commercial interest and social and cultural values.  I remember early in 2001, six years ago, in the first round ICANN IDN public consultation, many people raised the issue that IDNs are much more than Internet identifiers.  It is more a culture or a social identity showing.
 In that case, I suggest ICANN should not only respect but also encourage those small-scale, noncommercial and community-based IDN registration services in the future implementation.
 The last point is that Internet user community really want to be more involved in the policy-making because it's directly relevant to their interest.  And I've seen that both GNSO and ccNSO are working very closely with GAC.  But we can't see the similar working model with ALAC.
 So I wonder whether these two SOs are going to provide more direct channels for user input and user participation.
 Thanks.
 >>STEPHEN CROCKER:  Can I --
 >>VINT CERF:  Sorry?  Steve?
 [ Applause ]
 >>STEPHEN CROCKER:  Let me just add.  I am very empathetic to the points that you have raised there, but let me enlarge the picture just a bit.
 IDNs are multi-faceted, and one of the most important facets about IDN are their technical complexity.  And from a technical point of view, the right place for a lot of the work to be done is not so much in the ICANN forum but is in the IETF.
 A huge amount of work has been put into IDNs within the IETF, and more is underway and still to go.
 That forum is wide open.  It is not a matter of the GAC versus the GNSO versus other well-organized bodies.  And I would strongly encourage people who are concerned about the speed with which IDNs get worked out to also have at least some familiarity, if not strong participation, in the technology side of the matter.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you, Steve.
 Just a moment.
 Roberto.
 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  Just a quick comment.
 Building on what Steve has said, yes, I believe that what we face now is the need to sort out some technical constraints, and also to have some kind of orderly way to go to a first bid.
 I think that the board has discussed this, and we are all aware of the importance of the IDN and there's no question of principle on this.
 I think that the primary reason for having new TLDs is to offer choice.  And I think that whereas there's still the possibility with ASCII-related characters to offer even more choice to the ASCII world, we are far from providing an acceptable solution for the non-ASCII world.
 This is something that the board is aware of, but right now the problem is not to convince us of the need of introducing IDN, which we all agree, but how to define a process and how to trim the technical details in order to make this effective.
 >>VINT CERF:  Okay.  Thank you.  Thomas.
 >>THOMAS NARTEN:  Let me try to be brief but I want to raise a sort of general meta point on the technical issues regarding IDNs because we have been hearing a lot of that.
 There are some technical work that absolutely has to get done, because if it doesn't get done, the risk is we do things like allow for the creation of IDNs that go in, that people use, that later on we have to fix.  And they stop working.
 And these are exactly the kinds of things we would absolutely not want to have happen.
 That said, the technical work related to that is going on in the IETF.  It's well scoped.  It's fairly well understood.  And there is certainly a goal, if not an expectation, that it will be done in the next six months, give or take some.
 The point I want to make there is I don't think that work is really what's gating getting IDNs deployed into the root and so forth.
 There is another question that comes up that is a technical one that in the selection of strings, you have to be careful that if you choose a string to go in that it doesn't interfere with the same string or a similar string that might be used in a different language that is using the same script.  This is largely sort of a technical question, and we know how to answer that as a general rule in the sense that if we know what strings are being proposed and what languages and what scripts, there are people you can ask to get that resolved.
 So what I am trying to say is there are two steps that absolutely have to take place before anything goes in the root.  One is the IDNA work, the IDNA biz work has to complete so people know what the new standard is, people can go and implement it.  We have to do the string selection process correctly, and other technical considerations.  But those are the big ones.
 And my sort of personal view is that the really harder questions are all in the policy arena and not on the technical side.  Because the technical -- in terms of where we are heading from the technology will be done most likely before all the policy things are really worked out on the major things.
 So when I hear things like we need a short-term fix and let's not wait for the long-term solution, from a technical perspective, we're not trying to hold back things for a long-term solution that's going to take a long time to get there.  We are talking about a fairly short time frame to complete the main technical work.
 >>VINT CERF:  Paul, I see your hand is up.
 Let me remind everyone that we're deep into delay for completing all the other material on the agenda.
 Paul.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  Well, I wonder if I can just ask a question that I have no doubt is in the minds of others in the room related to what you just said, Thomas.  And if we get a proposal from the ccNSO and the GAC and others for some sort of interim move on some territories related to the ISO 3166 part 1 list for some sort of IDN ccTLD, but with a longer term policy issue which seems it will take -- I think Janis was indicating -- two years, how do you see the timing between and the conditions that should apply to any potential opening as it relates to the two processes you referred to in the technical arena?
 >>THOMAS NARTEN:  Well, the -- in terms of if you have a specific string, the question that needs to be answered and say is that string safe.  And it's easy to look at a string and say yeah, there are no issues with this one but there are others in a borderline area where you are less sure, so it depends entirely which string is actually selected and in which language and which character set and so forth.  So you can't give an absolute yes-or-no answer, but it's pretty quick to come up with an answer that says this one appears to be safe or there are questions about this one.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  So would it be possible and would you -- I'm not asking you to speak on behalf of the IETF per se, but would it be possible to have part of the process which would, if we were to go down the path that seems to be emerging, and let's say we were to receive requests from, say, something like 10 or 11 or 12 or something like that number, would you feel it's safe to have a review process on those strings?  That some grouping with the IETF would be able to look at that and say they are say or there is a question?  You know, like on ten strings or 12 strings?
 >>THOMAS NARTEN:  I'm not sure it's the IETF per se that would do this but I think there are relevant experts that can be found.  And some of them are in the character set -- or in the scripting community.
 But I think the answer is yes that we can get answers to those questions in a relatively short time frame.
 It's not open-ended.
 >>VINT CERF:  Steve.
 >>STEPHEN CROCKER:  Let me add that implicit in what you are saying, and I know that you are sensitive to this, but for the benefit of everybody, there are roughly two different kinds of questions to ask.  One is on the a per-string basis are there any given issues.  And then the other is on the system of strings, because one could get a positive answer, for example, on each of a very large number of strings but as a collection, they might have some different properties which would be very troublesome.
 So one has to have both of those in view.
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  Things like confusingly similar aspects, I assume.
 >>STEPHEN CROCKER:  Yeah, all sorts of problems.
 >>VINT CERF:  Folks, we need to move ahead.
 Please.
 >>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  Thank you.  Bruce, a quick question.  New IDNs, when is and how much?
 No, I'm kidding.
 [ Laughter ]
 >>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  With respect to the TLDs, I was interested in the comments one of the board members, Roberto, I think it was, said with respect to dot Berlin and their potential use of existing gTLD registries.  I brought up this idea in Lisbon, I believe with Kurt during the public forum, and would like to stress the point again of pre-accreditation of gTLD registries.  
 I believe pre-accreditation would promote vital competition at the gTLD registry level, and also, importantly, ease the burden of the evaluation process if the technical component was performed separately.
 Does the board foresee any issues with such separation of the process?  And more specifically potentially to Bruce, having been closely involved up until now, has this been a consideration?
 >>VINT CERF:  That's actually a pretty interesting idea.
 Bruce.
 >>BRUCE TONKIN:  Yeah, I think the quick answer to that, Adrian, is yes, it was discussed in the new gTLD committee.  I think there is an evaluation process and you would expect that the technical part of the evaluation if it was a registry operator that would take all of about five minutes.
 I don't think it needs to be dealt with any further than it is in the existing policy.
 >>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  When you say already known registry operator, I am saying for those who aren't known, how do they get known?
 >>BRUCE TONKIN:  Then they would be evaluated the first time.  So imagine you have got, say, ten applications and five of them were using the same registry operator.  Well, the first time you do the evaluation for the first of those ten, of that registry operator, you are doing a technical evaluation of them.  Once you have evaluated them, you don't need to spend hours doing it for the second and third and fifth application.
 >>ADRIAN KINDERIS:  I understand but you are talking about doing that within the evaluation process.  What I am say, potentially we know where the technical goal posts are right now.  Why not start a process whereby in order to promote competition, whether they are ccTLD registries or other people who potentially want to be registries, organizations can start that accreditation process.
 >>BRUCE TONKIN:  You are talking about --
 >>VINT CERF:  He is saying pre- accreditation, and this is not too different than a registrar wanting to become an accredited registrar.  It's a very interesting thought.
 Welcome.
 >>ELLIOT NOSS:  Elliot Noss, Tucows.  I feel compelled to note that between now and the next time we all get together in Los Angeles at the end of October, beginning of November, perhaps the most significant and impactful event in ICANN's history will have taken place.
 On October 15th, the price of a dot com will increase for the first time since ICANN's formation.
 There, or shortly thereafter, the price of every other major gTLD will also increase.
 I have been involved in the domain name policy process predating ICANN.  Like a lot of people in this room, some of you who are up on the dais now, the involvement dates back to the original CORE process in 1998.
 In my view, there is no more impactful decision as it relates to domain name policy, domain name economics.  And because of those two things, the impact on Internet users and the decision to allow a price increase in dot com.
 I would like to note that still, to this day, the justifications for that have been pragmatic and operational.
 To this day, nobody at a staff level, at a board level, on any level has stood up and said that that decision and what flowed from it was good policy, was good stewardship, was good for the Internet or for Internet users.
 What we saw subsequent to that was exactly what all of us feared.  VeriSign, and I want to be clear about this, in no way do I bring this on VeriSign's doorstep, they are a business doing what businesses should do.  VeriSign won -- Let me take a step back.
 There was a series of compromises made in the previous dot com contract renegotiation.  I have referred to them loosely as a win-loose-draw.  We win a com renewal.  We effectively lose org.  And we get a draw around net in the sense that that will be a fair and open bid process.
 VeriSign won that dot net rebid.  And to a great extent, they won it on the basis of a price reduction.
 It was nearly immediately thereafter that that dot net price that won that bid -- again, as well as every other gTLD registry -- sheltered under that dot com decision and had their prices increased.
 I don't think there's anyone at a staff or a board level who would stand up today and say, if they knew that the price of dot net was going to increase, that VeriSign would have won that bid.  I don't think there is any bidder in that dot net rebid process that if they knew they had the opportunity to increase the price and could have made price certainty a part of their bid would not have included it.
 I can say as somebody who participated in one of those bids, I would have happily done so.
 What's done is done.
 Here we are.
 When we do as we have done today, spend all of our time -- which is what people do, it's what I do when I go back to my business -- on the little things, the important little things, the little operational details that we all can get very absorbed in, we often lose sight of the bigger things.
 We all know that in the long term, we will not be remembered for the little things.  We will be remembered for the big things.  And I want to be very clear, again, that in all of my time in domain name policy, there is no single bigger thing that has taken place than that price increase.
 I think that that creates -- First I want us all to take note of that.
 Second, I want everybody who is part of the ICANN community, everybody, staff, board, people here, to take note of that.  And what we should all take away from that is that we owe something to Internet users because of that.
 We owe them stewardship.  We owe them the consideration and the care to recognize why we are all here.
 It's not about the little thing.  It's about the big things.
 Last point.  A lot of you know I'm here with my son today, and he is purporting -- and I can't question his bona fides or not -- he is purporting to speak for over the 100 million Internet users 12 and younger.  And he has made it clear that he not only supports my comments today --
 [ Laughter ]
 >>ELLIOT NOSS:  -- but also wants to note I'm going to be riding off into the sunset at some point, and he is going to spend the rest of his Internet-using days paying for that decision.
 Thank you.
 [ Applause ]
 >>VINT CERF:  Elliot, I can't resist -- I cannot resist observing that the subtext behind this might be that you made him pay for his domain name and now he wants an increase in his allowance to cover that 7% extra cost
 [ Laughter ]
 >>VINT CERF:  I would like to suggest something to you, though.  Your point earlier about how long it's been that the price stayed fix has a slightly different interpretation to it.  And the inflation is still non-zero.  
 So if you figure out a 7% increase over a 15-year period, that doesn't sound so terrible, does it?
 >>ELLIOT NOSS:  Let's parse that in a couple ways.  That would be important and relevant in this discussion if there was anybody standing up and saying that the price increase was cost-justified or would be justified in an open and fair market.
 You know, I didn't want to go here.  You've opened the door for it.
 There is no question that the largest providers of DNS -- and I've spoken to them -- in the world would happily do dot com at 50 cents a name.  There is no question that the largest providers of registry and registry-type services would happily do dot com probably without the DNS in the 50-cent to a dollar range.
 I would -- boy, if you take DNS out of it, you know, I made a public comment that I'd do both for $2 years ago, Vint.  I'll do that without DNS for 50 cents today.
 Inflation throughout, you know, the world economy today is at 2 or 3%, not 7%.
 The cost elements of provisioning DNS have done nothing but go down.  MIPS, bandwidth, every element of it, storage, et cetera.
 So while I understand the convenience of that thinking, I think that it doesn't hold up under even the simplest analysis, a 40-watt bulb, forget about a 100-watt bulb.
 >>VINT CERF:  Roberto.
 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  Thank you.  A couple of things I would like to do.
 I don't want to get into the what we did, did we do something wrong, or was it -- I mean, it's --
 >>ELLIOT NOSS:And I hope you didn't --
 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  It's done, and it's done.  And I think that we have to turn the page.
 I would only remind that there has been an overheated debate in the board in all instances that you were talking about, the renewal of dot com, the delegation of the dot net, the renewal of the contract, and so on.  
 Those are things that you -- people take different points of view.  And then at one point in time, we take a vote.  And we have to take the responsibility for what has been done.
 I hope that everybody agrees that the board has taken a decision and will stand after that decision, behind that decision.  That decision was controversial, and everyone in good faith has done what they thought was best.
 But I would like to add two points.  The first point is that when I first joined the Internet community in policy-making, there was only one TLD operator.  And the cost of a domain name was $50, including the $15, whatever you call the tax or whatever.
 And it's true, it's the first time that the price of a domain name in dot com has gone up.  But for many, many years, it has been really slashed down.
 So I think that all over, in terms of being an Internet user myself, I see, globally, a positive intervention of the presence of ICANN over the years.  If we consider this, you know, as a global period.
 Of course, I would be worried, and I believe you are worried, and I'm worried myself, if that will mark an inversion in the tendency.  So domain has gone down.  And now we are talking about a few cents going up four times over six years or whatever it is, this kind of mechanism.
 But it's still something that we have to keep under control.
 The second comment related to this is that we still don't know what the effect of this raise in price is.
 And I think that on the 15th of October, what I would propose is to keep an eye on what happens.  Because how much of that -- different registrars have different business models.  I don't have to explain that to you, I think.
 So some of the registrars will absorb the cost.  Some will pass it to the users.  There will be things that are happening due to this increase in fees.  And I would like to kind of propose that we make an analysis in the months immediately following the 15th of October to understand better how this reflects and who is going to really pay for this and what is the effect of this raise, what effect it has on some of the registrars that have the business model that is bringing to absorb the -- those 42 cents, what is the effect on ultimately users if it affects the market?  Is there going to fall on -- you know, all these kind of things.  I don't want to make it long, because the chairman is --
 >>VINT CERF:  I'm looking at my watch.
 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  -- looking at --
 So, anyway, but you understand the point.
 I agree with your concerns.  But I would like to take a view that on one hand, you know, you trust the board having discussed this and having taken a decision that we all take the responsibility for.  And on the other hand, we look to the future to evaluate what the impact of that decision really is, because as of today, we don't know.
 >>ELLIOT NOSS:  Very briefly, I assure you, Vint.
 Roberto, you and I met in that same room in 1998 that a bunch of people in this room did.
 At that time, and as COM prices were what they were then, there was a small fraction of the number of users of the Internet who were impacted by those prices, roughly 10% of dot com registrations then versus now.
 So I don't think on a macro level we can just look at that price in isolation.
 And the second point I'd make is that there is no question about, you know, when you talk about studying the impact, there is no question about what will happen.  There will be a massive wealth transfer from the competitive portion of the industry to the monopoly portion.  And that will result inexorably in reduced profits, reduced health, reduced support, and reduced experience for end users.
 I don't think that needs to be studied.  You know, I live in that world, and those people who have to deal with that are my customers.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Okay, Elliot.  Thank you.
 Let's go on now to the next comment.
 I'm sorry, one other administrative observation.
 We are now so far behind that we have only about 20 minutes left.
 We also have a very important RALO event at noon, and there's no way to postpone that, because the parties who have to be part of that have to leave at 12:15.
 So we are going to complete -- I'm sorry.  We -- I'm seeing extra people coming up in the line.  I asked to close --
 >>KHALED FATTAL:  I tried.  I'm not the enforcer.
 >>VINT CERF:  I'm not looking at you.  But I'm looking at all these other people.
 So here's what's going to happen.  We'll complete this queue.  I do not want to accept any more questions from the queue after the last person now standing there.
 >> Rita.
 [ Laughter ]
 >>VINT CERF:  And I am actually not going to go through any of the reports that we had originally scheduled.  If there is any time, I will call on one or two of them that I consider to be most critical.  And otherwise, we'll just have to end.
 Please.
 >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH:  Hi.  My name is Evan Leibovitch.  I'm with the Canadian Association for Open Source, just down the road from Elliot, but, basically, a generation away in terms of our lifetime here.  
 I'm proud to be one of the members of the new North American RALO.  And we've been moving very quickly.  I'm very happy to be here with my first meeting.  There's been some real interesting eye openers happening over the last couple of days, you know, including the session yesterday with the "Keep the Core Neutral" thing and so much that's going on.
 But I have one specific question.  And Elliot sort of touched on it, but I'll bring it into a different form.
 When we were looking around the room, we sort of noted the median age of this audience is sort of not quite the median age of the users of the Internet.  And so what I would like to suggest is the possibility of extending the fellowship program to extend a youth component that would not be limited just to the developing world, but would encourage youth from everywhere to participate in the process.
 Keep it short.  That's it.
 >>VINT CERF:  I've always wanted to have a panel of 13-year-old.
 [ Applause ]
 >>VINT CERF:  -- to participate in these discussions to give us an idea of what's the Net going to be like five years from now.  Yes, sir.
 >>J. SCOTT EVANS:  My name is J. Scott Evans, and I'm from the International Trademark Association, where I serve on the board of directors on the executive committee.  I only have two comments.
 First, I would ask that in our next meeting in L.A., that the meetings committee make a real effort to make sure that when groups that are not necessarily speaking for the board or the organization in formality, such as some of the workshops that happened, make it clear that they are presenting viewpoints, divergent viewpoints on devisive issues and are not necessarily presenting a neutral format of education.
 I went to a format yesterday, it was not an -- it was health by the NCUC.  And a gentleman stood up and said, thank you so much for educating me on trademark law.
 Now, while the professor who presented was an expert, she gave a very slanted view directed towards a political issue.  And this gentleman thought he was being neutrally educated on a topic.  So it needs to be clear that these are not necessarily educational opportunities; they are lobbying opportunities to present viewpoints.
 That's first.
 Secondly, I just want to say to the full board, it's been several years since I've been here -- and I said this the other morning at the breakfast -- congratulations on how far ICANN has come and how much you have done.
 You all should be very proud of yourselves.
 And you all should be very proud of yourselves.  This organization has matured.  It has so much success, with the communications with Kieren being involved, with Stacy being on board and getting onto contract compliance.
 Thank you so very much.  Please continue the good work.  Please continue to devolve -- I just want someone to say, there is so much negativity when they talk about ICANN and there's so much positive going on.  Thank you.
 [ Applause ]
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you.  Khaled.
 >>KHALED FATTAL:  Actually, Rita, Vint.
 >>VINT CERF:  Okay.Rita.
 >>KHALED FATTAL:  You started it.  And I was not born on saint Rita's day, by the way.
 >>RITA RODIN:  Am I going to need a good trademark lawyer out there to help me protect my name?
 >>KHALED FATTAL:  On a serious note, IDNs, IDNs, IDNs.
 --
 >> (inaudible).
 >>KHALED FATTAL:  Something like that, yes.
 I'm speaking to you here with the many hats that I actually wear.  As chairman and CEO of MINC, CEO of live multilingual translator.  Member on ICANN committee on IDNs, active member of the Arabic community, active member of the ICANN community and citizen of the international community whose native language is not English.
 >>VINT CERF:  So can you slow down a little bit so that the transcribers can keep up with you.
 >>KHALED FATTAL:  It's all right.  I'll provide them the text.
 The reason for this elaborate description, Vint, is what I am going to be discussing and proposing to the ICANN board, there's an element of validity and credibility behind it.
 I recognize the daunting technical task ahead of us for implementation of IDNs.  That's conceded.  I recognize that.
 But there's a bigger issue here at hand, and I think the only people that can really address it and resolve it and put it in its proper context, it is the ICANN board.
 And here I'm going to pose the question to you, and I'm going to put it in the simplest format as possible.
 What are IDNs meant to achieve and whom are they meant to serve first and foremost?  I want you to consider this individually as ICANN board members.  I want you to consider it collectively as a board of a highly respected international organization.
 Why this is exceptionally important, and why it is on your table and not any other subcommittee, in my opinion, it is because that clarity would go very far to put at rest many minds, in the hundreds of millions, in understanding what IDNs are supposed to achieve.
 I believe that IDNs are meant to be seen, used, and viewed as a tool to enable communities and language communities around the world that have been left out of the Internet because of the English -- of the language barrier, for no other reason than it has been that's the way it was.
 But at least we need to recognize that's really what the objective is.
 I actually believe that -- and I would put the challenge to the ICANN board members individually, knowing that they are -- their role is that of leadership -- if the ICANN board was to actually propose this and adopt it as a resolution and making it as a mission of ICANN in deployment of IDNs, I will put it to you that you would have a far greater chance of bringing in believers in the system than doubters.  If we can put it to rest that IDNs are meant to bring in those communities from the dark into the Internet world and that it's meant to be first and foremost -- I didn't say "exclusively," but first and foremost -- to help them come into this phenomenon, then you will have a far greater chance of success, knowing how daunting the challenge is.
 And on a last point, I think if the wisdom of the ICANN board to go that far can be seen ASAP, the challenges that are equally daunting, if not more daunting for the subcommittees, and the other tracks, like the GNSO and the ccNSO, in recognizing what needs to be discussed, what needs to be debated, and what course to be taken, would put things in a big perspective.
 And on a final note, so that it does not appear as if I am singling out those who actually hope to make benefit or profit from IDNs, I say if your role can actually help empower and bring in those communities and you can make money, I salute you.  That's my final comment.
 Thank you very much.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Khaled.
 [ Applause ]
 >>VINT CERF:  Could we have the next comment.
 >>MHAMED KHADAD:  Thank you, my name is Mhamed Khadad, I am from western Sahara.  My community introduced in November 2005 a demand for delegation of dot EH for the community.
 We know that Western Sahara is still no (inaudible) territory like Guam, Gibraltar and Falkland Islands and other 13 territories which are enjoying their own domain.  And since we have introduced our demand, we have not received a response.
 Thank you very much.
 >>VINT CERF:Thank you very much for keeping your comments so brief.  We appreciate it very much.
 I can assure you that the board is well aware of the desire for that part of the world to be part of the Internet.
 May we have the next comment, please.
 >>GAO MOSWEU:  Excuse me.  My name is Gao Mosweu from Botswana.
 I just want to say a big thank you to the ICANN for the fellowship program.  And the way ICANN is taking it very seriously.
 As a beneficiary of this program, I am simply thrilled at the opportunity to be here.  And I appreciate the amount of work that has gone on pre the fellowship program and I believe it wasn't easy.  But they did it nonetheless.
 I also thank GAC for the scheme to develop fellowship participants.
 Coming from a developing country where not a lot is going on in terms of Internet governance and ICANN issues and particularly ICTs in general, it's been a great opportunity for me to be here.  And I take back with me a wealth of knowledge that I have got from this conference.
 And besides having taken a picture with Vint
 [ Laughter ]
 >>GAO MOSWEU:  From my communications background, I believe that initiatives like these are quintessential to building human resource capacity, and I'd just like to see more support and capacity building programs in developing countries.
 Thank you.
 [ Applause ]
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much.
 Next comment, please.
 >>VANDA SCARTEZINI:  Vint, just a few comments.
 >>FARHANE AZZEDDINE:Thank you, Mr. Chair.  My name is Farhane Azzeddine from Morocco.  I am representing the Morocco in the GAC.
 While I haven't the intention to take the floor about the issue of EH but I take the floor for the simple reason to inform the board and all the participants that Morocco has requested also the delegation of EH, and we trust the board, we know ICANN has two requests, and we know that ICANN board will take the wise decision.
 Thank you very much.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you.
 >>VANDA SCARTEZINI:  Vint?
 >>VINT CERF:  Marilyn, you have the last word -- I'm sorry.  I beg your pardon, Vanda.  Go ahead.
 >>VANDA SCARTEZINI:  Just a little comment about the first thank you, the fellow from the Botswana.  And I just remark that we have in this fellowship program 24 countries here represented.  And some of those are governments, some of those are ccTLD managers, and the rest is people that is keen to participate in that.
 And one small feedback from those that asked for small kids, you know, or teenagers, we just discussed with the idea to have some training in more technical issues, so allow, you know, people from 18, 17, 20 years to participate and get more knowledge, technical knowledge for the future generation on those under development in developing area.
 Thank you.
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you, Vanda.
 Marilyn.
 >>MARILYN CADE:  Thank you.  My comments relate to discussions that have gone on throughout this week and reports that were published that are, I think, the subject of ongoing input and comment.
 Primarily the issue of accountability mechanisms.
 And I do this by noting that as a volunteer, a former council member, I am incredibly impressed by the amount of work that everyone does at ICANN.
 I know from my own volunteer work as a councillor and the additional involvement that I sought to have that I can only, as busy as I thought I was, I cannot by any means suggest that I touch the amount of work that our board members are expected to do.
 As we see, and as we have heard all week, this organization is maturing.  And the demands on our board members are maturing.
 I think that what I'd like to do is to link the demands we make on our board members, the increasing, broadening scope of ICANN's need to be broadly representative and the concrete proposal I would like for the board to consider.
 I think it's time for us to recognize that as a maturing organization and an organization that makes very deep demands on time and on participation of our board members, that we develop a compensation mechanism for the board members.
 There's a precedent for this in that while many not-for- profit organizations rely on volunteers, not all do.  Over 30% of the foundations in a council of foundations study do compensate their trustees.  As the council on foundations said responsible board service is time consuming, legal requirements are increasingly complex and potential liabilities have grown.  In many cases, compensation can facilitate participation by persons with different skill levels and those with different economic circumstances.
 We're broadening the penetration of the Internet around the world, not ICANN but the Internet itself is broadening and deepening.  But that has implications for us about our ability to attract board members who are able to devote the amount of time necessary and the concentration necessary, and develop the skills necessary to participate as potential candidates on the board and then on the board.
 I do think that any such plan would have to be carefully and responsibly structured.
 I have collected a number of examples of organizations that do compensate their trustees or their board members.  And I did a very superficial survey just to turn up that information.
 I would ask that the board quickly identify a process drawing on volunteers from the community to draft a proposed board compensation program, get it developed, get it published by September the 1st and consider it at the annual meeting in October.
 I see this, actually, as enhancing our accountability by making sure there's a mechanism for full participation from candidates from around the world.
 [ Applause ]
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you, Marilyn.
 In fact, this subject has come up, and some examination of practices and policies on other boards is already underway.
 Okay.  We have -- yes, Steve.
 >>STEVE GOLDSTEIN:  Thank you, Vint.
 I would just like to respond to the gentleman who spoke about Internationalized Domain Names.  Yes, I'm sorry, I don't remember your name.  You don't have to get up.
 >>VINT CERF:  That's Khaled Fattal.  His name is Khaled Fattal.
 >>STEVE GOLDSTEIN:  Mr. Fattal.  I think that the sentiments that you expressed are shared by every board member.  I don't think there's any dispute about that.  My own personal feeling is that the purpose of the Internationalized Domain Names would be to empower people to take advantage of the latest technology in their native language.
 So maybe those aren't exactly the words you expressed, but those would be my feelings.  And I thank you very much for having said that.
 >>KHALED FATTAL:  Actually, I would like to thank you for going on the record of expressing your position.
 I think you are really showing the international community that your role as an ICANN board member is truly that of a leadership role.  Because I actually made a mistake.  I neglected in something I wanted to do in my intervention -- I forgot to do it, but I wanted to ask each and every individual board member to express their position and their sentiment.  And by the way, it is sentiment.  I want to hear your sentiment.  The people want to hear your sentiment.  So from that point of view, it is far more than sentiment.
 It is actually an acknowledgment which can become a position by ICANN in how IDNs will be deployed.
 This is what I believe is necessary.
 Thank you, Vint, and I --
 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you, Khaled.
 Unfortunately, we won't have time to express sentiments right at the moment because we have an important action to take now.  And that's to prepare the stage for a RALO signing.
 This is the final North American RALO which puts into place the operation of ALAC as it was originally intended.
 So I'm going to call this meeting to a close.
 You will note that many topics did not get discussed that were -- and reports were not made that were originally planned.
 I'll call on all those who were planning to make those reports orally to prepare written materials and we'll put that up on the Web site for reference.  And I ask now that whoever is preparing the RALO signing, organize it now because several of us have to leave at 12:15.
 [ 12:00 ]