gTLD Registries
Constituency Meeting
ICANN Meeting
Sydney, Australia
23 June 2009

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  Francisco, do you want to introduce yourself?

>>FRANCISCO ARIAS:   Hi, my name is Francisco Arias.  I work with
ICANN, just recently joined.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   Craig Schwartz, ICANN staff.

>>BYRON HENDERSON:   Byron Henderson, dot travel.

>>NACHO AMADOZ:   Nacho Amadoz, dot CAT.

>>CAROLINE GREER:   Caroline Greer, dot mobi.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   David Maher, chair of the constituency.

>> Excuse me, Carolyn Hoover has joined.

>>CHERIE STUBBS:   Cherie Stubbs, Secretariat.  

>>CAROLYN HOOVER:   Hello?

>>CHERIE STUBBS:   Good morning, Carolyn.

>>CAROLYN HOOVER:   Good morning.  How are you?

>>CHERIE STUBBS:   Fine.  We just started.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Good morning, this is Jeff Neuman from NeuStar.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Chuck Gomes from VeriSign.

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   Michael Young from Afilias.

>>CATHERINE SIGMAR:   Catherine Sigmar, dot pro.

>>MATT BUCKLAND:   Matt Buckland, dot pro.

>>ADAM PALMER:   Adam Palmer, dot PIR.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you.  First item is the review of the agenda
and there are already a couple of items that we want to talk about. 
First is that the SIC is coming in between 10 and 11, I am hoping that
it won't be for an entire hour but it should be interesting to get an
update from them.

Second is the issue of communications, letters and other positions
taken by the GNSO Council, whether those can be done independently or
in all cases require approval by the constituencies.  And then finally,
very recent requests that Craig sent out for financial information from
registries which we, I think, will need some more information and
discussion.  Any other issues for the agenda?  The joint meeting is
going start at 4:00 p.m. and will move to the registrar room because we
hope, at least, they have more room for us.  So moving along, the first
item is the issue of registry-registrar separation.  And I know many of
you were at the economists' presentation yesterday.  They certainly did
not accept the comments of the constituency nor did they accept the
separate comments filed by PIR, Afilias and NeuStar.  Anyone want to
talk about that?  Jeff?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   I just -- this is Jeff Neuman -- you know, there are
two economists that have a certain viewpoint.  I think it's more
academic than it was based on actual knowledge.  I think there are --
were a number of facts that were not exactly right.  And I think that
this -- if this were an industry that started from scratch and started
at a blank slate I think they're probably absolutely right that
vertical integration has a number of benefits but the fact is that this
is not an industry that's starting from scratch, this is not an
industry that doesn't have a history and I think their view is,
although they said it in an economic way, they basically said that in
the long-term there's benefits to consumers and there's, quote, in the
short run there's some, quote, transition costs and so what that
essentially means is that, you know, thank you the registries that have
come into existence since -- since dot com.  We appreciate the fact
that we -- that you played by the rules and we -- but we recognize that
we probably shouldn't have set those rules for you but thank you for
living under it for 10 years.  In the long-term we're -- the
economists' view is that we want to switch it and you guys are pretty
much collateral damage.  And sorry about that.  But thanks for playing.

You know, their view is great from a, an economic standpoint if you
were starting from scratch but I think it is, as in most deregulation,
one thing they did not cite during the presentation is that most
deregulation has a transition period.  It's not as if there's, it's not
as if there's ultimately a decision and then the floodgates open up. 
There's actually usually several years in between a decision to open up
or deregulate and the actual time that, you know, deregulation is
finished.  So afterwards I did talk to the economists and they did
acknowledge -- both of them -- that neither one of them are saying that
opening up the floodgates in four months or five months or whatever it
is is the way to go.  Each of them said that this needed to be
discussed from a policy perspective but a transition period, where
something short of opening up the floodgates is probably more
desirable.  Now, I wish they made that point in front of everybody and
I'm going to ask him to make that point I'll ask them questions in
writing to make that point because I think that was kind of mussed.  I
think it was the perception of many in the room and people can say
otherwise here if they disagree, but the perception was that you should
just open up the floodgates on day one, and that's not -- that's not
necessarily their position or is it as a good position for ICANN nor is
that normal for a deregulation.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Anyone else?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Well, and one of the points, too, is that the CRA
report didn't advocate opening up floodgates either, right, which is a
point that many of you have made already so probably doesn't hurt to
reemphasize that point.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay, thank you.

>> (From the telephone)  Chuck, who do you reemphasize it to and in
what forum?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Now that Kurt just walked in maybe I'll reemphasize
the point for him.

[ Laughter ]

Kurt just walked into the room.  Kurt, we were talking about the
registry-registrar separation issue and I had a discussion with the
econ- -- with one of the economists after the session, and although
during the meeting it sounded like the economists were pushing for an
opening-up of the floodgates on day one in a few months to complete
vertical integration, they made a good point afterwards, which was that
no deregulation happens overnight.  That it's not as if you just open
up the floodgates and everything's deregulated.  Usually they go
through a several-year transition period in which maybe the end game is
the complete opening up.  But I think it was probably lost on the room,
at least from my view and from talking to others, where it seemed like
they were advocating just open up the floodgates.  So I'm going to
submit a question and -- well, and comments.  But I think one of the
points that we need to get across is that it's not necessarily opening
up floodgates day one that there needs to be some sort of transition
plan.  And it's not necessarily -- it's not the first round,
necessarily, that everything will be opened up, but maybe subsequent
ones.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   And I followed with that, Kurt, and pointed out that
the CRA report, as I understand it, did recommend a more gradual
approach to that topic and then Steve Holsten on the phone asked so who
do we make that point with and besides what we're doing right now,
Steve, I think we have this topic on the agenda with our board lunch
meeting today and I think that's another opportunity where the point
could be made.

>>KURT PRITZ:   Can I comment.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Go ahead.

>>KURT PRITZ:   So I'm loath to make a comment while the meeting's
transcribed.  But my personal take away, and I'm not at the best at
ICANN at listening or understanding, is that the economists said there
could be good effects or bad effects to any scenario, and that so given
some study if this is decided, then that would be a good effect and if
this is decided it would be a bad effect.  So my takeaway was to go
through the transcript and try to distill down those questions that the
economists said needed to be answered.  You know, if it is found this
is the case, then, you know, then there's possible effects to
integration.  If this is the case then there's negative effects.

So it seems like they posed that conclusion, they drew conclusions
based on unanswered questions that still needed to be answered and I
think still going forward is to parse through that transcript and try
to distill those questions down and write them down on a piece of paper.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you.

>>STEVE HOLSTEN:   This is Steve Holsten on the phone.  I agree with
what you just said, Kurt, my take away from all of this is when they're
looking at antitrust analysis and this rule of reason analysis that it
is all fact-based and when people pose different questions about
loopholes or gaming or various scenarios, they did not seem to be
equipped with all of the facts to know whether that was a good idea or
a bad idea but rather, that it all needed to be submitted for factual
investigation.  So my takeaway was that they seemed to think that this
was a ways out, that they still needed to analyze this.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you.

>>ADAM PALMER:   This is Adam from PIR.  I also wanted to make an
additional comment, Kurt, to follow up on what Jeff has said and maybe
to agree with you, Kurt, was that I felt that there was a great deal of
speculation yesterday and some very academic sort of theories being
suggested.  And I would urge, I guess, ICANN and I think it would be
prudent before any decision is made at least, and I think ICANN should
be the one, or should have responsibility to do it, to study these
questions and what I'd like to see as opposed to CRA report is a more --
at least some economic study that contains some real empirical data on
what the market is and as we're talking about fact-based rather than
sort of the academic theory, speculation than sometimes we've seen in
the past from the CRA report in particular.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Michael?

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   The other thing I think would be really useful to
see, and I really support what Adam's saying here, is actually some
analysis and empirical data analysis on secondary market.  We keep
discussing this whole issue about there's -- as if there's only a
primary market here.  And there isn't.  We all know that secondary
markets can destabilize primary markets as well, we know from badly
designed mortgage--backed securities in the last year can throw off
primary markets quite severely so if we don't understand what these
changes will do to secondary marketplaces in the domain industry, how
do we know that that might not cause a severe instability?

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thanks.

>>EDMON CHUNG:   Edmon.  Just a quick comment, actually.  Before I
talk about it, though, I want to make sure that we -- what I'm talking
about is not saying that this should be applied to the ccTLDs, but that
being said I think it may be worthwhile to take a look at the ccTLD
markets and how the dynamics pan out in those markets because so far
studies and even economists have never looked at it that way.  We had a
discussion yesterday about, you know, that -- that it's not the U.S.
market that we're talking about, it's the global market.  But the point
of which is that within a particular market, what the dynamics are and
if we are doing studies, perhaps the experience at the ccTLDs might
give us a better view of what might happen if certain things -- you
know, if we do certain things.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you.  Anyone else?  If not we can move on to
the next subject which is back to you, Edmon on the quick start.

>>EDMON CHUNG:   Okay.  Well, we've talked about this quick start or
fast track or whatever you want to call it for a number of times now
and since Mexico, well, right after Mexico, a drafting team was put
together at the GNSO Council to take a look at the possibility of
creating a charter for an IDN gTLD fast track process.  I think the
discussion went to -- multiple ways, I would say.  Until recently,
there was -- there was increased debate in the last couple, couple
weeks.  What it seems to come down to is an understanding that there's
one particular strong view that's somewhat shared by most people in
GNSO and has been -- has been expressed in previous statements and that
is that there should be, you know, not in exact words but there should
be some parity between the time when the IDN gTLDs and the IDN ccTLDs
are introduced into the root.  We understand that there are technical
issues for, you know, exactly the same time but I think what we're
talking about is reasonable and acceptable time difference for the two -
- for new IDN ccTLDs and new IDN gTLDs to be introduced into the root.

So instead of taking down -- going down the path of a quick start, I
think what seems to be emerging as a position, a point of departure,
that the group may be willing to go forward with is to find feasible
methods to address the issue of the -- the parity issue specifically. 
So instead of saying that we are looking into a fast track, the group
seems -- it seems to be better to say we'll create a group that will
investigate an option and one of the options being a fast track, to --
quick start, on this issue of trying to introduce IDN ccTLDs and IDN
gTLDs at around the same time.

And there's another option which is to get a -- get a mutual
understanding with the ccTLDs to say that we are okay to have them
together.  The policies and the process for each side would continue,
but then the technical implementation in the root would happen at the
approximate same time frame.

So that was -- that was where the group was heading, I think.  I think
Chuck probably can add more.

The other part of which, which sort of came out, was also that we
realize that there are certain number of items that are -- that are of
common interest between gTLDs and ccTLDs.  And they include, for
example, one of which is the IDNA standard revision.  Both the GNSO
recommendations and the IDN C, which is a fast track recommendations,
clearly said in the policy, well, in the recommendation papers, that we
must wait for the IDNA protocol revision to be done for it to be
implemented into the root.

There has been discussion recently whether that is required.  And I
guess without clear direction from either the GNSO or -- and the ccNSO
with similar group in creating a paper in -- in contrast to what is
currently the position of both SOs, it's probably hard for -- for staff
to reverse this policy directive.  So this may be one common interest
point that we want to address together.

The other common interest points are potentially variant management. 
Again, both the IDNC working group and the GNSO recommendations have
said that ICANN should abide by the IDN -- IDN guidelines and which
talks about IDN language tables.  But what has not been talked about is
how these IDN language tables are implemented on the -- in the root. 
And this is also a common interest between the ccTLDs and gTLDs.  So
what -- this brings me to a discussion that we -- there -- during the
lunch, the GNSO-ccNSO lunch earlier in the week, we talked about a
potential joint working group of some sort to address these issues on --
in one whole basket, including the issue of parity, including the issue
of a common -- issues of common interest.  So that's sort of where we
are.  I think, you know, for right now, I think this seems to be a good
approach and seems like it could be supported by most of the GNSO and
potentially the ccNSO as well.  So in terms of the approach with --
with the issue.  Chuck you might want to --

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah, one of the things that would be helpful for
Edmon and I, don't know whether George is going to be able to call in
on the council meeting tomorrow or not, but we're going to talk about
this topic.  There will not be any action.  So I want to be really
clear on that.  Edmon will be taking the lead on this and share what --
just like he did here and what was discussed in the little working team
or drafting team or whatever we are that happened over the weekend.

But it would be really helpful to have a feel where people's thinking
is on this.  Because in our last call, as you know, I was caught kind
of off guard by some changes in position with regard to this whole
issue of trying to close the gap between IDN ccTLDs and IDN gTLDs.  So
really appreciate it if we have -- if we can get enough feedback here
so that we participate in a way that we represent the views of the
constituency and that doesn't mean everybody in the constituency has to
have the same view, but we need to know that as councillors.

Now, I think what we're looking at and I'm glad Kurt's here, it's
always fun putting Kurt on the stop when it's being transcribed.

[ Laughter ]

But with regard to new gTLDs, I think what we're seeing based on
information that Kurt shared this weekend is that we're probably, you
know, applications may -- this is a "may" -- may be, you know, received
starting in February, I think is what you're estimating right now and
for applicants that have no objections, no contention, nothing like
that, you're probably talking, what, six to seven months until they get
into the root and then if there's contention it will be even longer. 
Well, let's just use the six to seven months, let's just use the short
one, six months.  So we're talking fall of 2010 when gTLDs would get in
the root.  Now, it's possible -- I don't think it's very likely, but
it's possible -- the IDN fast track won't kick off until then, but
there's at least three countries that are going to be very upset if
they're not in the root a lot sooner than that, and so that's an issue.
And the cc process likely will be much simpler than the g process.  So
do we care about that?  Do we want to try and shorten that gap?

In the past, up until our last teleconference call, we seemed to want
to do that but there was some objection to that that I understood in
the last call, so it would be nice to hear from the rest of you.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Anyone want to comment on that?

Are we going to be circulating a sign-up list for a working group? 
What is the next step?

>>EDMON CHUNG:  The next step seems to be unclear at this point: 
There are two -- I've had a chance to chat with Avri about it.  I was
going to talk to Chuck about it as well.  But we can talk about it
here.  In the GNSO ccNSO lunch, we talked about creating a joint
working group.  In the GNSO, so far, we have talked about putting a
request in to -- in to the board to create a working group so that, you
know, we could coordinate between the GNSO and ccNSO.  The question is
which direction is better or we do both?  In terms of our -- inside the
constituency, I think the -- right now the drafting team is not
exclusive to the council members.  Anybody really can join and
participate in creating the group.  I think the -- as Chuck mentioned,
no action is likely going to be taken in this week except that we would
continue the drafting team and, hopefully, produce a motion that could
be tabled at the next meeting.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  Thank you.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   Just add one more thing.  I forgot an important
thing that a few people reminded me very strongly recently about this
issue.  And that's -- we have been -- well, at least myself has been
focused perhaps too much on the process of which -- and have not
emphasized enough the user experience and how that -- you know, the --
and the user expectation for these IDN TLDs whether they're new IDN
ccTLDs or new IDN gTLDs.  And there's a strong -- we know, but I sort
of took it for granted that there is a -- it's important to understand
that there is a user expectation of consistency.  And, when they see
IDN ccTLDs, they expect IDN gTLDs to be there as well.  And I think
this is -- this is an important starting point for this -- perhaps an
important starting point for us to, you know, to lay the background and
the groundwork for this particular work and not be lost in just the
processes.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  Thank you.  I want to interrupt the agenda
to let you know that both Chuck and I have sent around a message from
ICANN regarding our stakeholder charter.  And when the SIC people come
in, it's what they're going to be talking about.  The good news that,
at least from a very quick glance, at it is that our charter is pretty
much been accepted and we'll -- but I wanted to alert you, if you are
on e-mail, you'll see a message from me or Chuck or both.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   David, in that regard, when we finish that topic, if
you want me to quickly highlight the major changes -- I've been
skimming the changes. You're right.  Your assessment, I think, is right
on target.  But I'd be happy to do that once we finish the topic we're
on.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   I think we're moving on to IRT.  Do you want to
go ahead?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Just one more question on the IDN issue.  Does
anyone object to Edmon and I participating in this drafting team and? 
Of course anyone else is welcome to participate on that drafting team
as well.  It's open.  So is there any objection to us doing that?

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Not from me.  Anyone?

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   And pushing it forward, I guess, is implied.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   Any time you guys want to do more work is good with
me.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Amen.  Okay, Chuck, do you want to comment on the
charter?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   If you can pull it up, the attachment, Denise's e-
mail summarizes the changes quite well.  If you want to pull up the
attachment, it's a nice red line.  What they did, first of all, is
instead of talking about voluntary constituencies as they had in our
stakeholder group charter, they changed that to voluntary interest
groups.  So any time there was a constituency used, the -- it's now a --
an interest group.  And an interest groups don't require board
approval.  So my understanding is that they're recommending the same
thing for registrars.  So on the contracted side of the house they're
not looking to continue what they've been doing in board-approved
constituencies.  Dirk, did you get this?  Did you get this in an e-mail?

 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:   I don't think so.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   David, can you forward it to Dirk so that he has it,
too.  Because it's very important to you guys.  And any other potential
constituencies.  So the -- and they're going to explain that to us in a
little bit.  The -- they also added the concept of an executive
committee.  Now we had a leadership committee.  And the executive
committee, they actually added a whole section.  You'll see starting on
-- what page is that?  Page 6 -- that they actually inserted EC
responsibility.  So you may want to glance through that, which is
totally new.  We haven't functioned under an executive committee.

And my understanding of, I think, Denise's note there was that what
they're trying to do is to have this kind of consistent across all
stakeholder groups.

Going down from there, they pretty much -- now, look at elections,
section 7 on page 8, you'll see they added a sentence there, "In order
to promote broad representational diversity in accordance with
principles contained in the ICANN bylaws, no more than one of the
elected RISG council representatives may come from the same geographic
region as defined in the ICANN bylaws."  So I'm not sure that's what's
going to come out of the geographical names requirements in the council
or not.  But we can talk about that.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   Just looking at the executive committee, I know they
put in there, but I don't -- we'll talk about it with the SIC.  But
right here it says that the EC shall, if requested by the board, select
Nominating Committee members and do some other things that I don't
think we want to give that power to.  So we need to ask them to clarify
that.  It's almost like they're making -- they want to make an EC so
they can communicate want EC as opposed to the whole stakeholder group.
I'm fine with having an executive committee to help manage things.  But
I'm not fine for an executive committee, especially amongst in our
group, which is we're all competitors to have an executive committee
that gets any kind of power above and beyond administrative.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   As long as you're on it.  

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   Except if I'm on it, of course.  I totally agree.  I
think we're going to have to ask some questions in that section and get
some clarity.  But, David, that's all -- I don't want to spend any more
time on that, but I wanted to alert people so it will help with the
conversation as they come in.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   That's good.  Thanks.  I think we ought to move
along to the IRT then.  One question I have:  Is the IRT, is a group
planning to come and speak to us today or not?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   During the registry-registrar meeting they're going
to do a group presentation.  I just thought it was -- we didn't need it
for the registry constituency since we pretty much have been on the
ball.  Yeah.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   I agree.  Okay.  The one issue, though, that
faces us and that is the draft comments that were circulated by Steve
Holsten, which I have read over and I haven't had a real opportunity to
suggest edits, is -- one comment that I've been hearing from people --
and I'm not sure it's reflected in the draft.  And that is that there's
a entire philosophy in the IRT report of putting more burdens on the
registries as opposed to the UDRP, for example, where it's strictly a
registrar function and the -- when a decision is made, the registry,
obviously, has to take action to remove a name from the zone file.

But can you comment on that, Jeff?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   I think that's an accurate assessment.  There is --
given the IP owners' issues with a number of registrars and what they
view as a lack of enforcement by ICANN, either for whatever reason
either ICANN doesn't -- RAA have the ability to do the enforcement they
want or they haven't done it willingly, there's a view that having this
done by registrar would just exacerbate existing problems especially
given the poor track record of some of the registrars.  So centralizing
it at registry level was something that was extremely important to the
intellectual property representatives on the IRT.  And -- but in that
same vein, the really only thing that's required of the registry is to,
once handed a decision, is to -- I'm sorry, there's two things.  One is
to actually lock or -- they call it freeze the name once a case is
filed under the uniform rapid suspension.  And then, if there's a
decision issued by the panelists to basically take the nameserver
information and substitute different nameserver information,
essentially pointing it to a provider site whereby they would post a
web page stating that the name had been taken down.  I forgot the exact
language, but essentially taken down through to a URS decision.  And
other than that, I mean, there may be other things and I'm just not
remembering off the top of my head.  But there is definitely more of an
emphasis of placing that burden on the registry as opposed to the
registrar.

>>STEVE HOLSTEN:  And, David, in the comments on the third full
paragraph of the second page --

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Steve --

 >>STEVE HOLTSEN: -- there is a discussion of singling out registries
for this as opposed to registrars when sometimes it's the actions of
registrars that are at issue.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thanks.  Steve, could I remind you to give your
name when you come on the phone so we'll know who's talking.  Thanks. 
Caroline?

 >>CAROLINE GREER:   Yeah, I was speaking to Indu from WIPO yesterday,
and she was saying that certainly WIPO were supportive of at least
going for joint responsibility between the registries and registrars. 
That was their position.  She was quite interested to hear what our
views were on the post-delegation dispute process, since that was a
WIPO --

>>Caroline, I can't hear you. Can you speak up a bit?

>>CAROLINE GREER:  I was speaking to Indu from WIPO yesterday.  And
she was saying that certainly they were interested in at least joint
responsibility on the part of registries and registrars, not so much
pushing it on to the registries' part.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thanks.  Anyone else?  As I understand it the
comments are due on July 8.  July 6th.

>>STEVE HOLSTEN:  I think it's the 6th, David.  This is Steve.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   And I don't believe that we have a meeting
scheduled between now and then.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   I just wanted to add something.  I'm probably, for
obvious reasons, going to abstain from the registry constituency
comments.  Although I did notice there was something we talked about
that wasn't reflected in the comments, which was -- maybe it is, and I
just missed it is really putting more of an emphasis on -- kind of
following up on Caroline said -- putting more of an emphasis on when
registrars are the cause of the reason by which they're going after the
registry, that the registrars should really be brought into those
disputes and should be subject to the same types of penalties.  And it
may also benefit us to recommend a policy process whereby a separate
post delegation or some dispute mechanism is introduced whereby any
time there's a third party complaint against a registrar activity, that
they, too, should have some sort of dispute resolution mechanism.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  Thanks.  Anyone else?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   David.  One of the things it seems to me that we
need to do today at a minimum is to clearly define a process where
we're going to get to in the next two weeks of a final statement that
everybody -- you know, states their approval or disapproval or
abstention or something so that we can submit it on time on the 6th.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yeah.  We'll have to circulate a request for a
vote.  We'll have to take a vote and also --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   But we first have to finish the draft.  So how are
we going to do that?

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Well, it is hereby announced that you are all
required to read the comments carefully and submit edits, comments and
suggestions.  You will be dealt with if you don't do that.  And I will
circulate an email that makes that perfectly clear.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   And who's got the pen on it from this point forward?
Not volunteering.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   How about Steve?  He's not in the room, so it's
easy to get him to do it.

 >>STEVE HOLTSEN:   I would normally be very happy to take it.  And
I'll take it for a little while.  I am going to be going on vacation
next week.  So, if you can do anything in -- during this Sydney week,
great.  And, otherwise, I can try to move things along from vacation,
if need be.  But I think that the main thing that's necessary right now
is for people to actually read it and to make red lines.  And certainly
the sooner the better.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   I think we ought to get somebody else -- it's fine
for Steve to interact this week, but we need to have somebody else
beyond that.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Any volunteers?  We'll circulate an email to try
to get that.  We really have to get it moving.  It's very important
that these comments take priority.  This is our best chance to make it
clear that there are some really fundamental issues that we think have
to be dealt with with the IRT.  And I think our interests are not
necessarily parallel to those of the registrars.  Okay.

 >>STEVE HOLTSEN:   Sorry, David.  This is Steve again.  Jeff, even
though you participated in the IRT, is it not still appropriate for you
to assist with some edits to the draft?  I don't see that conflict of
interest necessarily there.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   No, I'd be happy to assist with the draft.  I'm
definitely fine doing that.  And any questions or anything I see in
there that's -- maybe inaccurate, sure, I'd be happy to do that.  The
other thing is -- and I ask that if there's anything that we actually
do support in the IRT report, and I'm not presupposing that we support
anything.  But, if we do, maybe -- it may be good to also put those
statements in there as well.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  Thanks.  Is Ken Stubbs -- I don't see him
here.

 >>CHERIE STUBBS:   No.  He -- Ken needs to be away until about 10:00
o'clock.  So that will have to be plugged in elsewhere in the agenda.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay, we'll pass over the treasurer's report then.

 >>KURT PRITZ:   Thank you, David.  It's Kurt.  One of the reasons why
the board formed the IRT as, you know, primarily made of IP
constituency members was to drive to some solutions rather quickly. 
And ask the IRT to balance, you know, do balancing while they were
doing discussions and not make it one-sided.  So I'd like to carry that
thought forward as now we have these IRT recommendations, right?  And
it's for the community, you know, in the ICANN way to discuss and
arrive at what's going to essentially be put in the guidebook.  So in
considering how the registry constituency is going to respond, also
think about -- you know, how you might work with other constituencies
to, you know, in trying to drive to solutions.  Because we're -- you
know, we want to meet Chuck's goal of -- and Amadeu's goal of having
Santa Claus bring the program home.  

And so I'm just thinking a number of independent reports from a number
of constituencies will leave us with a number of independent
conflicting reports.  So how can we work together -- starting with this
session on Wednesday, how can the ICANN community work together to try
to get to, you know, a position?  I know it has to start with this sort
of report you're talking about.  And I'm not asking for a response now,
only to think about, you know, we want to try to closure on this thing
in July.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  Thank you.

 >>RAY FASSETT:   This is Ray. Can I make a comment?

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Go ahead.

 >>RAY FASSETT:   In the draft report there seemed to be a conclusion
as it pertained to the WIPO report that the enforcement should be
between the contracted parties being the registry operator and ICANN. 
That was in the draft report.  And then in the final report there was a
shift that, basically, enables a third party to bring enforcement
rights against the signatory, the registry operator.  And I think we
should have an explanation on why that shift occurred, on the one hand.
And then, on the other hand, really we're the only constituency that's
going to care about that shift.  No other stakeholder group is going to
come to our aid on this particular shift, which is -- to me, was a
pretty dramatic shift.  I don't know.  Jeff, is there any --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   Sure.  Let me answer that.  Yes.  The draft report
had stated it was ICANN's responsibility.  I think due to some feedback
from both WIPO and, frankly, ICANN, that was changed to -- in the final
report.  I believe WIPO wanted that.  And they still want a third
party's right to enforce this because they do not necessarily view
ICANN as having the same incentives that the IP owner necessarily has
to do that enforcement.  And ICANN also has emphasized the position
that they are not necessarily in the best position to do the
enforcement with respect to intellectual property concerns.  That ICANN
is not necessarily a party that's able to determine whether there's
infringement or cyber -- systemic cybersquatting.  So, based on that
feedback from WIPO and ICANN and, frankly, others -- other IP owners
that submitted comments, but primarily from those two sources, the
decision of the IRT or consensus of the IRT believed that they would
add this third party right.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   David, it might be helpful if Steve could give just
a brief summary of the draft comments because that issue was addressed
in there.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Steve, can you do that?  Well, if you -- it seems
as though folks have not really gotten a chance to spend much time with
this document.  So I would say let me just go through real quickly the -
- it's only a -- it's only, basically, four pages long.  And there's an
introduction, a note that the post-delegation dispute mechanism is of
greatest concern to the RyC, that registries aren't and shouldn't be
viewed as with trademark examiners.   Then a number of problems with
the PPDM, the problem of the slippery slope of having a bad faith
standard that could make this whole thing ripe for aggressive trademark
holder litigation that, even though it's bad faith intent to profit,
that it's very much foreseeable that folks could use that as a way to
bring actions.  And, therefore, it would require monitoring of all
domain name registrations by the registries. And there simply -- we're
simply not competent to do that sort of thing.  

Then, secondly, that the final report is inconsistent with existing
law.  

Thirdly, that it's designed to combat registry operators that operate
in a manner inconsistent with reps and warranties.  But the whole
notion of whether there are any reps or warranties regarding that kind
of manner in the first place and whether there should be, so the next
point with regard to the PPDM is that it would allow third parties with
whom registries are no contractual privity to initiate claims against
them.  Registries are required to use ICANN accredited registrar
channels in thick or thin.  We have no relationship with the
registrants.  So it's concerning that third parties would be able to
bring actions without even exhausting other remedies and could use this
mechanism as a first rather than last resort.  And then a notion of why
singling out registries as opposed to, for example, registrars who may
be the cause of the offending registrations.  The next part is a
section regarding whether there -- we don't believe that the PPDM
should be adopted at all.  But any variation of it would require
safeguards to be put in place.  And there is some recommended language
regarding a safe harbor.  So a safe harbor should essentially be given
to registries if they do not monitor or screen or analyze or filter or
take any affirmative steps to determine if a registration may
constitute infringement.  Beyond that, there are some discussion of the
IP clearinghouse and the uniform rapid suspension system.  But the guts
of this thing is really with respect to the PPDM.  And I agree that
that issue of third parties and registries responsibilities to protect
the rights of third parties is a very troubling one.  Is that enough of
a summary?

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yeah.  

I think that's very helpful.  Thank you.  Any other comments on that? 
Any thoughts?  If not, we probably ought to move along to the GNSO
Council updates.  And I think this is --

 >>RAY FASSETT:   Before you move on, this is Ray.  I just want to
make one more comment.

You know, a lot of the impetus for why this is coming about is due to
the fact there's a lack of competence out there that ICANN will enforce
contracts.  

I think there's a point -- I mean, I'm a little alarmed to hear that
perhaps this final IRT recommendation came as a result of input from
ICANN staff.  And, conversely, I would be looking for ICANN staff to be
standing up and saying we're going to enforce contracts.  So, rather
than jump to this fundamental shift in contract law, if you will, I
would hope that the issues here or the concerns get solved by what it
should be, which is enforcement.  And I would hope ICANN staff would be
standing up and saying that that is the way it should be.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   David, can I respond to that?  Thanks.  Let me just -
- I think you kind of took a little of what I said out of context.  I
think what I said was that ICANN staff, when it was discussed about
having the dispute, the post-delegation dispute, be purely between
ICANN and the contracted party.  I think what I said was that ICANN's
feedback was that they weren't necessarily equipped to make the
decisions of whether there was systemic cybersquatting alone.  So that
much like a registrar is not equipped to hear a dispute about
intellectual property and those are referred to a UDRP-type proceeding,
the feedback was that that type of dispute, the post-delegation dispute
be referred to -- brought by a third party against the other -- brought
by a third party in a independent review-type process.  But there is --
in a post-delegation dispute, there is an obligation initially to file
a complaint with ICANN and ICANN does have an obligation to
investigate.  And, if ICANN can determine there was a breach, requires
ICANN to take an action and use one of the enforcement mechanisms that
it has.  That's the first step.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   And, Ray, regarding the enforcement of ICANN in
compliance, take a look at the last paragraph of section A under the
PPDM there.  It addresses that.  And see if that does it well enough or
if some edits would be good.

 >>RAY FASSETT:   Okay.  Thank you very much.

 >>STEVE HOLTSEN:   And last thing on that, also look at the very
first paragraph of section 1, the PPDM.  Because it does make a strong
statement that it's believed that the PPDM arises from a lack of
confidence that ICANN will enforce existing protections, et cetera,
shifting responsibility for enforcement to the registry and away from
ICANN.  So take a look at that paragraph, too, Ray.

 >>RAY FASSETT:   Yes, thank you.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  Moving along, Jeff, I'd like to put up for
discussion your concerns about communications from the GNSO.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN: Sure.  This is discussion I've had with several people
this week.

It basically stems from my view personally that I think the GNSO
Council in certain circumstances has taken a role for itself, which I
do not believe it was envisioned to have.  And it particularly came to
light, it's come to light in a number of situations.  But a number of
people, a number of groups, whether it's the GAC, ccNSO or others look
to the council to represent the views of the GNSO community as a whole.
And I'm not necessarily comfortable with that approach.  The latest
example of this was a letter -- the GAC had submitted a letter on
geographical names that obviously disagreed with some of the points
from the GNSO community -- and notice I didn't say council but the
community -- in the new gTLD working group report.  And that was
eventually adopted by the council.  And the GAC, for whatever reason
they did, said that the GNSO had a week to respond to this letter,
which I think I got to state, for the record, is completely
inappropriate since the GAC requires any documents to them to be
published 21 days in advance.  So I think a strong message should be
sent to the GAC by us kind of admonishing them for that requirement. 
Putting that aside, the council kind of took it upon itself the right
to respond on behalf of the GNSO community to this thoughtful letter
from the GAC.  Whether we agreed with what the GAC said or not,
certainly a lot of thought and a lot of deliberation went into that
letter.  And I raised my concerns, although let me just state one other
fact.  Chuck did come back.  And the council came back, our council
members said we'll form a drafting team and we'll see if we can come up
with a draft of letter.  What I didn't understand was that that
drafting team would present directly to the council without coming back
to the constituency and all of a sudden that would be viewed as the
view of the GNSO community.  I think that's inappropriate.  I think
that any policy position needs to come back to the constituency for its
view.  I think the BC did the right thing in this case.  The BC
actually abstained because they didn't have enough time to get input
from their constituency.  And what I've heard or what people have said
is well, we were just responding based on a policy that we have
previously decided.  And we were just kind of using that previous
policy that was based on community input to respond to the GAC.  And my
point to Avri and to others is that I don't care that this issue is
previously discussed or even previously decided.  Any time we get a
thoughtful letter from another organization with a differing viewpoint
means that it should come back to us to reconsider.  Perhaps we were
actually wrong when we initially considered the subject.  Perhaps the
information we get from that letter could require us to change our view
even if we thought we were right the first time.  The point is that we
elect council members to represent our views.  And we are a group of
competitors, although we are very nice to each other. We all like each
other.  In the end we're competitors.  And we have differing views. 
And any policy matter needs to come back to the constituency so that
the constituency can give guidance to its counselors on how to vote. 
And, if there's not enough time for the counselors to react, just like
the BC did, they should abstain.  So, again, I think the GAC letter
highlighted a situation where it was such an important document, it
required careful consideration.  Whether or not we agreed with what
ultimately came out in the letter, it should not have been a council
activity.  And I think we should send a strong message from the
constituency that we don't view that activity as setting any sort of
precedent for what happens in the future.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Any other comment?  Do you want to draft a letter
to the GNSO?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Understand that this will be a topic of discussion
during the council meeting tomorrow so we probably don't have time to
draft a letter right now that doesn't mean it can't be doing in the
future but it would be very helpful for certainly Edmon and I to hear
what people think on this but keep in mind it's an open council meeting
tomorrow so there will be public comment on these things so -- but at
the same time I'd still like to hear from others to see where you
stand.  One question is:  Should we have a hard and fast rule that
anything that goes from the council must always be taken to the
constituency regardless?  Or is there some middle ground where
counselors have some leeway, you know, we'll do what people think we
should do because we're pretty careful to try and represent members of
the constituency.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:   I would agree with you.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Could Identify yourself?

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:   Michael Palage.  Rigid rules are always difficult,
right?  So I appreciate not wanting to have absolute rules, but I think
what Jeff -- the points Jeff was raising and which I think I kind of
agree with is the default should always be consultation, that should be
the preferred, and if there are some extraordinary circumstances or
something like that, then perhaps you don't need to go back.  But in
this situation, I, again, personally I kind of mind myself aligned with
the concerns Jeff raised on this point.

>>KEN STUBBS:   Yeah, I'd have to agree with Jeff.  Things are so
dynamic right now that decisions, the names council made four months
ago, for instance, could be totally -- our positions could be diversely
different.  A perfect example is that the -- the IRT wasn't even in
existence 60 days ago.  So I think we have to be very careful in
assuming that any actions that we take based on a previous decision
that was ratified by the constituency and just-hanging it on that could
prove to be something create some issues within the constituency so I'd
rather err on the side of conservatism rather than to have a --

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Was there anything in the letter that we sent that
the constituency disagreed with?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   I think that's a good question.  I think there were
things in there that I'm not sure we needed to fight every point.  I do
think that -- I think the governments have a legitimate concern and I
think that with respect to certain elements like country names specific
country names, I think what the GAC is trying to do is overly broad,
their recommendations, but I do think that we did not need so send a
letter that's almost seemingly fighting on every point.  I'm not sure I
was happy with the tone of the letter either.  And I think even putting
aside the substance, I may have questioned whether the letter should
have been sent at all.  I think there are certain things that we're
going to have to concede and I think -- in the spirit of compromise,
and I got a feeling that the letter was kind of fighting them on every
point whereas I think if we were being a little bit more political we
could have actually picked or selected specific points to debate as
opposed to every single one.  And so I think we could have been a
little bit more political about it.  One of the things I would
recommend is that when this opportunity comes up, or let me go back a
step, sorry.  One of the things I was update about is none of us want
to have to be involved in every single drafting team and every single
committee when we care about an issue but the feeling I got was while
we created a drafting team, and, therefore, that got the constituency
input I think was almost kind of the message I got or, you know, Jeff,
you could have volunteered for the drafting team and --

>>CHUCK GOMES:   That's not true at all, but I think it was expected
that the members of the drafting team would interact with the
constituency, as they're doing that.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Jeff and Chuck, I'm sorry to cut you off, but the
representatives of the board SIC have arrived and I know they're
anxious to make their presentation.  So if you could, Harald, identify
yourself.

>>HARALD ALVESTRAND:  Well, I'm not prepared to give a presentation. 
I was told to show up here as a member of the SIC.  But the chair of
the SIC has not shown up.  So you can talk for a another minute while
everybody tries to find us.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay, sorry.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   And by the way, Jeff, you and I, I think, are on the
same page as far as the results because we're at a point now where the
GAC has put forth a compromised solution, and they really did
compromise quite a bit in terms of second-level protection.  And we're
at a point where the council, and the constituencies that means, need
to decide is their willingness to move in the direction of their
compromise.  And so we will need to decide as a constituency probably
in the next couple of weeks whether we would like to do that and
support the what the GAC's trying to do or whether we think it's too
broad or whatever so absolutely and I think we have a good opportunity
here to do exactly what you're saying and when Avri and I met with
Janis over breakfast Saturday morning we're actually, you know, talking
about that but we need -- what's going to be needed, then, is the input
from all the constituencies as to whether that's something the broader
community wants to do in the GNSO.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Dennis, who is the --

>>CHUCK GOMES:   I'm not sure either.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   All right, we're still waiting.  We skipped over
the treasurer's report, Ken, are you available to do that?

>>KEN STUBBS:   Yes.  First of all, I submitted a treasurer's report
to you about three months ago and showing you where we were at that
point in time and requesting input from the constituency on ideas as to
where we would -- how we would be dealing with the next fiscal year.  

Unfortunately, I think we all got distracted with issues that were
actually more relevant at that point in time.  As far as -- I'm wait
for my computer to reboot, but I sent an e-mail out to y'all last week
indicating the balance in the account which I think was some 30,000-
plus dollars indicating our current run rate.  And at this point in
time, you know, I don't really know how we want to deal with additions
to the constituency in terms of the fee structures and so forth, number
one.  Number two, is I don't really anticipate at this point in time
any significant expenditures.  I think you're all aware of the fact
that we received our proportionate share of the old domain name
Supporting Organization surplus which was some 3,000 plus dollars, I
notified the constituency on that.  I've had discussions with Kevin
Wilson much the only thing we need for that is accountability from --
by that I mean that you've been lobbying very hard to allow the
constituency to use the funds to support travel to ICANN functions.  An
ICANN function can be defined as a registry-registrar meeting like the
upcoming one we have in Canada.  We need that flexibility to be able to
use it.  And the only thing -- only response I've gotten has been we
don't have any issues with that but we need to make sure that you
properly document it.  Our given run rate allows us to get through the
next 12 months without any issues at all.  My feeling is I can put
forth a formal budget and I can put in a contingency of $5,000 for the
rest of the year if that's acceptable to you.  You know full well we
won't spend any money without getting preapproval from the
constituencies, as we've always done in the past.

It was somewhat -- I didn't feel it was necessarily to formalize that
until I had a chance to run it by you.  That's something I can knock
out in five minutes but I'm just saying that from a practical
standpoint I just don't see any significant need for additional funds
for the constituency for at least -- you know, it's so dynamic, I don't
know what's going to happen next year at this point in time.  I've
heard rumors that we're talking about Kenya, we're talking about Lima,
Peru, we're talking about Barcelona, depending on various parts of the
world, we may want to use some of the subsidies that we still have.  As
you all recall, we requested in the last travel round that the slots
allocated to us, we had the right to carry those forward.  That's a
material item for us and we were given the approval to do that.  So I
believe, I'm not positive right now, but I think we have three slots
left for upcoming meetings.  As far as Cherie goes, we used one of the
travel subsidies to bring Cherie here.  That is not an uncommon
practice, as a matter of fact, the registrars have been using travel
subsidies for their Secretariat as well.  So I guess my question is: 
Does anyone have any questions or comments about this at this point in
time?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   David and Ken, I did respond to your budget and one
thought I threw out is, is next year, and we don't want to have to deal
with this now, but next year, presuming that we are looking at quite a
large number of new members joining us, and considering that we don't
have a huge need for lots of funds, should we revisit the initial fee
that members pay?  I think it's at 4,000, now, is that correct?

>>KEN STUBBS:   Yes.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   And I'm not recommending one way or another but I
raise that because of the things you're sharing right now.

>>KEN STUBBS:   Yeah.  Well, I think part of that, I think we're going
to get a better idea as we look at -- we have new constituencies that
are being applied for at this point in time, Dirk and the city people,
for instance, will have their own constituency, so I think we don't
have -- it depends on whether or not there would be either other new
constituencies or whether or not we plan on working some sort of
financial relationships with -- I'll call them "brother constituencies"
in one way or another.  In other words, we may decide that we want to
have a meeting, when you define the ICANN registry-registrar meeting,
you know, if we all have different registries, we have different
purposes, there may be a necessity to coordinate from a budget
standpoint.  So I think that's a good point.  There is one point I did
mention in my e-mail I didn't bring up and that is it's clear to me
that there's going to be a high probability for a necessity for more
information in a more complex Web site than we are currently managing
for the constituency.  I know we've been talking ICANN about what kind
of services they're going to be providing for us.  I'm not certain
whether or not those services include Web site design and maintenance,
you know, you'll not a techie, in the old days we'd have active server
pages, we could just upload stuff and it wasn't a big problem.  But we
may want to budget for enhanced Web site design.  I'm certain that
there -- we have resources in there for hosting.  And managing the mail
list.  Although I think that -- I want to thank Cary, I know he's not
here, but I really appreciate Muse Doma's services that they performed
for us over the last five or six years.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   And Ken, as I noted in my response when you sent out
the budget, the communications committee -- or excuse me, the GNSO
constituency and stakeholder group operations committee that's under
the OSC is actually looking at a tool kit of services that would be
provided to stakeholder, provided to stakeholder groups and
constituencies and one of the things that's being considered there is
one service being Web site hosting for constituencies and stakeholder
groups and so forth.  So some of those details will become clearer as
we move along in the GNSO improvements process so that's an option too.

>>KEN STUBBS:   We're all aware the hosting fees are not the real
problem, it's the costs of designing and maintaining the actual Web
site itself.  And I think it's important for us to be able to ensure
that in the future we have a Web site that's done in a very
professional manner and is capable of accommodating the new positions
that we'll be taking, and I think we need to revisit the Web site and
make sure that we're providing all the information that we're going to
need to provide.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Any other comment on the budget or treasurer's
report?

>>KEN STUBBS:   I'll tell you what, I'm going to leave myself open for
comments for, let's say, the next five to seven days until after the
meeting's over, that way people will have a chance to deliberate and
respond, it would be helpful.  If not, then towards the end of next
week I'll prepare a more formalized budget for review and approval.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you.  Raimundo?

>>RAIMUNDO BECA:   No, no.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Not yet?  Well, moving along, we'll go to the next
--

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   What are we waiting for?

>> (Speaker off microphone).

(Discussion off microphone).

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   We're waiting for the chair of the SIC.  In the
meantime, we probably should start on the bylaws of the reconstituted
GNSO.  Chuck, could you get us started on that?  Is that Dennis?

>>DENNIS JENNINGS:  May I suggest that you wait for Roberto on that
one because I think he's waiting on a charter with comments from the
SIC, whether do it twice, it may be better to wait for Roberto.  He's
stuck in this discussion, cross constituency at the moment.  He'll be
here as soon as he can.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Dennis, he's not talking about -- we're talking about
the GNSO proposed changes to the bylaws for GNSO restructure, not the
stakeholder group charter.  Is that okay?

>>DENNIS JENNINGS:   (Nodding).

>>CHUCK GOMES:   And we may get interrupted on this, but I distributed
I think yesterday or the day before a fairly clean version.  There's
still a couple items that need some information filled in, but the --
we have some proposed changes to the bylaws that the working team
developed to allow for seating of the GNSO Council in October in Seoul.
Those were distributed.  That's quite a lot of detail and I'm sure you
don't want me going through those in detail but I hope that people have
looked at that because there is the possibility that we would -- that
the council would vote on those tomorrow.  It does -- I think the
changes do include the things that we wanted as a constituency with
regard to the thresholds for voting being in the bylaws and not just in
the rules and procedures, that was a really big one that Jeff brought
up.  That is what's being recommended.  And all the thresholds are
spelled out in there.  The -- a lot of the things are consistent with
what the GNSO restructure recommendations were of the council before so
it was just adding some detail and language in the bylaws for that.  So
does anybody have any questions on those changes?  I mean, it's a
pretty good-sized document in terms of what it is and I don't think you
want me going through it, but I can highlight the latest changes that
were made, or if everybody's comfortable we can just move on.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Roberto, welcome.

>>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Thank you.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Now that you're here, we're ready to hear from you.

>>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Right now?

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yeah, if that's okay with you.

>>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Okay.  Do I need a microphone?

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yes, please.

>>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Okay.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:   (Speaker off microphone).

>> Caroline, there's a hand mic.

>>CAROLINE GREER:   Two mics here.

>>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Okay, well, it's better standing.  The SIC has
met a couple of times this week.  And yesterday we came to an agreement
on -- on a -- an updated version of your draft for the stakeholder
group charter.

I believe that this has been circulated.  I have to apologize, there
was a misunderstanding, I thought that that was sent yesterday.  But,
in fact, I was the one who was expect -- who was expected to send and I
didn't.  But finally, staff has solved the problem this morning.

There's -- it is basically a -- it's based on your proposal.  There
are some modifications that I would like to outline.  First of all, we
have eliminated the effort of two constituencies and we have replaced
that with interest groups for the simple reason that "constituency" has
-- is a word that has a very precise meaning in the ICANN world and
that would have created confusion because what you have meant in your
charter is that you could dynamically create groups that can associate
and can disappear based on specific -- based on specific interests of
the moment.

And, in fact, you were not considering for those constituencies that
the creation of a constituency would have an impact in the voting, for
instance, would have changed your voting system or so.  So it was not
appropriate in our opinion, to use the term "constituencies" but I hope
you can live with the fact that we are using another term.  That is
exactly to avoid confusion.

Another thing that we have introduced is the general -- I would say
some of the general principles that are valid for ICANN for all of the
organizations, the different part of the organization, principal, for
instance, to respect of minorities, for instance, the geographical
distribution of -- to take into account the geographical distribution
when there's a voting system, when there's a partition of seats and
sewn.  Those are, I would say, the most important changes.

In the -- there have been here and there some -- some changes in the
language, but I think that this is what comes to my mind as being the
relevant thing.

So another thing that I wanted to say is that we have identified the
fact that there's a substantial difference between the contracted party
house and the noncontracted party house.  In the contracted party
house, by definition, membership is clear.  You do have -- you do
operate a registry or you are a registrar that has a conflict with
ICANN, yes or no.  If yes, you're a member of the stakeholder group. 
If no, you are not.  This situation is not very clear from the
noncontracted party house because the noncontracted party house, by
definition, doesn't have a contract, otherwise they would be in the
contracted party house.

So in that case, the constituencies have another function and have the
function of kind of -- I don't know what's the best word.  But certify
the status of being a stakeholder.  In other words, the constituency of
ISPs is somehow -- has -- one of the tasks is to make sure that all the
members of that constituencies are, in fact, ISPs.  And whatever
mechanism they use is not ICANN's problem but, in fact, what we require
is the constituency is in some way, that was one of the pillars of the
review, was that we have an updated list of members, that we have
assessment, certification of continuous interest and so on.  This, in
fact, does not apply to the contracted party house and I think this is
something that we haven't thought sufficiently in the past and is an
issue that came out only in the last month.  And I think that based on
this, we are going to differentiate between the charters of the
contracted party house, registries and registrars, and the
noncontracted party house.  I don't know if you want to have also a
very short description of what happens for the noncontracted party
house.  Actually, for the registrars, I'm going to do exactly the same
speech.  Because there's -- the original proposal from the registrars
and the original proposal from the registries were very similar.  There
was a difference in the voting scheme.  Where you have this well-
elaborated voting scheme that we didn't dare to touch because --

[ Laughter ]

-- it looked to me like one of those things that if you start messing
up, you'll never be able -- it's like the Rubik cube, once you have
messed it up, you're never able to put it together again.  So we said
let's stay away from this.  But other than that they are pretty
similar.  And so the same considerations will apply to their charter.

For the noncontracted party house, we have, in both cases, a
transitional charter.  The commercial stakeholder group have proposed
the transitional charter by which they have an initial -- initially
three constituencies which are the three constituencies that currently
form the cross constituency that are the initial element of this
stakeholder group.  They have six seats in their part of the council. 
And they agreed to have two seats each of the existing constituencies. 
And they will approve this in order to allow the new council to be
seated in Seoul, to go to a speedy election and to have the new
council, yeah, seated in Seoul.

Then, in the meantime, while this interim solution is going on, they
are going to craft a more complete charter that will take into account
how they are going to deal with potentially new constituencies, how
this is going to change the assignment of the seats and so on.  I think
that at this point in time, this is a more than acceptable solution.  I
think that we have -- the GNSO, the view has taken already too long. 
And I think that to go and start fighting on the details about what is
going to happen in the future is probably not the best idea.

I have, as I said, just to the cross constituency meeting where I was
up to now, I said the same thing.  My term ends in Seoul.  And I have
not applied for the new term so I would like to leave this organization
with something achieved and I would like to see the council seated.  So
at least one thing I can say is done.  The complicated situation was
for the noncommercial stakeholder group.  I have heard over the years
from many parts of this organization, including from the registry
constituency, from the people that I have a more contact with in the
registry constituency where we can freely speak at the bar over a beer,
that one of the major problems was that the current NCUC is not felt to
be representative of the wide diversity in the world of the
noncommercial users.  I share this concern.  And this concern has been
reflected in our proposal, in our update of the charter of the
noncommercial stakeholder group, by the fact that we are very much
oriented to foster the creation of new constituencies.  And I will tell
you why in a minute.

So at this point, the charter of the noncommercial stakeholder group
is also an interim charter, a transitional charter, sorry.  

For the time being, the six seats are divided in two.  Three seats are
for the current NCUC.  And the three other seats are going to be
populated by the board with three names that can be chosen together
with the community but with the idea that those people will be the
element, the core around which a new constituency could be built.

This is -- the situation we had a few years ago with ALAC where the
board has appointed one person for each region with the idea that that
person was going to start -- get the ball rolling.  And then, when the
individual organization, when the value was going to be built, that
person was going to disappear and the mechanism was in place.

That worked with ALAC.  So we have identified, tentatively, some
constituencies.  One of -- one is definitely the consumer protection
agencies, organizations, however, you want to call that constituency
where we have already a couple of organizations that are interested. 
One, in particular, we have also one person that can act as a catalyst
for that constituency.  The same we're looking for research and
academia.  There are other things, situations that we are exploring for
the time being.  But the message, the basic message is this is what we
are going to propose.  We are going to have -- we are going to
explicitly mandate the creation of new groups that are not sufficiently
represented in the current scenario of the noncommercial stakeholder
group.  And those will be mandated by the board.  So this is the
situation.

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:   Roberto, quick question.  That just seems -- I
appreciate what you're trying to do to create the balance to allow this
to go forward.  But that just seems a little top down that the board
says we've identified some deficiencies or staff that -- and we're
going to set them up.  I mean, would it not perhaps -- you know, one
other option to fill these three seats is you have the Nominating
Committee, which is supposed to be bottom up.  Perhaps, if -- you know,
they actually always have an overflow of people that have come forward.
Perhaps maybe the Nominating Committee, if they have extra candidates
might be able to fill these three roles.

I'm just concerned with sort of the precedent here of oh, we've
identified that there's shortcomings in this group, this group, this
group, and creating them.  It just -- it doesn't seem bottom up.

 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:   I agree with you.  I agree with you. That's a
point that Raimundo has made insistently in the SIC.  Let me try to
answer this.  There are several reasons for this.  First of all, the
Nominating Committee -- that would be a perfect solution had we said to
the Nominating Committee six months ago that this was the way to go. 
Because the Nominating Committee has the people who have applied.  And
the people who have applied have applied for several reasons.  But not
to be the element that was going to be mandated for building a
constituency.

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:   But I guess my solution is, give them a one-year
appointment.  If these other catalysts are out there, let them come
forward and put forth a constituency.  There's nothing prohibiting
people from coming forward.  We have the city TLDs.  I mean, if people
want to do it, if there's consumer-oriented groups, let them come
forward.  It just is -- it doesn't reconcile with bottom up when the
board is saying we want this group, this group.  If they're out there,
let them come forward.  We're not prohibiting -- again, we're just
looking to create balance to let this implementation go forward.  And I
really do think the Nominating Committee, if they have these talented
people may be an interim solution just give them a one-year appointment
and that gives these groups one year to catalyst and self-form.

 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:   I understand this.  I am the -- my first point --
I mean, there are several reasons why the Nominating Committee is not
feasible.  The main reason is the fact that we have a balance between
Nominating Committee members of the council.  And there's already a lot
of fight about the fact why do we have three elements that are
nominated by the Nominating Committee and not coming from the community
and so on?

Another issue is Nominating Committee will have at this point in time,
when the submission period is closed, will have what they have.  And so
what -- the people that they are going to assign were not necessarily --
that's what the point that I'm trying to make -- related to the
constituencies that are nonexisting yet.  Like, for instance, I'm
talking about the consumer protection constituency.  There's no
guarantee that in the set of people that the NomCom has that people
that have applied for the GNSO, there is one person that can be
representative of the consumer protection organizations.  Whereas, we
know them and we have this possibility.  There's another point.  We
have left -- I agree this is a top down.

But we have said already two years ago that this was the way that we
were going.  I mean, two years ago we were speaking about having
commercial and noncommercial stakeholder groups and so on.  And then we
said we'd sent a clear message to the noncommercial stakeholder group,
the future noncommercial stakeholder group and said one of the key
issues is try to foster diversity, try to do outreach.  Try to come up
with new constituencies, with new groups.  All what this is about is
about having people that -- involve people that have not been involved
up to now.  Where two years later, there's nothing.  And all what we
have in terms of new people in the noncommercial area is what has come
up with the ALAC.

But there's nothing that has come up within the GNSO.  So at that
point, we have two possibilities.  Either let the initiative die, or to
say okay, well, in that case, if it worked for ALAC, why can't it --
can't we give a chance for the noncommercial stakeholder group.

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:   But the seating of ALAC, the ALAC was part of an
evolution and reform process.  We knew the structures were there and
the board seated them.  But this is different of the board.  And what
you said several times during your comment is, "We know people.  We
know people."  So it's already -- we already know -- the board has
already decided who these people are.  And it just -- again, it just
doesn't reconcile.  It would sort of be like us, the GNSO saying, you
know what?  We need new board constituents or a new board working group
or -- I mean, it just doesn't work.  And the fact that these people
haven't come forward, maybe that should be a signal that maybe there's
something wrong systemically why they're not coming forward.  And just
because you've identified "We know people" and seating them, I just
struggle.  And I guess --

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Michael, I'm sorry to interrupt.  I think we may -
- this is the registries constituency.  And the NCUC has enough of its
own problems that we probably can't solve.  I'd like to move this to
the action of the SIC to our stakeholder charter.  There was one
question that was raised regarding the idea of an executive committee,
which is really not a problem.  But there seemed to be an attempt of
the executive committee to give the new stakeholder group power,
specifically, it was an a appointment of the Nominating Committee
member.  We really don't -- I think from the preliminary discussion, is
it essential that the executive committee have specific power beyond
that would otherwise be in the group?

 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:  No.  We have just used the term "executive
committee" for what you have called leadership in the charter.  In
fact, there was a question that came up.  We -- you have in your
charter one point that says, okay.  Then I will ask Denise to help my
memory.  But off my memory is that, when you create an interest group,
one representative of that interest group will be a member of the
registry stakeholder group.  And that doesn't sound right.  Because
members of the stakeholder group are just about everybody.  For the
fact that -- so we haven't understood very well that point.  And we
were wondering whether that was meant to be that representative of the
interest group had to be included in the leadership and, therefore, in
the executive committee or not.  But this is something you have to
decide and not us.  Whatever -- whatever comes up from your decision is
fine for us.  That was -- in the draft that we have distributed, it
appears as a question, not as a statement.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you.  That's reassuring.  Does anyone else
have thoughts about the -- Raimundo?

 >>RAIMUNDO BECA:   Yeah.  There was a chart --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Just get closer.  Because the people on the phone
can't hear, if you're not --  

>>RAIMUNDO BECA:  Okay.  In your charter -- in the charter that you
proposed, there was a language which was not very clear about the fact
that the voluntary constituency that -- we now call them interest
groups, they may be -- they may elect one person to represent them. 
And some of them asked -- I didn't understand them that way -- some
thought they were going to be represented in the leading team.  And, in
fact, if you look closely to the wording, was not in the leading team. 
It was in the working groups or whatever.  Because it was indicated
they may represent the members of the voluntary constituencies in
everything except voting.  Exactly what the executive committee doesn't
vote in the election of the GNSO or whatever.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Could I respond to that, David?

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Please.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   It's a very good question.  What we were thinking of
-- for example, let's use Dirk as an example.  He's willing -- in fact,
I would hope he would jump in on this discussion.  But for the cities
constituency that has expressed an intent and put forth their charter
and so forth, a very well-detailed charter, the they're going to have --
looks like they're going to have quite a few members.  So it may not be
possible for all of those members to actively participate in all of the
stakeholder group meetings.  So, if they wanted to assign -- elect Dirk
as their delegate to do that and to represent their views, that was the
intent in the stakeholder group meetings was the intent.  Does that
make sense?

 >>RAIMUNDO BECA:   That was my understanding.

 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:   Let me step into this.  Last meeting in
Mexico we thought that there's a way for our future city top-level
domain constituency to step in to the registry stakeholder group even
if we are not a contracted party.  But I think, with the charter I saw
today, which switches constituencies to interest groups, we are somehow
lost in the whole process because we applied as a constituency.  And it
was also mentioned in the registry stakeholder group that only
contracted parties can form constituencies.  And we're asking ourselves
now where do we fit in?  Do we fit in in the business constituency? 
Business stakeholder group or -- and which stakeholder group.  So, if
there's no way for such a group like we are into the whole process, I
really doubt that this process is useful.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   First of all, we have -- we have -- and you've known
this for probably over -- well over a year, that we have always allowed
observers in the constituency, okay?  The basic requirement to be in
the registry constituency is that you have a contract with ICANN.  So
that's in the bylaws.  So once your constituency or interest group
members, you know, have contracts with ICANN, they're automatically
eligible for membership in the stakeholder group.  In the meantime,
though, we have invited you and all of your potential members to
participate in our processes.  So -- and whether it's called an
interest group or a constituency doesn't really impact the
participation in the stakeholder group.

 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Can I just add one thing?  I think this reminds
me very much of the origin of the registry gTLD registry constituency
that in the beginning had three seats and one member.

So --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   They wouldn't give us three seats, though.

 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:   That was an explicit provision in the bylaws to
deal with this.  I think there's a history of perspective registries
participating in the registry constituency.  So I was assuming that the
same mechanism was going to be in place.  The fact is, if we establish -
- okay, rewind a moment.  I was -- my proposal in the beginning was to
have a supplier and consumer.  But then the decision was to talk
explicitly about contracted parties and noncontracted parties.  And I
think that it would be a source of great confusion if, in the
contracted party house, you had the constituency that is about parties
that are noncontracted.  So I was kind of assuming that with the
observership and with the fact that the registry constituency is open
to participation for perspective registries for an obvious reason, the
sooner you get into the loop and then the better it will be the moment
that you will become a registry with a contract with ICANN.  Because
you are already validated and you know the mechanism and you can access
the information and so on.  So I was kind of assuming this.  But one --
if you make reference to what I said before, that the constituencies
have a special role in the noncontracted party house, which is the
ability to identify members, this is a problem that I was assuming
nonexisting in the contracted party house because the contract is your
membership card.

 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:   But for us it's now the question -- observer
status is fine.  And we have participated in the last constituency
meetings or stakeholder group meetings for a while now.  But I think we
need to have a representation as a constituency as well.  And that
might end up that we're going to the business stakeholder group and
apply there as a constituency to have the ability to get a seat.  We're
a serious group.  We're serious members.  All our organizations.  So I
don't think that observer is what we want only.  And I think that's --
other groups may have the same problems, but we are a special case
there.  And I really understand the discussion about contracted and
noncontracted parties.  That's very clear, I think.  But there should
be a way for us to have the right to form a constituency and not just
an interest group or having an observer status.  And with getting a
contracted party with ICANN, this is a huge delay, as you all know.  It
was originally planned for 2007 that this round opened.  And it delayed
and delayed, and we can't wait this time.

 >>KEN STUBBS:   I'm sorry.  I didn't know who to request from. 
Roberto, please correct me, if I'm wrong, now.  If he wanted to do
that, he could apply for membership in the -- in a constituency in the
other house like the business constituency.  And, when he received a
contract, he could then qualify as a full member of the registry
constituency with related voting rights.  But he would not be able to
participate in policy votes in both houses.  He can't double up on his
membership and vote twice.  Am I correct there?

>>ROBERT GAETANO:  That's correct.  If you're a noncontracted party,
you can apply for constituency in a noncontracted party house.  The
moment that you become a contracted party, then you can form a
constituency within this stakeholder group.  And then you have to
figure out -- because, at the moment, your charter doesn't specify what
we're going to do if we have more constituencies in the full sense full
sense of constituency.  I think you will have a series of problems if
you get into multiple constituencies in this house.  If you can
imagine, for instance, we have a ccTLD constituency.  And then we have
IDN TLD constituency.  Fine.  Now, I'm the operator of dot Beijing in
Chinese characters. Where do I go?  So a little bit of a problem you
have.  You have how you will organize then the voting the moment that
you have multiple constituencies and so on.  

But this is not the problem for today.  For the time being our
objective is to seat a council in Seoul and what we have is good
enough.  

Now, the issue is would be preferable for prospective ccTLDs
constituencies to sit as an observer in the registry stakeholder group
or as a constituency in the noncontractual commercial stakeholder
group?  That's a decision for you.  I mean, I don't know.

 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:   It could be both.  Or excluded.  Sure.  So
that is a likely solution, I think, in this.  That we are observer here
and a constituency in the business house then.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Dirk, one thing I'd like to point out, that is a
legitimate decision, I think.  We're expecting that registrars may
become registries and may be in both stakeholder groups within the
contracted house.  But I would just like to make the point that most of
our decisions, historically, in the registry constituency have been on
a rough consensus basis rather than on voting.  So it really hasn't
come down to a vote in very many cases at all.  Obviously, elections
you vote and so forth.  But so I say that because we don't too often
have to take formal votes.  Although when we make consensus statements,
we ask people to express what their preference is, so -- and like that.

 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:   Let me say, when dot Berlin is approved, we
would step out from the business stakeholder group and become a member
in the registry stakeholder group.  That's obvious.  So there's some
changes.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Ken, could you turn your microphone off.  Thanks.

 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:   David, may --

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yes, go ahead.

 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Two things.  I was giving for granted that some
people may belong to different constituencies or different stakeholder
groups.  I think I have an example.  I'm going from constituency to
constituency.  Wherever I go I see Michael Palage.  So I think this is
a possibility.  

But, on a more serious tone, Dirk, let's make it clear that you have
the right to apply for the constituency.  But I would also invite you
to read what the bylaws required in order to have a constituency.  The
moment that you present a constituency, you have to give a very
specific reason what is going to be the added value of that
constituency in that particular stakeholder group?  So there are
concern steps.  Now think of it seriously in terms of is there really
an added value of having something that is just the ccTLDs in the
business constituency?  Maybe it would have a value to have all
perspective future contracted parties have an interim solution in the --
as part of the business in that stakeholder group.  I'm just trying to
figure out what, you know, what can be -- you know, how to base your
location, what really your interests are.

 >>HARALD TVEIT ALVESTRAND:   Roberto, just a reminder we're supposed
to meet for the at-large in minus one minute.

 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:   We will have a discussion on city top level
domains tomorrow.  We had a discussion the day before.  So it's ongoing
work now.

 >>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Do we have any other open things on your charter?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Just one question.  Is there a suggested timeline for
us to respond to the changes?  Are you shooting for two weeks or a month?

>>ROBERTO GAETANO:   What time is it?

[ Laughter ]

>>CHUCK GOMES:   I know you do want them as quickly as possible but
has a deadline been set?

>>ROBERTO GAETANO:   No, a deadline has not been set but if you have
as soon as comments if you can get them, we're going to have a
discussion in the board on Thursday, so after the -- at and after the
public forum.  So if there are some issues that you see as potential
roadblocks, get them to us as soon as possible.  And then, you know,
then the charter can be finalized.  I think that the deadline is more
set by the GNSO Council rather than the board.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Roberto, thank you very much for a very
enlightening presentation and we appreciate your all taking the tomb to
come and talk to us.  At this point we'll have a five-minute break.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   And before we break, David, can I say thanks to the
SIC because these people have been working really hard over the last
several weeks.  And without their responsiveness, the council would not
have been able to move forward on the bylaws changes that we were
talking about just before we started this.  So my thanks sincerely.

>>ROBERTO GAETANO:   Thank you.

[ Break ]

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   The next item is the GNSO improvements, the
transition of the restructured GNSO and we have, Chuck has sent around
the new bylaws, these are the bylaws of the ICANN board, but they
establish the structure of the GNSO Council, is that correct?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Yes.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Any comments on them?  The question before us is
whether or not -- as I understand it, the council is going to vote on
these tomorrow.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   There's a possibility of a vote on them tomorrow.  If
I had -- and so we need to be prepared for that and Edmon and I and
Jordi any direction in that regard.  There's also the possibility that
especially the commercial stakeholder group will ask for a little more
time.  But that will only be probably until the end of the month. 
Certainly before our next meeting.  So regardless of how it comes out,
we're going to need direction in terms of how to vote.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yeah, go ahead.

>>KEN STUBBS:   Chuck, it's Ken.  Can I ask you to give me some
clarification at this point in time on term limits for councillors,
where do we stand for that?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Term limits are in there.  Now, they're in the bylaws
changes.  And they are stated such that if somebody -- it's two terms,
okay?  And then you have to have at least a full term off before you
can be seated again.  And then if you assume the remainder of someone
else's term, it doesn't count so that's the gist of it, okay.

>>KEN STUBBS:   Well, I guess what I'm concerned about is some of the
gaming that could going on in the transition.  Is it possible for the
constituency to, quote, reelect someone just prior to the transition
and then that person would have one term and then be entitled to two
terms after that?  If they decided -- you know.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   I don't know.  That's going to be part of the
transition and the transition -- there's a transition article here, but
it hasn't dealt with that so -- so I -- I think we'll have to see there
and I appreciate your concern and I'll watch for it and we can all
watch for it.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Anyone else?  There's one other -- Mike, go ahead.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:   So Chuck, the whole -- the objective here is to
have everyone -- to have the new council seated by Seoul, that's the
target, right?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   That's correct.  And the reason that it has to be
done very quickly here, is because once we send it -- the GNSO sends it
to the board, then they've got to put it out -- they typically put it
out for a comment period.  And so assume that's 30 days.  And then the
board has to act -- won't act on those, and we need some lead time from
the time the board approves them for stakeholder groups to elect their
representatives to the council with enough time before Seoul so that
they don't -- you know, et cetera, traveling, et cetera, so everybody
appreciates, I hope, the time crunch that we're under.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   There's one other question that we may or may not
want to talk about and that is that Avri Doria has indicated that she
will not run for reelection as chair of the council.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   She can't because she's termed out.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   That answers that question.  So the next question
is who will be the next chair of the council?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Obviously, we don't have a clue.  But the bylaws in
here talk about the election of chair, okay?  And what happens if
there's not -- I think require -- what does it require?  I'd have to
look it up here?  It requires like 60% of both houses to elect a chair,
what if you can't get that?  And the alternative is that the two vice
chairs would become cochairs until such time that a chair is elected.

>>KEN STUBBS:   I'll speculate, but I think I'm pretty close, in that
that would be an immense amount of pressure to put the next chair up
out of the business constituency and I would not at all be surprised if
they didn't try to do Philip, again, because it's been many years since
he's been there but -- you know.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Of course, that presumes that he's not termed out. 
But you raised that question already.

>>KEN STUBBS:   Yeah.

>> Stranger things have happened.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Do we want to consider a proposal, a nomination of
somebody?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   That could be somebody we talk about with the
registrars, too.

>>KEN STUBBS:   I think it would be a good -- in the past, we've been
somewhat successful on using a birds-of-a-feather type of approach. 
And I think it would be a good idea to get a shakeout of exactly how
the structure's going to work in the future.  And then I think there
may be a strong possibility we need to reach out to people who we feel
would be comfortable.  You know, it's always a little give and take
like it has been in the past in board members, but the point is we may
be better off to find somebody that we can agree with a significant
amount of time but not necessarily's going to be in complete...

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Mike, go ahead.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:   Chuck, again, my apologies for not having gotten
through this stack of documents.  Does the chair have to be a council
member or can the chair be someone outside the.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Has to be a council member but could be the nonvoting
NomCom rep or one of the voting NomCom reps.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:   Thanks.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   For right now and for next year as well Olga Cavalli
and -- and -- oh, I went blank, somebody help me out, who's our other --
I'll get it here in just a second.  The continuing -- and we don't know
which house Olga's going to be in or which house -- and hold on a
second, I'll grab it here very quickly.

>> Terry.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Terry.

>> The guy from -- Davis from Washington.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Terry Davis, thank you, thank you, Terry, Davis,
yeah.  So are the two continuing reps.  And whether or not one of them
will be the nonvoting rep or the -- we're going to let the NomCom
decide that, I guess, is the way -- what the plan is.  So -- and then --
so -- then you're going to have one new person coming on board which we
won't know till, what, late summer I think the NomCom -- who's our --
Caroline, late summer we'll know on the NomCom appointee?

>>CAROLINE GREER:   Yes, that's right, yeah.  We got that
communication from Avri, yesterday, I believe, what you're saying that
it would be up to the NomCom to pointe.

>>KEN STUBBS:   I have been told by quite a few people that Olga is
very anxious to be considered for the chair next round.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Our next topic is the steering committee's
reports.  Jeff apparently has stepped out so we'll have to --

>>CHUCK GOMES:   He had to go to an IRT presentation.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Do you want to talk -- Chuck, do you want to talk
about the operations steering committee?

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Sure.  All three committees are, working teams are
proceeding.  The one that I'm on has to do with the constituency and
the stakeholder group operations.  And there's a request for feedback
that has been sent out to the constituency regarding, you know, are
there any other things we'd like in that tool kit of services that
could be offered by ICANN to constituencies and stakeholder groups.  So
I haven't seen any response to that at all.  Does anyone have any input
on that?  Keep in mind that ICANN staff did a survey of those things
and the services that were in the message that went out came from that
survey that most of you had a chance to respond to at the end of 2008. 
So it included things like web -- Web site services, not only just
hosting but it could be, you know, design and everything else.  So --
so hosting of meetings, meeting control, there's a whole bunch of
things in there.  If we don't receive any feedback, I'll assume that
you're satisfied with the list of services that are there and then the
working team will come up with a proposal in terms of what the services
are but before the working team makes that decision they were trying to
get some -- allow any additional input that there might be from
constituencies.  So anybody have any thoughts on that?  I won't ask if
anybody's looked at it because I'm afraid of the answer.

[ Laughter ]

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Now, the other two teams, ray -- ray, are you still on.

>>RAY FASSETT:   Yes.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Why don't we let ray give a little update of his team.

>>RAY FASSETT:   Well, we continue to move along.  We had, actually, a
meeting on Sunday, local time to Sydney, with regards to being focused
on what are called the GNSO Council rules of procedure which really
have not been formally updated since -- in some cases, since the DNSO
days.  So it's a bit of a task on our plate right now, and what also
convolutes it a little bit is we have to wait on some things to be
completed on a bylaws levels, because some of the things that are in
the existing council rules of procedure interrelate with what's going
on with some of the bylaws changes right now.  

So -- but nonetheless we have, with the support of ICANN staff, been
provided some direction of which ways to head on certain areas such as
with quorum and with voting and a few other areas.  So, you know, the
main -- the main challenge right now within this team is just to stay
on task, you know, we have a -- it's easy to drift off or become -- go
off into areas that we don't want to necessarily go off on.  So that's
the main challenge right now, it's just keeping the team on task and I
think we're doing pretty good.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you.  Anyone else.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   And then we have Steve, are you still on?

>>STEVE HOLSTEN:   Yeah, I sure am.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Steve's a member of the constituency on the
communications work team.

>>STEVE HOLSTEN:   Yeah, and -- and briefly with respect to the
communications work team, there are four real tasks that we've
identified.  One is improving the GNSO Web site.  The second is
improving document management.  The third is soliciting meaningful
feedback.  And the fourth is improving coordination within the other
ICANN structures.

So as to the first tasks, the subteam has completed a business
requirements document and our chair, Mason Cole, is going to share that
with the operation steering committee and as a next step that subteam
is going to meet with Marc Salvatierra who is the ICANN webmaster to
take that document to a design level.  So there are differences between
a business requirement and the actual implementation.  On the task of
soliciting meaningful feedback, one of the issues that everybody's
grappling with is understanding localization and translation efforts,
comparing that with what ICANN does with its Web site and just more
generally.

And then finally, on task four, Mason is spearheading that effort, and
I'm not sure exactly how much progress has been made in that, but I
think on the whole, the communications work team has been making good
progress.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Thanks, Steve.  And David, if I can go back to
Michael here, because he's vice chair of the constituency stakeholder
operations team.  And I know that there's some input that's wanted from
the registries that I think he and I are expected to give representing
the rest of you so I'll let him take that.

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   One area, and we're going to be getting, hopefully,
from Krista, a list of questions in particular, but one area I'd just
give some insight is of the work area is to proposal, to put together a
database of all participants in the stakeholder groups' constituencies
and so the initial feedback would be how does the group feel about
that?  Is there any privacy or confidentiality concerns about listing
people's personal contact information, e-mail addresses, that sort of
thing, we should know about those and get those on the table.  

The purpose of the database would be general consumption for anyone in
and around the ICANN bodies to be able to look up people, what groups
they're working in and how to contact them.  Possibly some -- possibly
a little bio on them I mean, that hasn't been discussed that far,
Chuck, but it's a possibility.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   That means that, in effect, the general public
would have access to this simply by signing up, getting an ICANN
password?

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   And that could be one of the concerns with it,
absolutely, David.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Keep in mind that this was in the board
recommendations, this wasn't a specific recommendation, but it was an
idea with regard to making it easier for people to find out where --
who's in which group and so forth.  So a lot of issues come up, but
Krista's asking to meet with Michael and I to kind of get a feel for
where the registry constituency members are on this and so any comments
you have would be very helpful like even the question you just asked.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thanks.  Anyone else?  If not, I think we can move
along to PEDNR, the new acronym, Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery. 
The question, as I understand it, is to advise our councillors how to
vote on the charter tomorrow, is that where it's coming up?  This is an
issue that I think I have some fairly strong meetings that the
interests of the registrants are being overlooked, and I'm not sure
that we're in a position to argue with the registrars about how to
handle this because it's their problem essentially.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   But it could result in a change to the redemption
grace period policy.  Doesn't necessarily need to end in that but
that's a possible outcome of this particular working group that's being
recommended for -- with -- out of the charter for the working group in
particular.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Does anyone have any comments by our councillors
on this?  As far as I'm concerned, we should vote in favor of the
working group, if anyone has any other thoughts on that, now's the
time.  If not, Greg, you're in fast flux.

>>GREG AARON:   Thank you, David.  The group is currently working on
its final recommendation section for its report to the council.  That
was not ready in time for the Sydney meeting but should be out pretty
shortly.  In summary, it's not going to recommend any policy changes. 
It may recommend some further study in some areas and some best
practices.  So that report will go to the council, they'll have to
examine it and decide what, if anything, should happen next and
participation in the group at this point is down to about six
individuals.  So nothing more than that, I can say, unless there are
any questions.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   There don't seem to be any and I think you can
move on to registration abuse.

>>GREG AARON:   Okay.  This is the registration abuse policies working
group, I'm chairing it, and we have representatives from our
constituency, including Nacho, Jeff Neuman, Michael Young, and Pat
Kane.  This group had a very wide remit from the council which was to
look at a variety of issues, including what -- what abuse could be
defined as and then to look at specific examples that the members might
propose.  We spent the first part of our work on definitional issues. 
I wanted to make sure that all of the members understood some of the
basic concepts including the picket fence and so forth.  So there's a
common basis for understanding and discussion.

We've now gone into discussions of specific issues.  Some of them that
have been proposed for discussion include cybersquatting, which we
discussed at our meeting on Monday.  We're trying to shy away from
WHOIS because that's being discussed elsewhere, of course.  Issues of
dealing with phishing, malware and other DNS-related problems are also
on the list.  And there's some interest from some members about making
registries and registrars responsible for taking down domain names. 
And perceived inconsistencies on registry contracts related to that
issue.

So the work continues.  It's a pretty broad group with good
representation from all the constituencies and because the remit is so
broad the work will probably take a while to work through.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you.  Any --

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah, question:  Craig, now, is that working group
participating in the session that I think is Thursday afternoon on abuse?

>>GREG AARON:   Not explicitly, no.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   But that's what it's about.

>>GREG AARON:   There are a couple of sessions, one is about the DNS
and that's a workshop to find out how the issues roe being dealt with,
they'll be talking about, for example, those issues, there's also going
to be a discussion of malicious conduct in reels to the new gTLDs
that's a separate meeting.  These issues do come up again and again in
various fora.

>>RAY FASSETT:   This is Ray, I have a question.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Go ahead.

>>RAY FASSETT:   At some point back, there was a high-level conclusion
brought forward by ICANN staff that domain name abuse can't happen with
the registration of a domain name but requires the use of the domain
name for there to be domain name abuse.  Is that -- I believe that's
pretty much what was said, is that being filtered into your discussion?

>>GREG AARON:   Absolutely.  The issues report from the staff said
that registration issues are within scope.  So for instance how domain
names are allocated, transferred, deleted, those kinds of issues that
we're very familiar with for PDPs.  Staff also said that uses of domain
names are outside scope.  So actually, we spent a fair amount of time
talking about that issue when the working group got under way at Mexico
City to make all the members aware that -- where the picket fence lays,
among other things.  So very much on our minds.

>>RAY FASSETT:   Okay.  A follow-up question, then.  Is it me or
should it be logical that there should be a definition of what is
domain name abuse?  I mean, it starts there.  "Domain name abuse is..."
Is that -- is there anything like that?

>>GREG AARON:   Well, that's one of the things the council asked us to
look at so those are the marching orders we got.

>>RAY FASSETT:   Okay.  I know that's easier said than done, by the
way.  I just hear the term used so much in various reports around, just
throwing that term out there, domain name abuse, be helpful to get a
common definition of what that means.

>>GREG AARON:   I agree.  It's used very differently by very different
people.  And this group is going to try to come up with a definition
for -- for use by ourselves.  And we'll see if it can -- it's
applicable to all the ways that all people use it, let's put it that way.

>>RAY FASSETT:   I'm even recalling an IRT footnote that reference
(inaudible) procedures as domain name abuse.  And -- so we really --
(inaudible).

>>GREG AARON:   Right.  There are a lot of things that get conflated
and different people have used the word very, very differently.

>>RAY FASSETT:   Right, thanks.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thanks.  Any other comment on the abuse issue?  If
not, we can move on to the transfer proceedings.  Is Barb, Barbara
Steele on the line?

 >>BARBARA STEELE:   Yes, David, thank you, I am.  I don't have a
whole lot to update you all on today.  But I believe some of you may
have attended the brainstorming session that was held there in Sydney
on Sunday morning to discuss the issues included in the IRT PDP.  And,
basically, most of the discussion for those of you not able to attend
really focused on whether or not many of the issues included in that
PDP continue to be a problem.  So several participants have agreed to
kind of summarize their experience with the various issues and provide
them to Marika.  The working group has been formed and the mailing list
has been published, so I do expect that work will begin on this
shortly.  

>>CHUCK GOMES:  And, David, there are two motions in that regard that
will be voted on tomorrow in the council meeting.  The first one is to
initiate a PDP, and the second one is to approve the charter for a
working group.

 >>BARBARA STEELE:   Thank you, Chuck.

 >>DAVID MAHER:   Anyone have any strong feelings about how our
counselors should vote on those?  Apparently not.

That brings us to the RAA amendments.  Is that an issue currently
before the council?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   No, there's no action item.  There's probably two
little action teams that are going to work on that.  Bear with me a
second, and I'll pull up the action item list.  I'll pull up the whole
agenda.

The -- specifically the agenda for tomorrow's meeting -- we've talked
about the motions that are up for action, the post-expiration domain
name recovery charter.  And we just talked about the transfer policy,
the two motions there.  We're going to talk about internationalized
domain names group that we talked about earlier with Edmon.  He's going
to be the lead on that.  The bylaws changes that we talked about is a
possible action item.  Okay?

And then the GNSO improvements and restructuring progress, most of
that is status updates.  And then it's just open mic.  So this
particular topic is not -- is not there.  But there are -- let's see if
the latest action item list is posted.  I don't know if it is or not. 
But there are -- in this regard, there are two working groups that
anyone's welcome to participate in on the RAA.  And a message was sent
out about that if anybody wants to participate.  So -- one of the --
one of the -- just to let you know, David.  One of the groups is to
discuss further amendments to the RAA.  And the other one is -- and I'm
blanked.  Does anybody -- you remember what the other -- talking about
breaking it up into two separate groups regarding the RAA amendments. 
But we have about 30 days for the council to come back -- or for the
working groups to come back with some recommendations for possibly
defining the work further.  That's all we're doing right now is
defining the work on the RAA amendments.  And the ones that were
already approved are in the implementation phase.

 >>DAVID MAHER:   Thank you.  The next item on our agenda is the
constituency position -- petition involving the city gTLDs.  But I
think we've pretty well covered that, Dirk.  I don't want to cut off
any opportunities for you.  But the discussion with Roberto seemed to
have pretty well exhausted that one.

 >>DIRK KRISCHENOWSKI:   Yeah.  Thanks, David.  I think we are going
back to our group tomorrow to discuss this with Robert Hoggarth and Ken
Bour and some people from the SIC.  I think that's the group.  They are
-- and then we will come back to you and discuss what we can do and
where we fit best with our efforts and our group into.

 >>DAVID MAHER:   Thank you.  The last item really is WHOIS.  I don't -
- is there -- again, is there anything pending before the council on
that?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   No.  There are a couple activities going on with
WHOIS right now.  Staff is sending out some requests for information
regarding estimates on those six areas of WHOIS studies and feasibility
estimates, et cetera.  And then staff is also doing initial work in
terms of scoping out what might be needed to determine what possible
WHOIS requirements might be for -- if, for example, we were to look at
a new WHOIS protocol.  So those are ongoing activities that will
probably take quite a bit of time.

 >>DAVID MAHER:   Okay.  There's an open item on the agenda.  I'm not
aware of anything -- actually, I take that back.  The one item that we
might want to cover -- Craig, are you in a position to give us a better
look of what ICANN is looking for in that recent message about
financial information?

 >>CRAIG SCHWARTZ: Sure.  So the benchmarking study that I wrote to
the registries about maybe about a week and a half ago comes out of
comments that we got out of the draft applicant guidebook that the
technical, operational, and financial criteria that have been sent out
were really not, let's say, meaty enough and that ICANN as the
technical coordinator should beef up its requirements in the draft
applicant guidebook.  So in the work that we've been doing with KPMG on
validation on a lot of the other components of the guidebook, they
raised the notion of reaching out to gTLD registries and ccTLD
registries to provide input into beefing up these particular elements
of the guidebook.  In particular, the information, if we were to
collect it, would be used to redo some of the questions in the
guidebook so that more objective information could be obtained from
applicants rather than subjective information and that the information
could also be used to aid evaluators in more adequately evaluating
applications.

So the e-mail that went out last week was really an invitation to sit
down and talk about what it is we're looking to do.  It was not a
request for any information at this time.  And we sent out -- as I
said, we sent out the request to all the registries.  And a random
number of ccTLDs registry operators. And we've had about 20 responses
that said, "Sure, we'd like to sit down with you in Sydney and talk
about what it is you're trying to do and determine then if it's
something we'd like to participate in or not."

And I've been a part of a couple of those meetings so far.  And the
response has, on the whole, been very positive, that it's a way to
create more objective criteria for the applicant guidebook and to aid
evaluators.  Now, KPMG would be handling this project for ICANN and
would be working directly with the registries.  But the specific
information would not be public in any way and would not be provided to
ICANN.  But aggregated information would be used to refine and develop
new questions for the guidebook.  So we're right now in the phase of
are registries interested in participating in this?  And the next phase
would be to develop the questionnaire and send it out to the
registries.  And the timeline that we're looking at is to conclude the
conversations with registries while we're here this week and probably
by the 13th or the week of the 13th of July to get the questionnaire
out to the registries with an anticipated turnaround time of probably
two weeks.  Because what we'd like to be able to do is use this
information and take it to build upon what will be presented in the
next guidebook, which, as most folks know, is supposed to be out
sometime in September.  So it's up to each registry or sponsor to
determine, you know, whether or not they want to participate, to what
extent they are comfortable supplying information.  KPMG has certainly
offered to enter into NDAs with any interested party.  And, if further
methods of security or confidence building, you know, over and above an
NDA is requested, KPMG said that they'd certainly work with
participants to give them what they need to feel comfortable sharing
and participating in this project.  So, just to be clear, we haven't
requested anything yet, other than some time to sit down and talk with
you about how you might participate.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   And you'll be dealing with this individually?

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   We've had one-on-one meetings with some folks in
this room, and we will have some in the next few days.  We've only
scheduled meetings with registries that have responded to the e-mail.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you. 

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:  Sure.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Any questions on that?  We have come to the
question of the registries constituency rule.

Edmon, do you have any information?  I'm really not sure who to ask
about the status of our -- this is the constituency renewal as opposed
to the stakeholder charter.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   I don't, but I think Chuck mentioned something
earlier in the week.  I'm not sure whether it was for the stakeholder
group or the constituency.

 >>DAVID MAHER:   We may have to wait for Chuck to return.  The
actually, we can have a discussion on the open and transparency
practice.  Michael, Michael Young is -- I take it this is related to
that issue you brought up about the information for the board.

 >>MICHAEL YOUNG:   Yeah, Chuck took it as an action of our group to
get some feedback from the constituency about open and transparency
issues.  So he -- I think he put an e-mail out on this asking for
feedback.

 >>CAROLINE GREER:   I think this subgroup that we were working on
transparency and openness for the constituency.  Is that -- yep.  We're
getting confused.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Do you have a report?

 >>CAROLINE GREER:   I sent it last Wednesday.  We were very late in
the day on coming up with something, but it was myself, Ken Stubbs,
Steve Holsten, and Chuck was the guest of honor on that group.  So
you've probably seen the e-mail.  We were discussing a couple different
options or things we could possibly look at in terms of opening up a
little bit to the community.  And so we spoke about the possibility of
opening up our constituency mailing list and the pros and cons of that.
And our thoughts there were well, you know, even if we did open up the
mailing list, chances are that some sort of private discussion that
will continue to happen as happens with most constituencies or groups
that do have an open mailing list.  So what we did is we looked at were
there other things that we could do that might be more meaningful in
order to show openness and transparency.  We thought that one thing we
definitely should be doing is posting high level notes or summary of
each of our meetings, maybe something short of detailed minutes, which
could be cumbersome, but something akin to what Cherie posts after each
of our constituency meetings, action points and dates, names of those
responsible.  So we were all in agreement in the subgroup anyway that
we should be doing that.  And other things that we spoke about or
looked at were having some sort of central e-mail address to which
queries or comments or questions from anybody in the community that
could post those comments or queries to the central e-mail address
would be monitored to somebody or some group within the constituency. 
And we would agree on responses and post responses to those questions. 
Then sort of more standard version of that would be to actually have a
registry constituency blog, which was something that Jeff Neuman was
somewhat supportive of.  And possibly, you know, protect it with the
user name and password and just to try and manage it a little bit
better.  So we were kind of split on that.

You know, it could be time consuming.  And, you know, you could
question the value of that exercise.  But, again, it's another option. 
It does occur to me that some of these ideas might have some associated
cost for the budget that Ken spoke about this morning.  I don't imagine
much, but it is another consideration.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Is there a timeline for this?

 >>CAROLINE GREER:   It was my understanding that all of this was sort
of to preempt any comments or questions that we could get on our
stakeholder charter.  Is that right, Chuck?  We haven't seen one
comment unless that's changed.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   In the edits they gave us today, I didn't see
anything on that.  At the same time, I think it's probably wise for us
to look at this issue.  It's consistent -- what we're looking at is
consistent with the board recommendations for GNSO improvements.  But,
interesting enough, I was just reskimming it.  I realized, I don't
think they changed anything in that regard in our charter or suggested
any revisions in that regard.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   I didn't see any.  While you were out, I raised
the question we have petitioned for renewal of the constituency
articles of operation pending the stakeholder charter.  Is that now
just a dead issue?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   I think so, yes.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Good.  That solves that problem.  Does anyone
have any comment on the --

 >>MICHAEL YOUNG:   I just wanted to -- I think the suggestions were
really good, and I wanted to thank the group for doing that.  I am a
little concerned about the idea of a blog.  And I did put my concerns
out on the list.  But it would require quite a bit of work for
moderating it.  And then we'd also have to set some standards of what's
appropriate behavior and, you know.  And maybe we could take those
standards from other activities around the ICANN environment and not
have to reinvent them ourselves.  But it still feels like a bit of a
quicksand situation.  And it does make me nervous because I'd really
hate to tell somebody it's not appropriate and not approve their
posting.  Because there's always going to be gray areas, you know,
where something might be interpreted as inappropriate or unfair or
constitute a racial or a discriminatory remark of some sort and then,
you know, it turns out that's not what was meant at all.  Just makes me
really nervous to step into that area of responsibility.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   It sounds to me as if we may have arrived at a
point where we should take your summary and turn them into concrete
proposals for action.  A blog, yes or no.  Improved Web site which
we've already -- which Ken already talked about.  And all the other
areas.  Does that -- that sound feasible?

 >>CAROLINE GREER:   Yeah, I can do that.  I mean, if -- I don't know
whether comments from others -- I mean, the things we did reach
consensus on, as I mentioned, were the high-level action points and I
think maybe a central mailing list.  I guess we need to think about how
that would work.  And -- well, we couldn't really do that at the
minute, could we?  Could we do that through our Web site or --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Well, some of these things may be easier to do once
we get the toolkit of services.  But that's probably six months to a
year away, depending on when we actually get to implementing the GNSO
improvements.  But that may become an easier thing to do once we have
that toolkit of services.  But I think it's fairly reasonable to expect
that that will be -- some of those things will get ICANN staff support
and technical support to do them.  So -- and, again, we can have some
input on that in terms of this whole process that's going on right now.
That's what that toolkit of services request for comments was all
about.  So --

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  It sounds as if the timeline at this point
is pretty far out in the future.

Well, this brings us to six minutes before noon.  I imagine our
director guests will be late as usual.  But -- they're hiding behind
the pillars.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   It's very unfair to the two that are sitting back
there and you can't see.  

>>DAVID W. MAHER:  Present company excepted.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   David, maybe we could take a few minutes to decide
how we're going to proceed with how we're working on the charter
changes.  It doesn't look like a very complicated task.  We could in
our next teleconference call walk through them and try to do it, or we
could form a small group to come back with their recommendations and
then walk through it in our next call.  But I think it would be good if
we can make a decision on that and finalize something on our next
regular teleconference call.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   I think that's a great idea.  We don't want to
let this get away from us.  I will volunteer to be part of the working
group.  I was involved in the drafting, rough drafting of the charter. 
Any other volunteers to help?

 >>MICHAEL YOUNG:   I'm happy to volunteer.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Great, Michael.  We accept with pleasure.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   You two guys can probably do fine.  I'm certainly
confident that you can.  If I can be of assistance, I will.  But I'm
okay with you two guys taking a crack at it and then coming back to the
group.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Anyone else?  I believe -- we don't want this to
be an exclusive group.  But, if you change your mind, by all means,
send us an e-mail.  Michael Young, myself, we'll get to work on this. 
I think we should expect to have something for the next teleconference.

 >>MICHAEL YOUNG:   I don't see why not.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   In fact, if you could get something out before the
teleconference, that would be great.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yeah.  Ready for voting, acceptance or rejection
at our next teleconference.

One note on the agenda, we have an agenda for our luncheon meeting
with the board.  And we're opening with IRT and then moving to the
registry-registrar separation.  I don't see any reason to change that. 
Anyone have any thoughts on that?

The other thing is that on the draft agenda for our joint meeting with
the registrars, we suggested -- and I -- I think we talked about this
at our last teleconference, the question of registry-registrar
separation, or vertical integration.  Mason Cole, the new chair of the
registrar constituency did not include that in his suggested list of
topics.  And I think it's probably best to leave that off the agenda. 
I'm not sure that we could have a very constructive discussion at our
joint meeting, which always involves a very large number of the
registrars.  And I'd much rather spend the time on the issues of the
new gTLDs and particularly the IRT.  And I think we also need to talk
about the way the contracted party house will function.  Those are two
immediate issues where we can really get some work done.  If anyone has
any other thoughts on this, by all means speak up.

Jeff, welcome back.  Do you have any -- while we're waiting for the
board members, we skipped over the PDP team.  Do you have any --

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   Sure.  I guess it's -- I don't know what you talked
about.  But I guess the PDP -- the PDP work team is in progress.  It's -
- we had a good discussion today.  I think we're moving forward.  We
know we have a goal to reach Seoul and try to have a PDP draft or
finalized.  So we're working towards that.  Hopefully now we'll get
some more attendance and participation.  I think everyone realizes how
important it is.  We actually moved forward and did a little survey
within the group of some of the points that we thought we were getting
towards.  And I think that was actually really helpful because it --
for the first time people could see it in writing.  So I think we're
making progress and just -- we'll hopefully in a few weeks have
something more substantive to report.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Could you possibly give us just a really rough
idea of what changes are going to result?  I think we're all pretty
familiar with the PDP as it has been used in the past.  Is there
anything radical that is being proposed?

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   I don't think it's going to be radical.  I think
there's more of an emphasis on work being done prior to the official
launch of a PDP, what we call a PDP and it's a problem with the
termination -- said termination -- the terminology that we use.  We use
the word PDP for two phases, actually.  One is the initiation even
before a launch or even before an issues report people call a PDP,
initiating a PDP.  And you also call it after the council votes to set
up a working group.  That's also called the initiation of a PDP. 
That's a problem with terminology.  

So the initiation of the policy process, even before an issues report,
I think will become more -- there will be more guidelines on the work
that needs to be done so that, hopefully, we can avoid some of the
situations like the fast-flux groups or some other recent working
groups that have been set up prior to understanding the issue. 
Actually, I think it's happened anyway without formalizing in any
document.  I think in some of the last few issues like the post-
expiration -- PDE -- whatever it stands for, the abbreviations.  And
also the abuse -- registration abuse drafting teams have been formed. 
So I think that's kind of the stuff that's envisioned.  But we need to
be careful because a lot of people don't want too formalistic of a
process.  It needs to allow for flexibility.  And so really what's
coming out of it is what I think -- and again, I'm the chair.  So I'm
not really presupposing a result.  But the feeling I get is that there
will be guidelines for what is the best practices approach to
initiating the policy process and getting it forward to the -- to a
working group.  Then the working group is doing the -- task force is
doing its work as to how that operates.  And then, when it comes out of
the working group, you know, what kind of steps should be taken to get
it to council.  But, more importantly, what kind of emphasis there
needs to be in work on implementation, on review of a policy, review of
its implementation after a set period of time.  And then a policy to
come back to the original policy and make any necessary changes.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   All right.  Thank you.  Any questions for Jeff? 
Or any other thoughts?

We've arrived at 12:00 noon.  And, as always, this is the end of the
open session of the registries constituency meeting.  So I would ask
our guests in the back of the room and elsewhere to leave us for the
closed session of the meeting.  I think we can take a break pending the
arrival of the board.

[Break]

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   I think we're going to get started.  Peter Dengate
Thrush will be here shortly.  And as a first step, I'd like to go
around the table and have everyone introduce themselves.  Adam, why
don't we start with you.

>>ADAM PALMER:   Adam Palmer, policy council for PIR.org.  And also
joining me here in a second is Alexa Raad who is the CEO of dot org.

>>CATHERINE SIGMAR:   I'm Catherine Sigmar from dot PRO and joining me
in a second will be Matt Buckland also from dot PRO.

>>GREG AARON:   Greg Aaron from Afilias.

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   Michael Young from Afilias.

>>KEN STUBBS:   Ken Stubbs, I'm director of Afilias.

>>EDMON CHUNG:   Edmon Chung, dot Asia.

>>CHERIE STUBBS:   Cherie Stubbs, secretariat.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Chuck Gomes, VeriSign.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Jeff Neuman, NeuStar.

>>BRUCE TONKIN:   Bruce Tonkin, Melbourne IT, and also the GNSO
representative on the ICANN board.

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   Paul Twomey, CEO and president.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   David Maher, chair of the constituency.

>>BECKY BURR:   Becky Burr.

>>BRIAN CUTE:   Brian Cute, Afilias.

>>CAROLINE GREER:   Caroline Greer, dot mobi.

>>NACHO AMADOZ:   Nacho Amadoz, dot cat.

>>KATIM TOURAY:   Katim Touray, ICANN board.

>>BYRON HENDERSON:   Brian Henderson, dot travel.

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:  Raynor Dahlquist, VeriSign.

>>PATRICK KANE:   Pat Kane, VeriSign.

>> (Speaker off microphone).

>>STEVE HOLSTEN:   On the phone is also Steve Holsten of VeriSign.

>>BARBARA STEELE:   Barbara Steele of VeriSign.

>>VLADIMIR SHADRUNOV:   Vladimir Shadrunov from Telnic.

>>BARBARA FRASER:  Barbara Fraser, I'm on the board of PIR.

>>GLENN RICART:  Glenn Ricart, PIR board.

>>DENNIS JENNINGS:   Dennis Jennings, ICANN board.

>>CHING CHIAO:  Ching Chiao, dot Asia.

>>FRANCISCO ARIAS:   Francisco Arias, ICANN staff.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   Craig Schwartz, ICANN staff.

>>DOUG BRENT:   Doug Brent, ICANN staff.

>>KURT PRITZ:   And last but not least, Kurt Pritz.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   As always, we welcome you to our conference
registries constituency meetings we look forward to these candid
exchanges and I think this -- the topics this time are probably of more
burning interest than never before.  The key topics that we've listed
are the -- first the IRT.  Second, the issue of registry-registrar
separation also known as vertical integration.  And then new gTLDs and
we'll, of course, give the board its own opportunity to raise questions
or topics.

To get the ball rolling on the IRT the constituency is preparing
comments which will be filed fairly quickly.  We talked about those
this morning.  And I think the salient point that we'd like to bring to
the board's attention is the feeling that the IRT developed some
proposals which make the registries responsible for actions and
policies to an extent that is really unprecedented and the reason for
doing that appears to be a feeling on the part of the IRT members that
they could not trust ICANN to carry out the announced policies of
taking care of malicious Web sites, cybersquatters and so on.  We don't
really think that's a good reason to change the burden of
responsibilities to the registries, that it would be far preferable for
ICANN to take further steps to make sure that the registrars live up to
their responsibilities.

Having said that, does anyone else care to add to those comments?

>>RAY FASSETT:   This is Ray, can I make a comment.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Certainly, go ahead.

>>RAY FASSETT:   The mechanism to get to the ends of the means is to
basically award themselves enforcement rights in contract without being
a signatory to the contract, and that is a major position to take,
unprecedented, if you will, and the justification for it doesn't seem
to be there.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you, anyone else, would new of the directors
or.

>>DOUG BRENT:   I'm not sitting at the table because I'm leaving at
1:00.  Any clarification maybe the best way to get this would be maybe
through your written comments but when you say aspect of the IRT report
were related to lack of enforcement, could you be more specific about
that or should I just wait and read it in your comments 'cause I'm just
-- you know, the IRT obviously made several different recommendation
areas.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Right, I'm not thinking of a specific instance, I
think it's -- the question of the underlying philosophy of the IRT
comments and we'll make that in our written statement.

>>DOUG BRENT:   Okay, thanks.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:  Well, I think it's -- we can move
smartily into the far more interesting topic of vertical integration
registry-registrar separation and again, I'll get the ball rolling.  I
really enjoyed economics 101 yesterday.  It was certainly educational. 
As you -- as the directors, I believe, are aware there's not a
unanimity of opinion on the part of the registries constituency.  Some
of the registries have made their own statements.  But I think it's
fair to say that there is a general belief that more data, more
research is needed.  And we would -- we urge ICANN to take this
seriously, to provide far more detailed study of the economic situation
of registry-registrar that the whole domain name market, primary and
secondary, to make policy on a sound basis.

So the other concern, which I think is fair to say is shared by
everybody, is that the -- what came out of yesterday afternoon's
meeting seemed to be a proposal or a plan that would require ICANN to
deal with any instances of anticompetitive behavior on a case-by-case
basis.  And our question to the board is whether the board has
considered how to deal with what we anticipate as serious
anticompetitive situations, is the board going to develop procedures to
prevent the anticompetitive actions or is the board planning to wait
until they occur and then take steps to do something about them.  Paul?

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   Well, I think a couple of things to start with. 
There is no proposal on the table at the moment.  So there's no
proposal which has gone to the board which says the situation should be
X or Y.  There are a couple of facts, though, I think that we need to
be sort of clear about.  One is that there -- and I think in quite a --
in quite an expression of good faith, there has been a communication
registrar back as the meeting in Vancouver by a large number of the --
by a number of the large registrars might be a way of putting it.  Of
their interpretation of existing gTLD language and their interpretation
of the legalities of that.  Whether or not it does prohibit them from
owning registries.

But in that sense, when that first discussions took place there was --
and even further, that there is no formal policy, if you use modern-day
ICANN wording for the word "policy," there, actually, is no policy on
this issue.  In the sense that -- because this was one of these things
negotiated at the very beginning at the formation of ICANN, and indeed
the registry-registrar separation was largely negotiated by the United
States Government as part of the process of bringing VeriSign to the
table to the ICANN compact.  Becky could probably talk about that --
certainly talk about that more than I could.  So that's one of the
facts that we have on the table is that expression.

In response to that, I think the registrars who raised the issue said,
you know, agreed that economic analysis or economic discussion, this
would be a valuable thing, so, you know, I think that was at least a
sort of a good-faith expression by their part to -- you know, not to be
a part of an ICANN understanding of the issue.

I think the other fact I'd put on the table is that the industry
structure is changing and is going to continue to change and if new
gTLDs are actually implemented, we need to understand that it's not
just a question of registries and registrars, it's clearly going to be
an issue of registry service providers.  And that's an emerged part of
the industry structure.  And that potentially the whole issue of
resellers has always been discussed, I think Mike Palage has, over the
years, produced documents that -- had, you know, two hours, three
hours, four hours in descriptions of the industry structure.  So I
think there's some facts that we're just going to have to, I think,
recognize.

The process at the moment is there's been some economist's report, the
(inaudible) at the level of public economics during yesterday's
session, I think there will be some potentially further discussion.  I
think, you know, you said it was economics 101, but I think, frankly,
there were other people in the room that was probably some of their
first experience of economics 101.  But like I say, there's no proposal
up in front of the board at the moment so there is further discussion.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   When you say "no proposal," what about the
February 9 recommendations for Section 2.8 of the basic agreement,
isn't that a proposal on the table?

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   Sorry, you've corrected me appropriately.  There was
a -- there was a placeholder put in in the February 9.  The board
itself has had discussion about this at its most recent meeting, as
recently as its most recent workshop in Vienna but has wanted to make
certain that still further -- further discussion.  I think the board
would consider this issue as not formally proposed on the table but I
think, you know, the general issues that were being discussed yesterday
are real ones and we are -- we will have to think about them and have
to make an active decision as to which way we go one way or the other.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Do you have any thoughts as to whether it's
appropriate to anticipate, have a proactive approach to these issues or
is it -- is your feeling better to wait and take action after they occur?

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   Why don't I give a personal view.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   So I don't speak on the part of the board, and you
can all value the personal view as much as you want because in five or
six days it's an ex-personal view.  Or it's a more personal view in
five or six days.  

I think there is something in the proposition that was discussed
yesterday that one-size-fits-all tends to cause harm.  I think there is
something in that, when you have a large variety.  But I personally
think there's also something in the concept that if you are going to
make any changes to an existing structure, you should do that
incrementally and it should be done in a way that is clear to the
participants.  

So I -- I'm personally more in favor of the idea that if you're going
to make any change then you do it on an incremental basis and you make
it rule-based, you don't necessarily, for ICANN, make it interpretive
of the market power problems case by case.  I personally prefer to see
that role remain with the national competition bodies who clearly have
those powers.

>>BRUCE TONKIN:   The case-by-case rule.

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   Yeah, the national competition bodies clearly have
the case-by-case power, case-by-case role, I think.  And in the sense
that the presentation yesterday, I think quite rightly said, from my
understanding of competition law, that it is very factually -- it is
very factually contexted, and that it does tend to be, you know, what
other facts under determination, I think that is, right.  Do I think
that ICANN should be developing that capacity to do that on a case-by-
case basis?  My personal sense at the moment would be I'd be saying not
at the moment for ICANN.  And I'm talk very personally, others may
disagree.  But potentially we may need to consider the fact that our
present one-size-fits-all rule may not be applicable, perhaps there
should be more flexibility in that, the rule should be set.  The case-
by-case analysis I think should be left to the national competition
bodies, and potentially there should be some clear way of, you know, if
people want to refer something to those competition bodies, they can do
so.  But it's purely just a personal response and it's a personal
response as of today.  I reserve the right to completely change my mind
tomorrow.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   That's fine, I certainly can understand that.  Ken
do you -- Mike, go ahead.

>>MICHAEL PALAGE:   Thanks, Paul.  Just a data point.  I mean, we were
just talking about -- we've heard about the evolution of the registry
infrastructure provider, right?  It's really not so new.  Actually, if
you go back to the 2001 contracts, there was a provision 5.12 dealing
with subcontracting that if 80% of the value of a contract was
subcontracted out.  So that was a provision that was specifically put
in by Louie Touton to deal with the situation where Afilias when they
allocated to do the dot info contract were subcontracting with, of all
people, a registrar, it was Tucows, and Liberty had had the
infrastructure at that time.  So there were provisions, again, so,
again, I just raise that factual point from a historical standpoint as
we're having this discussion that infrastructures -- the regulation or
ICANN being involved in making sure that there was separation and stuff
like that was there.  It's not something totally new.

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   I accept that.  I think to some degree you've also
made my general point which is that was a specific set of things put in
place for a specific set of circumstances at the time which is part of
the compact of the founding, all right, this is where this issue --
where it wasn't actually formally policy, it was contractual responses
as part of the negotiation.  I mean, I would argue it's policy, but you
can make an argument that says show me where there's a PDP saying this
is the position.

>>BECKY BURR:   (Speaker off microphone).  I just want to sort of put
some history on the table because I think there's a lot of revisionist
history, that the structural separation in the registry-registrar
function that was the product of the negotiations between the U.S.
government and VeriSign and ICANN was done in order to provide
assurances to potentially competing registrars entering the market that
they would have a fair shake.  It was put in place for a very specific
reason and it got negotiated in different ways over the course of the
years.  But it was -- I mean, the -- the issue on the table was:  How
do we bring competition into the registrar level of this in the
quickest way, in a way that would bring people -- persuade people to
make investments in the business.

I think what happened after that is that the -- sort of the -- that
separation became a piece of religion that was not related to anything
that was on the table.  And it's not true that this issue didn't come
up.  In the 2000 round, there were very, very serious discussions about
whether this registry-registrar separation thing made since.

>>(From the telephone).  Excuse me, (inaudible) has joined.

>>COLIN DOYLE:  That's a new person joining.

>>BECKY BURR:   So the -- what happened, and I think this was sort of
the point that I was making at the end of yesterday was that there was
a sort of concession to what I think -- I'm probably not politely going
to characterize this, the sort of the registrar said "this has to be
the way it is."  And it was -- sort of made sense not to argue with it.
But the product of that has been a rule that is not economically based,
that has been imposed on every registry that's entered the market, and
that means for 10 years they have not created the capacity that is
going to turn out in a world, if -- where you increase -- suddenly
increase the number of registries to turn the bottleneck at least
temporarily from being registries to being registrars.

So I think that putting aside all of the economic stuff, because I --
Steve Salop was my law school professor, I know what he would say on
this regard, that the issue here is a rule, a noneconomically based
rule that was just sort of a matter of convenience that was imposed and
as a matter of equity it has to be dealt with in some kind of a
transition.  So whether you, you know, say it's per se, a rule or case
by case, the equities really require taking care of that issue which is
not a new issue, I mean, it really has been an issue on the table
forever.

>>KEN STUBBS:   (Speaker off microphone).  Jeff's on the same topic,
mine will be just slightly different so I'll go ahead and let him go on
and if it's all right I'll make a comment after Jeff.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   I think it's important, Becky mentioned a transition
period, one thing that was missing from yesterday's discussion was it
left everyone in the room with the perception of, that the floodgates
should be immediately opened up, you know, four months, five months'
time, all of a sudden the floodgates are opened up.  Which the other
message I got from the meeting yesterday was NeuStar, Afilias and other
registries except for VeriSign, it was thank you for playing within the
rules, we probably should have never imposed economic restraints on
you, we probably should have never imposed this vertical integration,
we apologize for doing so, thanks for playing within the rules, and you
guys are going to be the short-term transition costs, I think was the
term that was used in economics, which is a harsh way of saying, you
know, we're basically collateral damage.

So, you know, that's a hard message for us.  The other message that
was missed was that, you know, in every single deregulation, especially
the ones they were citing, it wasn't as if they created a rule and the
next day, poof, it's deregulated, I mean, this is years and years'
worth of transition which is something that I think necessarily needs
to happen -- you can't -- as you started this out, you can't just move
to that automatic, you know, open up the floodgates tomorrow and five
days, there needs to be some understanding of how you're going to move
forward.

The other point you made about, you know, it's interesting you said
Vancouver which is about four years ago, which was also right around
the time that we started raising it.  This is going to be an issue when
the new gTLDs come up.  And I said at that point, you know, look, if
you're going to open up the floodgates you need to allow the existing
registries to become registrars or you need to allow us to get on a
competitive playing field and that has not been allowed to date
although requests have been made.  So I feel like we're really
tremendously disadvantaged during this process.  I feel like now, when
we're going to compete as registry service providers, and I told you
this before and I'll say it again, we -- it's hard for us to compete. 
When our competitors are saying, look, I have this affiliated
registrar, affiliated either by ownership or by contract, that will
guarantee competition and NeuStar's great, you can go use them, and
they're fantastic technically, but I can give you something they can't,
and that's a built-in customer base, and we're going to lose every time
simply because this rule is in place.

So I think all that needs to be considered in this transition.  I
obviously don't think that the floodgates should be opened up and I
think time -- we need time to figure this plan out on how, if this is
the way that ICANN' going to move, how you get from point A to B
without the collateral damage.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Peter.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:   Thank you, good afternoon.  I'm sorry I was
a bit late, I got caught up in another meeting.  

Becky, thank you for the history.  I think it is important to remember
that those days were all about breaking a monopoly that doesn't exist
anymore.  

What I was taken -- yesterday, I wasn't able to attend the whole
session was this discussion of case-by-case analysis which sounds sort
of straightforward until you realize that what happens on a case by
case is that the court that's analyzing the case is applying a whole
lot of well-developed law from previous cases, or previous statutes,
none of which we have.  So we don't actually have an operable
definition of market power in this environment, it seems to me, and we
don't have an operable definition of anticompetitive behavior, and we
certainly don't have any definitions of what abusive market power might
look like, so it seems to me that Jeff's right, and that if we are to
move to a different situation, then we need to take whatever time it
takes without allowing it to be reason for delay to develop the laws or
the tests or the standards.  And I don't understand how we can do that
by referring it to national authorities because then we're going to
have 240 different jurisdictions to deal with.  And it seems to me that
if this is what we do and this is the self-regulatory model of ICANN,
then we need to design these rules.  And I agree with Jeff, that we
should do that in a careful sort of a way, and I wonder whether that
would allow, you know, a sufficient transition time for you to get out
of the collateral damage position that you've described yourself in.

>>PAUL TWOMEY:  Can I just make an observation that the CRAI first
report actually pretty much followed your line of thinking.  You might
remember as it gets to the end of that report it said his principles,
but then you may just want to, you know, to use -- use -- use, in a
media language, you may want to take some baby steps.  And they
actually proposed some simple steps.  So I think that was the approach
they had first proposed.

>>BRUCE TONKIN:   I think just to set the context, the discussion a
bit more as well, I think firstly we need to get clearer terminology
because I think there is confusion between sort of registry operators
and registries in a contractual sense.  So it probably be better to use
maybe some of the ccTLD or even the ITF definitions around the DNS
system.  So you probably might be better using a term like TLD manager
'cause currently we have ccTLD manager which is a contracting party. 
We might want to use that more generically and just say it's a TLD
manager, like PIR would be a TLD manager.  Then we use the term
"registry operator," someone's actually operating the registry function
and then "registrar" for an entity that's operating the registrar
function.  So I think we need to clean up terminology's the first
thing.  

The second thing is that presentation yesterday, I think, Jeff, you're
interpreting that, speaking on behalf of ICANN, the organization, or on
behalf of the board, they were not.  They were simply economists and
legal experts in order to give a background on competition law for the
audience and also to allow people to test some ideas against that so
people queued up and said this is what I think it should be and they
responded to some of those ideas but they also made clear throughout
that presentation that it's the responsibility of this community to
make its own decisions, they're not telling us what to do, it's our
community that decides that.  And then if you look at our community,
what I've been hearing in the last three or four years was it started
out with nothing to do with new gTLDs but existing smaller -- existing
smaller gTLD registries such as dot co-op and I think it might have
been dot museum as well approached the registrars and said, you know,
they're struggling to supply their domains to where they want to supply
them to.  Is there some possibility of relaxation of rules there.  And
the registrars looked at and that and that bounced back and forwards
for a couple of years and then it kind of got pulled into the debate
then about new gTLDs.  And it's interesting, some people changed their
views.  Initially some of those registrars were saying, no, we
shouldn't change any of those rules, we like them as they are, thanks. 
And then when some of those registrars thought, hey, wait a minute, if
there's a new gTLD and we could be operating it, then we've got a
completely different perspective and that is we want another set of
rules.

So when you're a board member -- now, I know the industry, but others
don't.  When you're a board member what you see is a bunch of
registrars saying one thing and registries saying the other thing and
both sides say what you expect them to say.  If it's structurally
separated and you're a registry, of course, you're going to say I want
it to stay that way if you're a registrar and want to get into that
business you're going to say the opposite, of course.  So the real
question is the parties that are in the broader ICANN community which
is the ALAC, the GAC, the business users, the ISPs, what's their
thinking?  And I think their thinking is probably their fairly
comfortable with the system they've got.  I don't hear a lot of people
complaining about the separation issues being a huge problem but I
think people are able to make a case saying they want some small
relaxation of rules and I think then the debate should be what's that
relaxation of the rules or what's that change of rules.  I don't think
we're at the point where we're debating throwing the rules we've got
out.  I don't really hear anyone within the community really saying
apart from those that -- you know, that say a direct personal
incentive.  So I think the debate should move not from a -- should we
have all or not, but the debate should move to we're about to create
new gTLDs, is there some opportunity to make some small changes that
would help some of the smaller registries and certainly in the new gTLD
process people are proposing registries that might be as small as
having one single domain name in it.  And, you know, does it make sense
to make some small changes but do that in such a way that you don't
cause risks to the existing system.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:  We have a queue.  Ken, Alexa, and then Jeff.

 >>BRIAN CUTE:   Thanks, Ken.  I'm going to step in because I have to
step out.  One of the questions that was begged out of yesterday's
discussion is who does the analysis and when.  And, if I heard the two
of you correctly, I think I heard Paul saying, effectively, that the
competition authorities should be doing this analysis.  And then I
heard Peter saying this is really within ICANN's purview to do this
analysis.  

And, Paul, I think I also heard you say ICANN, if it were to take on
analysis, might not be ready today.  So the question is which is it
going to be?  Can you give us an idea?  And also, if ICANN is not ready
-- if ICANN is going to take it on but they're not ready today, that
means for this extraordinarily important round, impactful round, they'd
take a pass and in a subsequent round we'd build that antitrust unit to
do subsequent analysis.  Just clarify, please.

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   If I can clarify what I was saying, I think ICANN is
well-positioned as a community to set rules and have those rules
applied into contracts, which is not the same thing as case-by-case
analysis ex post facto of whether a party is exercising market power in
an improper way or a way -- that's not the same thing.  Maybe Peter and
I are differing about whether we should eventually  have that capacity.
The question was posed do we do this afterwards?  Do we do it after the
event or before?  I'm saying we don't really have the capacity, I
think, to do after-the-event analysis.  We can do before-the-event rule
setting.  And I think after-the-event analysis, if you want to have --
ensure that this is being addressed, the national competition
authorities clearly have that capacity and authority.

 >>BRIAN CUTE:   Clear.  Thank you.

 >>KEN STUBBS:   Okay, now.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Alexa.

 >>ALEXA RAAD:   Thanks.  What I saw most from yesterday's meeting --
and I think, Peter, you said that quite clearly was there was really no
indication that the panel knew what the market -- what the definition
of "market power" was.  They made a couple of really good points.  A
lot of the abuses that they actually highlighted under vertical
integration, we had actually highlighted in our own paper to the board.
I also want to make the distinction that we have never offered up a
blanket statement on vertical integration.  In fact, we have made
provisions for smaller registries, and we've been very distinct in our
reasoning and motivation for doing so.

Second, I want us to -- although I -- I applaud the motivation not to
run into this process with full haste and actually take some time to
make a measured and rational -- create a rational approach to what is
market power, how is that going to be determined, and do that across
the board, not just for registries and registrars.  I also don't want
us to be fooled into the sense that the current rules are adequate. 
The current rules, as they stand, are riddled with loopholes.  So in
looking at making a better judgment and putting a little bit of a break
on the full haste approach to vertical integration, I also do not want
us to lose sight of the fact that there's some tweaks that need to be
made immediately in the current process.  And not to be lulled into a
sense of security.

 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:   Can I just answer Brian's -- I don't have a
view, to be clear.  I'm taking the approach at the board of saying I
want to know -- I want a clear explanation in as few words as possible
as to what is the problem?  What is the solution?  How does the
solution fix this problem?  And, if implemented, what are the
consequences?  And I don't have answers yet on that, so I don't have a
view.  I certainly think that an additional step -- and I agree with
Paul that what we could do is take some small steps in relation to the
contracts, if we can define some special cases like the one domain name
registry or some particular problems.  I'm sure there will be some
simple solutions to particular problems.  

In my own list of things that I said earlier, the first thing we would
have to say is Paul, as an indicator, is should we attempt to do the
rulemaking ourselves would be a really important first question. 

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   Thank you.  I wonder if I could -- the question was
asked before, where are we hearing requests for change.  And Bruce gave
a view of what he heard.

Can I share with you what I certainly heard?  I have heard requests
for change related, as Alexa just said, related to small registries. 
I've heard requests for change, interestingly, in -- from quite a
number of the -- in a number of the people who are prospective gTLD
applicants for those who seem to be concerned with a corporate TLD
where they want to control the second level either for full brand
control or for cost control, particularly, I think some were thinking
about using it mostly for e-mail.  And that's the question they've
raised is, to use your terminology, that the TLD operator be able to be
its own registrar.  Not that it would have to go and find or go through
the cost of creating an arm's length registrar to sell within the
company alone.  So that's -- I mean, just sharing that as a concern
that was raised.

I've heard the same concern from community groups, which is probably a
pre -- it's sort of an echo of the small TLD problem now.  So
indigenous groups saying, "Why can't we just market this directly?"

So that would be --

 >>KEN STUBBS:   In some ways I would -- I've been on boards for
years.  If I was a board member right now, I'd be somewhat frustrated
because I'm getting hit from all sides.  And I am very sympathetic with
the perspective that Pete has and very, very in sync with the
perspective that Bruce has.  I'm going to give you a couple of examples
of the some of the issues I'm concerned about.

First of all, yesterday, I had a discussion with the economists, both
who indicated they really did not have a very deep knowledge of the
basis for the CRA report.  And some of the work that was done in the
CRA report did not take into consideration the fact that we're
operating in a dynamic environment.  And so, if -- those of you who
understand the industry know that the most important thing is the
current trends.

And you're talking about net creates.  In other words, who's getting
the new business?  Who has been gathering the new business over the
last two or three years?  When you take a look at that, you can find
that there is a significant variance between what the CRA report
indicated in terms of market share and so forth and what is, in fact,
reality.  So, if I'm a board member, I'm going to say now wait a
minute.  People brought this up.  And I'm going to go to somebody like
Bruce and say, "Do these guys know what they're talking about?  Is
there any credibility to this?"  All I want to do -- it's the old
Johnny 5 needs more input. I really truly believe you need more input.  

What scared me yesterday was a lot of the tone of a lot of what I
heard at that meeting was, number one, competition is good, so go for
it.  You know, blanket -- and it's too complicated to try to develop a
set of rules to deal with every single circumstances.

And that scares me because ICANN has lived for years with issues that
were created initially and weren't necessarily -- and we criticize
Louie.  And I criticize Joe, because you all know as well as I do that
the only sanction you had against registrars for years was the death
sentence.  So you couldn't do what you really needed to do.  So I'm
just saying take your time and make sure you develop a process that
protects all sides.  That's it.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   We have a queue.  Becky and then Jeff.

 >>BECKY BURR:   Just a quick -- I want to really focus on what Alexa
said.  It's not enough actually to not do anything or take baby steps
because, if you add a bunch of new top level domains, the current rules
are going to skew things.  So I understand the frustration and all of
that.  I sort of had a slightly different reaction to yesterday's
panel.  But I do think simply, you know, making a change for a single
registry TLD or something like that is not going to do it because in
the context of opening up a lot of new top level domains, the rules, as
they stand now, will affect registries and registrars, existing
registries and registrars differently.  So you have to actually take
this on, I think.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Jeff?  I'm sorry.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   Okay, yeah.  I think Becky made some of my point.  I
think that's exactly right.  The status quo today has a number of
loopholes in it, and we all recognize it.  We have recognized it for
years.  And the argument I'm hearing from some registrars that want to
be registries is well, look, we just want the same rules that the
registries have lived under for all these years.  The loopholes do
exist today.  We know it does.  But, just because we've been good
actors and haven't taken advantage of the loopholes shouldn't mean that
we're punished and have those loopholes continue to exist for those
registrars that come into the market.  So I think it's a really good
point.  

Status quo is not enough.  Status quo is full of loopholes, full of
gaming possibilities that we talk about in our paper.  And so I've
heard from board members as well, just in informal conversations,
obviously, not an expression of the board.  But I don't know.  I'm
confused.  I hear good arguments on both sides.  Maybe we just leave
everything as it is.  And that's just not an appropriate way to go. 
And the last point is Paul had mentioned two scenarios -- the single
registrant TLD and the community-based TLD.  And, ironically enough,
those are exactly the two scenarios we have in our exact language that
we proposed to ICANN in our comments to the second guidebook that a
consensus of this constituency -- a supermajority of this constituency
supported.  So I don't want that language to get buried.  Because this
was several months ago that we actually put forth the language of how
to take the slow steps and how to close the loopholes that currently
exist to make it a level and competitive playing field.  And I really
want to urge the ICANN staff that's in this room to circulate that
language around the board again so that they can see it and it doesn't
get lost.  Because that's exactly what we proposed.

 >>BRUCE TONKIN:   So I guess what I'm trying to understand is what's
the next step in the process and what do you think it is?  From my
perspective the following steps have happened.  The staff got a report,
the CRA report, and got comments from the market and suggested, as Jeff
said, making small changes.  As a result of that, some text was put in
the draft applicant guidebook and I guess in the proposed registry
agreement into that guidebook.  And the staff received public comments.
That guidebook went through a second review view.  And then it got some
public comments.  And then what the board got was some letters from
both current registries and I think prospective registrars with various
views around that.  Are you expecting the board or the staff to
basically take all that input into account?  So, in other words, when
they do another iteration of the guidebook taking into account the
transcript of the session yesterday, taking into account the letters
that you've sent, the staff produce another draft and they put that out
to public comment?  Or are you expecting a natural policy development
process to be initiated to develop the rules?  Because I think really
to understand what process we want, this is a debate -- I don't think
the board is having a debate about what's right or wrong right now
because, as Peter has said, we don't actually have a concrete proposal
in front of us.  But what do you see the next step?  Do you see the
staff take all this stuff into account, produce a document, and it's a
public comment process?  And then, if the board sees that the public
comments agree, by and large, with what the staff proposed, then we
approve it?  Or do you want us to go into a proper sort of formal rules
making environment where the board at this meeting requests the GNSO to
consider this as a policy development process?  I don't understand what
you actually want the board to do.

 >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:   You see why we get on so well on the board.
The little list of questions I've written are almost exactly the same.  

I'd like to begin by saying, yes, I'm interested in closing the
loopholes.  This is new to me.  And I look forward to receiving the
material that Jeff has asked to be recirculated.  My questions are
exactly the same.  Isn't the place to deal with this GNSO PDP?  This is
not an implementation issue arising out of the GNSO policy that we were
given.  This is an entirely new policy question to me.  So shouldn't it
be done by GNSO PDP?  

And then my questions are would the current structure of the GNSO
actually allow a properly worked PDP?  And, if not, would the amended
structure of the GNSO permit a fully developed process?  And, if
neither of those are appropriate, what other mechanism should be used
to develop those processes, and what might that look like?  So my mind
is going exactly the same way as Bruce as how do we solve this?

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Mike, you have the answers.  Go ahead.

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:   No, just some suggestions.  And it really goes
back to what Bruce had said earlier.  What the board has to do here is
they have two entities that have financial economic interests.  So on
the contracting side of the house.  So I think, if you look at the new
structure, this is where I think the board should be listening to the
noncontracting parties to see what they experience in the, if you will,
domain name marketplaces.  So, again, I just really go back to Bruce's
comments earlier about looking at those noncontracting parties that
don't have a financial interest at stake to see what -- what their --
what their say or what their concern is.

(Speaker off microphone.)

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:   I think the PDP would probably be the best way to
do it.  I'm very cautious about how that potentially might slow down
the entire new gTLD process.  That being said, I look at the work of
the IRT and what those -- I mean, again, compliments to Jeff.  What the
IRT was able to do in a very short period of time was pretty
impressive.  So --

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   I think the -- I agree with Mike about the parties
should have an interest.  I think there's another set of parties who
are very important here and we need to be very careful about.  And
they're the prospective new entrants who would have a particular
interest in this.  Other people who wish to apply to be registries.  So
they're a party.  They're a group whose views would also have to be
heard on this.

The IRT process, of course, is not a PDP.  It's a community-based
proposal solution for the consultation.

And maybe that's one that could also be on the potential types of
approach.

 >>BRUCE TONKIN:   Could use that approach here, yeah.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Alexa?

 >>ALEXA RAAD:   Thanks, David.  I'm the last person you want to ask
about processes.  That's not my forte.  The one thing I am concerned
about is actually effecting change and doing it in a proper format.

My concern about this whole closing of the loopholes is one of timing.
So that it is actually -- the loopholes are actually closed before the
new gTLDs are put out.  Because, again, I think you've heard from me,
from Jeff, from Becky, that there are gaping loopholes currently.  To
sit back and expect that the status quo will simply be okay, I think,
is a huge fallacy.  And to -- to really disconnect the timing of the
closing of the current loopholes with the new gTLD process would also
be an additional mistake.  So my caution to you is loopholes have to be
fixed, but please do not choose a process where it's going to really
drag on and now once we fix the loopholes there's a huge mass of new
gTLDs with the grandfathered loopholes already in place.

 >>KEN STUBBS:   One other thing -- and I'm sure I'm being both
redundant and probably oversimplifying here.

But I strongly suggest you listen to the comments that were made at
the very end of that session by the representative from Go Daddy. 
Because it is not necessarily a registry versus registrar situation. 
But there were strong concerns expressed by the largest registrar about
some of the vertical separations issues as well.

So I think, you know, that's where you really have to take the input
all the way around.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   Just to add, I think an IRT-type approach may work. 
But, in the end, whatever the recommendations are, let's say it's a
recommendation to open up the space.  I don't know how we would do it. 
But you need time -- you need to give time to the existing registry
operators to get on that level competitive playing field or
alternatively to the applicants to get their act together to get on
that level competitive playing field, too.  If, for example, the
working group says it's a good idea, let's allow that integration in
these situations, well, NeuStar -- I'll speak for us -- we've been
prevented from getting into that situation.  And it's almost too late
to get in that situation to put ourselves in that competitive position.
In other words, you know, if the rule was well everyone can be
registrars and registries, for example, well we've had these registrars
have had a 10-year head start to actually develop that base, so there's
not going to be that competitive playing field.

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:   If I can, just, Paul, real quick.  With regard to
an IRT versus a PDP, two questions we need to ask.  And, Becky, perhaps
you can comment on this is this inside or outside the picket fence,
number one?  I think that's going to be the first threshold issue. 
And, if it is within the picket fence, that's probably going to have to
be the way to go to contractually bound existing operators to close
that loophole.  So, although I was initially attracted, as we sat
around this table, to an IRT solution, as far as a legal implementable
path forward, I think the PDP may be the only way to go if it is within
the picket.

 >>BECKY BURR:   I don't think this has to do with the security and
stability of the Internet.  I'm uncomfortable with the discussions
about -- there were a lot of discussions yesterday about market power. 
Chuck was at the table back those many years ago.  This was really
about -- there was one place where we could introduce competition
quickly and easily. And this was the what do you do to provide
assurance to entrants that competition would be fair in a world where
you're moving away from an integrated monopoly -- you know, integrated
monopoly provider in that space.

To me, under normal circumstances, if you were starting from a blank
slate, this would not be a PDP issue or a picket fence issue at all. 
But -- so -- and I guess -- taking that -- when you start from that
position, to me, making it a PDP means that you're talking about a
whole bunch of other issues.  You're introducing a whole bunch of other
issues into the mix about change.  And whether we like the ways
registrars behave and a whole bunch of other things that I just -- I
think are going to make your life really complicated.  I think this is
a conversation that some pretty -- you know, you need -- you need some
hard core economic information.  You need some information about
markets.  And then you need to have a conversation about what's really
fair, if you want to move to what I think is probably an economically
preferable position where, you know, you're not having too much
regulation in this space.  But what's a fair way to get there?

So, I mean, I'm -- I am speaking from my own prejudice on this.  I
think you're going to get a lot of other issues on the table in a PDP
that will make this much harder to deal with.

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   It strikes me, Mike, that it's a question, to use
another word, ring fence.  It's a question of whether you're ring
fencing existing TLDs and applying this only to new TLDs.  And, when I
use the TLDs now, I'm going to agree with the terminology.  You're
quite right.  I'm either going to say do you ring fence certain strings
with existing TLD operators?  And then you're looking at this ab initio
for new strings or you want to apply it whether you can apply this back
to existing strings.  And that's a question.  If you're going to apply
it back to existing strings, I think you're more likely to be in the
PDP space.  If you're looking at future strings, I think you can be in
the IRT space.

 >>BECKY BURR:   Go ahead.

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   I'll let you correct me in a second.  And to make
the point, I think that separates -- we think of it in terms of TLD
operators and strings, I think it does -- this helps to decouple
registry or registry operator from TLD and string.  I mean, potentially.

 >>BECKY BURR:   I guess I don't understand the concept of ring
fencing existing strings.  I mean, to me, the issue is sort of at the
moment where you open up the gTLD space a lot, what are the sort of
market forces and is the market -- are the participants in the market
going to be free to make, you know, reasonable economic choices about
where they go for registrars or back-end providers or whatever it is? 
Or is there going to be this kind of artificial limitation that is
going to skew choices?  So I guess I don't really understand how sort
of saying okay, we're not changing things with respect to the existing
strings would work.  That would be -- seems to me to be the worst
possible outcome from the perspective of the, you know, registries in
the 2000 to now world.

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   Well, I think if I was to channel one of the
economists from yesterday -- please note I'm now channeling.

 >>BECKY BURR:   That's a very scary --

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   It is.  If I was to channel, clearly, one of the
things that would emerge very quickly in that that person would channel
that one string and one TLD operator has, in the words of that person,
market power.  And, therefore, they would have potentially
consequences.  So --

 >>BECKY BURR:   Okay.  Well, that -- that is -- I'm not going to
speak for Chuck on this one or VeriSign.  That is an issue that I think
is an issue where there's a complicated conversation that probably goes
well beyond this room and does involve national regulators.

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   Now you understand my phrase "ring fence."

 >>BECKY BURR:   Okay.  Let's take that one off the table.  I do think
that's a complicated situation about which I'm not qualified to speak
or channel anybody.  

It's just that the -- putting that aside on the -- at the moment in
which there are, say, imagine a thousand new TLDs, what is the -- you
know, what are the situation of all of the other TLDs that have been
added since 2000.  We can talk about cleaning up the language, but the
fact is that the registry operators and the back-end providers are all
regulated as TLD managers. Because, in fact, just as a sort of matter
of chance, they also register, they also operate registries.

So something very specific with respect to the existing registry back-
end providers, whatever it is, has to be -- has to be negotiated.  And
so I think it's a negotiation.  And I think, you know, you need a lot
of really smart people in a room thinking creatively about how you get -
- how you move to a place where there is a levelish playing field.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Chuck, then Mike, then Jeff.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Thanks, David.  I want to come back to the PDP idea.
I'll leave it to the legal experts to side whether it's in the picket
fence or not.  There is one category that's listed there that might
fit.  But, again, that's not my call.

But I would suggest this:  That if it would be decided to go a PDP
route, then I think it would be wisest if then the major decision,
maybe some minor tweaks could be done, be deferred to the second round.
Otherwise -- and especially if we as registries are pushing that, it
looks like we're trying to delay competition.  And I don't think any of
us really are trying to do that.  I think it would be unanimous that
that's not what we want.  Now, if there's some other work like the --
like an IRT-type approach where we could work on some of the holes,
some of the little things -- some baby steps, Paul, like you said,
something like that might realistically be able to be done without
causing significant delays.  And I don't think we want to be viewed as
causing significant delays when it looks like we're trying to delay
competition.  And I don't think that's our goal.

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:   I want to just follow up on Chuck.  The first
point about ring fences, I think what I want is a level playing field. 
I want all operators operating from the same set of rules unless a
national government says this one's different.  I want level rules.  I
don't want legacy versus new, number one.  

Number two, with regard to, Chuck, your view about antitrust concerns,
obviously, one of the things that the board needs to be very concerned
about is what is how does its actions potentially increase or decrease
its litigation risk profile?

And one of the things was actually very interesting in reading the
recent Ninth Circuit case that came out that dealt with antitrust
issues.  They talked about standard setting bodies and how, you know,
that is -- that actually is a very important mechanism.  So standard
setting bodies are appropriate.  And I think we need to look at ICANN
as perhaps a standard setting body.  So Chuck, to address your issue,
yes.  If this was a PDP that we, the registries alone put forward,
probably would not look very good.  And, in fact, there's case law that
says, if a party tries to interfere with a standard setting body,
that's inappropriate.  But this is why if we go back to a PDP and we
have all the stakeholders, particularly those people from the
noncontracting side of the house coming forward and saying yes, this is
an issue that we want to look forward, I think that actually gives the
organization maximum coverage because that is -- that is how our
standard setting body is working.  All of the stakeholders, the
contracting, noncontracting, whatever, they follow the rules.  With
regard to timing, if we go back to what the bylaws say, we should be
able to do a PDP in 60 -- we're supposed to do it rather quickly.  It's
never gone that quick.  But, hopefully, this is a PDP that could be
done in a couple of months as opposed to a couple of years.  

So, again, I would really look to the legal principles and legal
protections that standard setting bodies are provided and how we get
the entire ICANN community to partake in this to come up with the right
result.

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:  Hi, Raynor.  One thing that didn't seem to come
yesterday and hasn't come up today, you talk about market. There 183
million domains out there today.  And number two and three position are
held by dot cn and dot ce, and I don't see them in the room.  And I
don't know that they're registrars who distribute or actually any part
of any of this discussion.  So it occurs to me that yesterday there was
very little said about what the actual market is for domains.  How many
actually exist and who has them and how they participate in any of
these processes that you're talking about.  And it starts to even
further worry me when you talk about carve-out contracts for certain
governments who may have additional TLDs.  So I think we take a very
skewed internal view of the market when we look at contracted and
noncontracted parties.  And that's just really not the case.

 >>MICHAEL PALAGE:   I agree.  That's one of the reasons, why, Paul,
when you talked at the annual board meeting in 2006 about a full market
economic analysis.  We've not yet had that.  And, even though in the
Dennis Carlton report it said it might be nice, I don't think it is not
just nice.  I think actually very critical to look at the entire
ecosystem -- g's, Cs.  We need to have that analysis.

 >>BRUCE TONKIN:   Just trying to draw this discussion to a close.  In
terms of the next steps, what I'm hearing is that whether we call it a
PDP -- PDP was really intended for making changes that become mandatory
to existing contracted parties.  So, whereas, IRT is looking forward
into -- yeah, the new gTLDs.  So one thing we could do is if the IRT
approach -- and I worked with intellectual property constituency at the
last meeting such that the board can provide direct staff to provide
resources to something, that was the approach that we took there.  One
of the things you could do even in the next 24 hours is sort of suggest
how would you form a working group that could look into this in more
detail.  Because I don't think it's fair just to throw it at staff to
say hey staff, take into account all these quite different points of
view and try to come up with an answer.  What you could say, though, is
with the IRT, that was a working group of experts in that field.  That
wasn't just a completely open working group.  All the participants were
selected because they knew something about trademark law.  And the idea
was to try to get people from different perspectives.  So there is
actually a trademark law from the noncommercial constituency, for
example, that's on that IRT team.  They're not all from intellectual
property constituency.  So you could constitute a working group that
said we want a working group with people from different areas like
potential new participants, registries, registrars, even ccTLDs, if you
think it's appropriate.  And they constitute that working group.  And
then you set a timeline.  And the board basically said set in the IRT a
pretty tight timeline of about two months or something.  And they all
complained about it.  And at the end of the day they actually did get
something that the community could then discuss.  That's an option I'm
just putting on the table.  I'm happy to work with any group that wants
to propose anything like that and try to structure it.  That's a
proposal.  The other approach is you just say staff, summarize the
discussions and do another round of the applicant guidebook and we get
public comments.  But I think, if those public comments are all over
the place, it's going to be hard to converge it.  Some saying I
absolutely hate this or some saying I love it or whatever or you
haven't gone far enough.  So anyway, leaving -- just putting that on
the table.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   It's a little bit -- thank you, Bruce, I think that's
helpful.  I think it's a little bit different than the intellectual
property issue, you have a constituency of like-minded individuals and,
yes, you allowed -- I was on it, and you had Jon Nevett and you had
Mary Wong, but in the end, we were not representing the diametrically
opposed side.  We were more to bring balance as to what was feasible
and implementable.  Whereas here, for example, if you had a group where
let's say I was on it and you had -- Richard Tindal was on it, we are
diametrically opposed and you're not going to get to the middle.

>>BRUCE TONKIN:   Which would be a PDP situation.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Right.  So I don't know how to solve that issue.  But
one of the initial complaints about the IRT was that it was so many
people from constituency, the IP, you know, I'm an IP attorney as well,
Mary Wong is an IP attorney, and Jon's not an IP attorney but he is an
attorney.  So we were able to counterbalance the IP concerns.  But, I
mean, if you asked Phil Corwin or if you asked people who are on the
complete opposite side, they would tell you that it was an awful
process, right?  I don't see -- I'm not sure how we would get a group
that was comprised of one and the other side to come to the middle
because their model -- I mean, if you ask them, they'll be quite open
about it.  They have a different business model for the launch of their
TLDs which are completely nondependent on registrars and have a
completely different use of domain names.

>>BRUCE TONKIN:   So tell me the problems, tell me what you're
proposing.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   So I think it's something that we should get a
smaller group to talk about how we could do that but bring in those
people.  I don't have an answer at this meeting.  But this right here -- 

>>BRUCE TONKIN:   So it's something we could work on as a step forward.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Yeah.  Well, I'm thinking it's more of experts that
have -- maybe it's experts in the economics, antitrust field that are
able -- that we're resources to that group, but we're not the ones that
write the decision or that write the ultimate report, but that they're
mandated to come to us for any information they need in order for them
to write it, does that make sense?  So it's a group of true experts as
opposed to --

>>BRUCE TONKIN:   (Speaker off microphone).

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Well, different viewpoints, different economic
viewpoints.  They were very much similar at least in their report.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   By the way, David, what Jeff described there is why I
don't think we could have a fast PDP in this case.  It's going to be a
long one and that's why I said if we go that route, we need to look at
second round for that part of it.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   All right.  I don't want to cut off this debate,
which is the best we've had, by far.  I do want to give our guests, the
chair and the president, the opportunity to share, ask some questions,
share thoughts, words of wisdom.

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   I'll leave wisdom to Peter.  Well, just quickly
finishing this last conversation, we should just recognize that short
time lines and dreams of pots of gold at the end of the rainbow are
good incentives to get people to come together to see whether they can
make something work.  So I think that's part of the challenge, if
there's going to be some expiration of a working group, then the next
48 hours I think -- there might be the dynamics to get people to come
together and work well.  

I do think it would be valuable to have some economists potentially
assisting, not the least of which I think the GAC would want to see
that, I suspect.  

Ironically, I think you'll find those two people who you heard the
other day actually consider themselves to be diametrically very
different economists.  

The issue of topics, just talk about accountabilities.  I mentioned
yesterday in the president's report the staff recommendations
personally coming up to the board following on from the president's
treasury committee's improving institutional confidence.  There's a
layer of recommendations there, and they basically are along the
following lines.  There's a group of recommendations in the report that
frankly are under way in different parts of the organization as they
are.  There's a next group of submissions of support that the sort of
the things that have been picked up by some of the committees of the
board in their working program, you know, for instance, the issues
around public participation, there's a PP -- public participation
committee which can take some of those issues on as their agenda item. 
But the most significant recommendations, one which was -- potentially
look at for operational reasons, whether there ought to be an
additional legal entity, the board commissioned the staff to start
discussions but to come back and share those issues with the community
before it made any decision to proceed.  All I can report to you is the
discussions have started, but because we are, I think, a new instance
for both jurisdictions we're having a conversation with, those
discussions are going to take some time.  So I don't see that -- we
have nothing to report as of this meeting, and I suspect it will be
well into -- before Seoul before we have even the first parts of
anything to report back.  So that's going to be a slow process.

The third area is about the role of the GAC.  And the discussion is
that the board and GAC should start a detailed dialogue about how the
role of the GAC should continue to change.  And there's some also --
some talk about making that a more public dialogue.  But that's an
issue that's there.  And there were some proposals about particular
meetings between boards and the GAC.  But that's for them to discuss.

Then there was the question of accountabilities.  And there were two
proposals.  One is a voting mechanism for the community within 90 days
or the next international meeting, whichever is the longest, to move to
have a vote of two-thirds of the supporting organizations in the --
advisory committees to, then, request the board reconsider a decision. 
And this is -- this was part of the PSC discussions, it's been
consulted on quite a long time.  There seems to be general support for
it as a bylaw amendment.  There seems to be some discussion about what
the threshold point should be.  At the moment the threshold point two-
thirds and then for each of the supporting organizations committees at
least a two-thirds vote.  There might be some discussions about that
threshold point.  But that looks like it has a fair degree of support
and it is, if you like, a small P political mechanism within the
committee to say to the board we think you got that one wrong, you
really need to go back and rethink it.  

Now, I need to stress for you that under any country's corporations
law, the board is the -- is the final decision-maker in a corporation. 
And we are a nonprofit corporation.  So you will see that all these
recommendations are then for the board to reconsider.  That is the
legal necessary sort of expression to ensure that the board's role of
supremacy of policy-making is maintained which is what's required under
the California -- certainly under the California incorporations law.

The third one, third -- second recommendation at the moment which I
think is very significant is for us to take our independent review
panel process, which is in place and to augment and expand that to
establish what we're personally calling independent review tribunal. 
And there seems to be discussion about the noun, we may -- some would
like the word "court," I don't think that necessarily would work, but
anyway, some might like the word "tribunal," it doesn't translate well
in Spanish and French, it has some historical overtones.  

So we -- we are looking at, then, having an international panel of
high-level judges from a range of jurisdictions and jurisdictional
traditions and also technical -- senior technical people selected by
third parties, in a sense probably an independent dispute provider and
maybe we'll ask one of the technical bodies to help supply.  There is
some discussion, Mike and I have been having some discussion about
whether it's just the way it normally works in an arbitration, you
choose one and they choose one and you choose in between.  I have to
say most of the feedback I've received from, say, GAC members and
others is that they -- part of what they want to see is a standing
body, they want to be able to see the people, they want to see that it
exists, they want to be standing.  And that this group be given the
power so that any affected party, materially affected party, any
materially affected party anywhere in the world could bring an action
in front of this group if they felt that ICANN's board has made a
decision that is basically under three headings:  That they made a
decision that was not according to due process and fairness, basically
didn't follow proper procedures; or secondly, was contrary to its
mission, was beyond the bounds of the mission and the bylaws of the
organization; or thirdly, was a decision that was manifestly not
rational, not made within bounds of reasonableness and evidence.

These three -- and the proposed wording which is up is up -- is -- has
been posted, it's -- it's only staff level at the moment, this is not a
board position yet, the board has not taken a position on this yet, but
this, then, would allow some heads under which people could bring
appeals to this court, say this decision materially affects me and they
didn't follow one of those following three things, and then this group
would then recommend to the board, that it make an amendment.  Again,
the board has to be the final decision-maker but the board could even
pass a resolution saying it binds itself to implement the decisions of
this sort of a group.  I do think it gives us -- it's a proposal that
has a number of advantages.  A, it does expand out the accountability
of the organization.  B, it's accountability to the community as a
whole.  And C, it seems to be an international mechanism, it's not just
a mechanism under one nation's courts.  But that's there for -- that's
there for discussion as well.

>>KEN STUBBS:   Just a real quick comment, Paul, on both a combination
of outreach and meetings.  I had a very interesting discussion with
Dennis Jennings and I think there was some very fruitful ideas that
came out of it in terms of how to enhance participation, especially
remote participation, your meeting schedule is needless to say very
aggressive over the next six to nine months.  And I think there may be
some ways of enhancing remote participation so that you don't run into
the criticism that you get, especially with the trips that people have
to take and the costs that are -- I know a lot of people here are still
trying to recover from the jet lag just as the Australians would be if
they were attending meetings in Europe.  So I would hope that this gets
explored a little more deeply in the board because I think it really
could be beneficial for ICANN.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   I guess a quick question on the independent -- or the
tribunal.  When I read the new standard for bringing an action under
that -- to that tribunal I actually interpreted it as much more narrow
than what currently exists in the independent review panel and the
question is:  Do you view it that way?  Do you view it more narrow or
is it broader than what currently can be brought?

>>PAUL TWOMEY:   My view of it is it's broader so I'm happy to have
the discussion.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Okay.

>>BECKY BURR:   I have to go but I want to make a profound plea that
is just totally personal.  The proposal for the tribunal should not be
written by ICANN or ICANN staff.  You guys should go around and
identify three or four international experts in, you know, this area
and get them to come back with a completely independent proposal, bring
it to the community and talk about it.  It's not going to have the
credibility and the stature and the independence and people are going
to look at it the way -- I mean, I think it's hard to tell whether it's
narrower or broader.  But the truth is it looks like another attempt by
ICANN to control the outcome.  And until you get away from that, it
won't be credible.  You've got to really take a chance.  I mean, you've
heard me say this before.  Take a chance.  Get some experts in there. 
Get their best thoughts.  Bring it back to the community.  Let the
community talk about it.  But let the community have something that
doesn't -- that isn't worrisome as somebody's agenda.

>>PETER DENGATE THRUSH:   Just a quick response.  That's I think what
the President's Strategy Committee actually called for was the
formation of a group like that so perhaps we can return to that, I'm
not sure.

No, I just -- we've got to go so I just want to say, thank you for
this discussion, as always, nice to come and meet you and I think that
particularly useful discussion for me today on a number of issues so I
thank you very much.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   We thank you, and we especially want to thank
Paul.  I believe this may be his last official participation in our
constituency meetings and we will miss him, we will miss his candor and
fortitude and thoughtfulness.  It's been a pleasure working with you
and we hope to see you frequently.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Well, As soon as he gets his new TLD, he can come
join our constituency.

[ Laughter ]

[ Applause ]

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   We'll give you time to get coffee, a short break. 
And we'll resume in about five minutes.

[ Break ] 

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   I think Mike is going to talk to us about
termination procedures, but before we get to that, we need to decide
what to do given the suggestions made by Peter and Paul and Bruce.  Jeff?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Yeah, I mean, I think it's -- I think we need to work
with Bruce to come up with some sort of a charter for a working group
to look at this issue but the working group would not be a working
group comprised of us and the prospective protective registrars who
want to be registries because I think that's just not going to get
anywhere.  I think we need to figure out -- and maybe we get Becky's
help on this as well -- is to figure out who the right experts to be on
this group would be and make sure that that group could, then, consult
with us as well as the prospective registry operators who are
registrars to figure out a certain set of narrowly defined issues,
those being not the whole issue of whether the market should be
vertically integrated or not, that's too big of an issue, but it's
basically, based on the premise today that there is vertical separation
and, you know, how to allow for some sort of integration with respect
to the limited examples, maybe the examples that we were talking about
in our proposal, you know, the community TLD, how to do that in a way. 
And also in a way that closes up the existing loopholes.  

So it's a group comprised of experts relying on any source that it
pretty much wants but hopefully on us and the other side as well to
look at those narrowly defined issues in a relatively quick time frame.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Do you have any idea as to how we go about this? 
Is it the constituency as a whole or do we start a working group?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   No, I don't think this would be a working group of
the constituency.  I see this as a working group comprised of experts,
but you mean just drafting of this --

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yeah, well, somebody -- we've got to start
somewhere.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Right so what the IPC did for the IRT is they got a
few people within the IPC who were interested, just drafted the
resolution for the board and presented their idea to the board on
Thursday so that they could vote on it on Friday.

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   Jeff, how did -- how is the definition of "expert"
in that space, how did it come about?  Who decided it, what constituted
a reasonable background or credibility to be involved in the IRT work?

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   Yeah, that's my problems with the experts,
right?  I mean, there were some economic theory people there yesterday,
they were not experts.  So, I mean, I think we're each going to get to
a different place on what an expert is.  My view of this market is
global, right?  And a U.S -- U.S. economist is not going to be an
expert.  So I would actually suggest we start with members of this
group and working group and lay out what the market, actually, is and
agree on that and then define what experts we bring in based on what we
define as the market situation.  Instead of letting somebody who has --
it was pretty clear yesterday that they were independent, but they had
pretty good -- you know, they had pretty good personal views, right?  I
mean, I think Steve Salop was salivating at one point, poor Adam, I
think it was pretty clear where his views were, right?

>>ADAM PALMER:   (Speaker off microphone).

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   I know.  I don't know, I don't see the view that
we let a group of experts get together.  I think then people just
define an issue and look for the experts, right?

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   When you say a global market how -- can you give a
more specific idea of what you're talking about?

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   I think that if we're really, really honest, the
registries, registrars and end users, you know, it's a global economy,
it's a global market and we should have a view of that and we should
get together as a working group to decide, you know, how best to
approach the situation before we let a group of economists, who have a
singular view, you know, kind of get together and define that for us.

>>CATHERINE SIGMAR:   Is it possible to identify sort of in a fairly
concise way what all of the interests are and work from there in
forming the group?  So if we started by identifying the interests, not
the interested parties, but the interests, would it be possible, then,
to allocate representatives of those interests and form a group that way?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   I just don't think that a group of people
representing those interests could come to an agreement.  It's like the
WHOIS situation, right?  You got a whole bunch of people representing a
whole bunch of different interests and you'll never get agreement
'cause some of them are so diametrically opposed.  

Raynor, on your suggestion, I'm not sure the issue -- I'm not
advocating a group to look at the whole issue of vertical integration
as a whole.  I'm trying to come up with a group that can figure out
solutions for the short-term to at least allow us to proceed to the
first round of new gTLDs so if it's possible to narrow down the issues -
- and maybe economists aren't the right experts, I'm not sure who is,
and that's why I kind of said, well, maybe we can brainstorm on that,
but just on the narrow issues of how we go forward with another round,
how we do not set a blanket rule to not relax the requirement for
certain types of TLDs and how we close the loopholes that currently
exist which other new players can take advantage of but we cannot.  And
if you narrow it down to those narrow issues, then I'm not sure we need
to look at the global market, but I could be wrong.  I'm not sure.

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   Either way you're going to either be pushing
your position to the people who are meeting or you're going to be in
the meeting pushing your position.  So I don't understand why we don't
just get in the meeting and push our own positions and get to a place
where we agree with one another instead of doing it from the position
of trying to influence the people who are getting together, you know, I
think we're suffering from that enough right now.

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   I agree with that.  I think that, Jeff, you know,
your point of -- I think the next step should be to draft a resolution
for the board so they can act on that.  I think in that resolution we
should put some structure around the kind of participation that should
happen in the group.  That includes, you know, interested stakeholders
and parties.  But also ask them to put someone at the table that
frankly has some background in this, maybe some business training,
maybe an economist or two, that's fine.  But as long as they are
knowledgeable in our industry and they're up to speed, I don't think
that theory or nonapplied economists are useful.  I mean, my own -- I
have business training myself.  I've trained as an economist.  But I
like to think that I use applied economical methods because I'm
actually in business doing something, so I've lived what I've actually
preached.  So I think that's something we all could put in a resolution
and then that gives the board something to act on because they're
saying "we want something to act on."  That's what I'm hearing.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Do we want to form a team right now to draft a
resolution?  Yes?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Yes.  So just take a list of volunteers.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   All volunteers?  Raynor, you're volunteering?

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   I'm volunteering Chuck.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Nice.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you very much.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Obviously, I'll --

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Jeff?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   I'd like Michael, sorry, you said some good things.

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   I'll volunteer, sure.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   And I think we should volunteer Becky even though
she's not here.  I'd like to hear her perspective.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   I'll join in.  We've got Chuck, Jeff, Michael,
Becky, I.  Is that -- that --

>>CHUCK GOMES:   What's the timing we're thinking about?  Sorry, I
jumped in a little late.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   48 hours, isn't it?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Yeah, we have to have it to the board, and I'd like
to -- we'll run it through Bruce too, but we have to have it to the
board before they go off for their wonderful dinner or whatever they do
Thursday night.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Thursday afternoon.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Thursday afternoon.  And Bruce said he would push for
resources so financial support from ICANN as well.

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   What are we trying to get done in 48 hours just
outlining the group and the things they would go off and think about.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   A draft resolution for the board is my
understanding.

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   I guess I'm trying to understand why they can
dictate 48 hours for that amount of work.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   No, no, no, sorry, David, I think it's to draft the
outline of what the group would do, resolution to define who would be
in that group, what the mission of the group would be.

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   That sounds doable.  A full resolution, I mean,
if I can't submit a new product while we're here because I can't look
at it I don't think we should have to, you know, be drafting
resolutions in 48 hours either so, you know, let's -- let's be fair to
each other, right?  So I think outlining the working group is great. 
But, you know, we're not going to get to a full resolution in 48 hours,
that's too hurried.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Well, we have to have something that the ICANN
board can deal with.  They've asked for it --

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Hold on.  Different meaning of the word "resolution."
Be a board resolution as opposed to resolving the problem.

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   Let's be clear about what you're doing in 48
hours.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   But the board can't get a resolution the day before
they have a meeting.  So I'm not sure what we're thinking here.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Sure, that's how they did the IRT, just so you know,
the IRT, the board got the resolution --

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah, but the concept had been vetted well before
then.  The issue and so forth.  And there has been some vetting, we've
had a session this week.  But giving the board a resolution on
Thursday, I don't think's a viable approach.  Giving them something
that they can talk about and consider is a viable approach, I think.  A
formal resolution doesn't -- I mean, we can try it but it seems like a
long shot.

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   I think that's what Peter asked for as we were outside.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   A resolution?

>>JEFF NEUMAN:   Yeah.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Dennis, do you have any -- we've been talking
about forming a small team to present something to the board before its
meeting on Thursday to push forward in whole concept of getting a
group, a working group, to make proposals and do studies.  So the
question is:  What -- do you have any thoughts as to what the board
would like to see from us?

>>DENNIS JENNINGS:   The board would like to see a solution.

[ Laughter ]

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   We all would.

>>DENNIS JENNINGS:   A clear proposal perhaps with a draft of a
resolution, you know, cut as a resolution, but a clear proposal,
certainly as to what you propose to do.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   That's very helpful.  I think that's the kind of
thing we could do is a proposal accompanied by a draft resolution which
almost undoubtedly wouldn't be voted on by the board but at least would
get the proposal in front of them, which is, I agree, that's, I think,
what Peter and Paul and Bruce were all suggesting.  Okay.

Getting back to our agenda, Mike Zupke has been very patient.  Is Mike
still -- there he is, go ahead.

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   All right.  So I appreciate your time here.  It's not
often that I meet with the registries.  So anyhow, I'm the registrar
liaison manager at ICANN.  And I wanted to just spend a little bit of
time talking to you about some sort of operational issues that we're
seeing and that you're probably seeing involving registrars and in
particular failed registrars.  So I think the last time that I met with
this group was about a year ago in Paris.  We had just posted the
deaccredited registrar transition procedure, which is intended to
facilitate the transfer of names to a deaccredited registrars to
another registrar.  And this is something that not only did staff see
the need for in the community, but I know there were several people in
the room who were also very interested in seeing more efficient
transitions of portfolios of names of registrars who had been
deaccredited.  So we've been using that for some time now.  And I
think, generally, our experience on staff has been pretty satisfactory.
I think that, you know, we continue to learn through it.  But I would
like to hear sort of the registry perspective.  When we talked in
Paris, the feedback that I got mostly was not about the procedure but
about just some operational issues.  And, you know, in particular, I
think things that came up were issues about requests that staff was
making to registries, for example, requesting that they would partially
disable a registrar's access to a registry.

So I think we've -- you know, ironed out some of those details.  Or
we've tried to.  So you know, I guess having experienced this for a
while, I'd like to get some of your feedback.

 >>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   Sorry, Jeff.  I thought you had a question.

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   Just a little more background.  In this year we've
had five deaccreditations that were involuntary.  And we've had, I
think, probably at least a dozen voluntary registrar terminations.  Of
the five that were involuntary, four of them involved a registrar just
going dark and walking away.  So, you know, having an efficient
procedure has really important to us.  But also having mechanisms for
gathering data.  And, of course, obviously, it highlights the
importance of the data escrow program.  

So, I guess, I don't know how operationally involved everybody in the
room and on the phone is.  But, you know, if there was any general
feedback that you'd like to share with me, I'm here to take that now. 
And I don't have any particular prompts.  But whatever feedback whether
it's technical or electronical, I'm happy to take that now.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Any -- go ahead.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   I'm not sure if others had this problem, and maybe
it was isolated.  There was one recently -- I can't remember which one,
I'm sorry.  A little -- still a little jet lagged, I guess.  There was
an issue where a registrar was deaccredited and terminated.  And,
apparently, they had taken money for renewals but had never actually
done the renewals within our registry.  I don't know if other
registries had the same problem.

So what happens is was, when the new registrar was appointed, the new
registrar didn't want to pay for those renewals.  And the registrant,
obviously, didn't want to pay for those renewals.  But the registrants
came directly to us to say, "Well, I paid for these renewals and I
never got them."  And so we were kind of put in the middle of that. 
And I don't know what kind of diligence you guys do or what kind of
recommendations you have.  I mean, obviously the registry shouldn't
have to foot the bill in this situation and the registrant shouldn't
necessarily have to foot the bill.  Perhaps the knowledge of the
incoming registrar as to what it's inheriting might be a useful thing. 
So the registrar knows I might have to acquire all these names, but I
might have to spend a little money up front in making things right for
the registrants.  But we were kind of put in the middle of it. And I
can't remember how it works out.  I just remember that coming to my
attention.

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   Okay.  And, you know, I think that's a good question.
And I don't -- I don't have the perfect answer.  I can tell you sort of
the performance is that registrants still have a recourse against the
former registrar.

So, even though that registrar is no longer accredited, it's still a
legal entity which has liabilities to its customers.  And I think that,
practically speaking, that probably doesn't comfort a lot of
registrants who have been affected, right?  You know, I would encourage
the people in this room to think about that because clearly it's
affecting you probably more than most in the community and, you know, I
think that there may be either a policy or a technical solution I would
be -- I would encourage you to give me some suggestions that we can
either on a staff implementation level if it really is procedural or
really is policy pushing that kind of through the process.

 >>JEFF NEUMAN:   If it's not that much, ICANN can certainly help fund
it from the reserves.  It's always a possibility.

>>PATRICK KANE:  It's the same thing as the register fly problem,
right?  So we keep pushing all of these consensus policies towards the
registries. And the domain abuse working group policy or working group
is taking a look at what we can do.  But somehow you've got to get a
little tougher with the registrars.  And I think that's where the
policies have to be focused in terms of what we do and what we require
them to do with data.

You know, they are required -- when they take a registration or take a
renewal for multiple terms, to submit that to the registry.  They're
not supposed to hold that back.  But where is the audit process on
those kinds of things?  So that's exactly what we're talking about here.

 >>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   From our standpoint we've been very involved in
this, Jeff.  And we've eaten quite a bit of renewal.  I would say
Barbara Steele on our side has worked with the team at ICANN to try to
come up with a better procedure back and forth for how to handle this. 
And I think we found we just have to cut them off earlier than maybe
ICANN is comfortable with.  And that's an operational decision that
we've had to make in certain circumstances.  And I think that's
probably to your point where policy is probably needed instead of us
having to make an operational decision.  Because during that time
period when we all probably know the registrar is going to get
deaccredited but it hasn't really happened yet and they're still
clearing units through, you know, who's paying for them?  It's us. 
We're paying for them.  And, you know, we're not only paying for the
fee to ICANN.  But, you know, we're paying for it in terms of the
liability on our books.  And, as publicly-traded companies, you and I
both know it's a huge problem.  Right?  So I think Barbara has worked
hard on this with the ICANN staff.  I think we've gotten to a better
place.  We actually are putting in partial disabilities for those
registrars on a systems standpoint just because, you know, you may be
able to keep your existing base in renewal. But you're certainly not
adding any more to the problem, right?  And another stage where you're
going off all together even if you aren't completely deaccredited. 
Because this situation just drags on and on.  I think there's a bigger
issue too there's early warning signs.

So year-to-date we've had 265 name or administrative changes in
registrars.  There's some funky business going on out there. Okay? 
And, when you start seeing those, especially in certain families, you
know there's something coming.  You know there's going to be a whole
slew of business that quits working or stops working, right?  There's
also patterns of activity from the financials with them having credit
lines on top.  So we know that.  So we put in place over this last year
an operational procedure.  We reauthorize every registrar using the
same auth procedure you would use if you were going to get an EV cert
to see if they were still who they said they were when they came
through.  We had 17 of them fail since we put the process in place for
various reasons.  But I think, to Pat's point, we're really trying to
bone up on our end and working  with ICANN to try to get something in
place.  But it would be great if there was just a uniform policy and
procedure that we could all go after.  It is a big problem.  It is a
big problem.  You're right.  Right now we kind of laugh about it
because it's 1300 registrations.  What happens when one of the top 10,
you know, is for sale and doesn't get sold, right?  That's a very big
problem.  And we're not ready to take that right now.  You know?  So
those are all issues that we're working on with the ICANN staff.  I'd
love to see a policy.  And one that doesn't put the registries at risk
for solving it on their own.  You know?

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   That's really helpful feedback.  And I know we have
worked pretty closely with Barbara and I think some others on your team
in trying to make our transition process as staff faster so that there
is less liability involved in the auto renew names.  

There's one thing, Pat, that you said that I'm not entirely sure if I
agree or not.  And that's that registrars have this obligation to put
renewal on the registry after they've taken money for it.  I'm not sure
that's in the RAA.  And I'm just speaking from the top of my head. 
But, if it's the case that it's not, I would think that might be an
example where policy might be appropriate or contract amendment.

 >>KEN STUBBS:   This is somewhat of not necessarily a loaded question
but a question that involves probably some legal interpretation as
well.  Number one, in this -- you and Raynor you can probably answer
this.  Are the registrars driving most of your answers with registrars
that are still operating under the original accreditation agreements
with ICANN that's making it more difficult, number one?  Number two, do
the new accreditation agreements provide for a process that makes it
easier for all of us in a case like that?  

And number three, isn't there some sort of process that could force --
now, this is the legal problem.  Is there some sort of a process that
could force a registrar who's operating under the old accreditation
agreement into the new accreditation agreement a trigger point?  In
other words, delinquencies, whatever the financial -- are you relying
primarily on your agreement with the registrar, VeriSign's agreement
with the registrar, to deal with these issues?

 >>PATRICK KANE:   So there's a lot of questions there, Ken.  But I'll
try to get some of them.  Barbara, you can jump in.  Correct me, if I'm
wrong,  okay?

 >>BARBARA STEELE:   Sure.

 >>PATRICK KANE:   The place where we have the biggest problem is the
place that's the most visible.  That is registrars that offer ramp-up
registration services.  There's a bunch of them out there.  And what
they do is they take the -- basically, like a reseller. create a new
accreditation for them and then, after a period of time, turn that over
to that accreditation.  And so they don't have any engineering
capabilities.  They don't have hardly any process behind it.  So we
actually spend more time with those registrars than we do with the guys
in the top 10 because the guys in the top 10 know what they're doing.

You know?  It's plain and simple.  So that's where our biggest
problems are.

And the warning signs are always there.  You're getting payment from
someplace else.  Half the time we don't know that something has been
changed.  They either don't notify ICANN.  They don't notify the
registries.  But we're the ones that see the activity that becomes a
warning sign.  And so a lot of times we're telling, you know, Craig and
Mike and the registered liaison staff that something has happened. 
Barbara's team does a really diligent job in trying to track, you know,
who's related to who, who has become what, et cetera.  That's part of
the problem.  And I really believe some of the people we're trying to
save are the registrars themselves.  It's not registrants.  So, when we
try to be consumer protectionist, which, you know, I'm not saying I'm
against that, but we're protecting the people that are hurting us.

And then so there's -- so it's not the accreditation.  It's the
business model that we see because who they're working with -- EST
domains.  Very clear example.  They were a customer of Directi through
logic box and they ended up being criminals.

So --

 >>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   A lot of them, not a lot of them, a good
portion of them end up being the registry and the registrant
themselves.  They don't have any registrants.  Two big key giveaways
for us when we're doing compliance rotation is they call customer
service and they don't have the password.  They forgot it.  That's a
big one.  Number two, all of a sudden their Web site doesn't exist
anymore.  There's no Web site, which they were required to have when
they ramped up.  So there are other kind of key factors that the team
have learned to kind of look for.  They come in all flavors and
varieties.  Pat just mentioned one.  We had two guys who were dormmates
at Ohio State who got accredited who were doing business for
themselves.  So we have a full range, Ken.  It really is all over the
place.  But some of the warning signs kind of group into categories.
And, if you're interested in sharing best practices, you know, what we
learned, I'm sure Barbara and her team would talk to anybody in the
registry group to know what we have learned.  We'd be happy --

 >>PATRICK KANE:   That actually may be the best way that we can help
ourselves is to find these leading indicators and give you guys early
warning.  Because, at the time accreditation expires or you decide to
terminate, then you're asking the registries -- or at least us.  I
don't know if you ask the other registries this.  But can you extend it
for six months before you completely cut them off?  Don't take new ads,
but do auto renewals.  That puts the registries at risk.  But we've
known we're going to be at risk all the time.

 >>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   We can't give out names.  

>>PATRICK KANE:  I wasn't going to, on that one.

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   So, Ken, I don't think we've answered your questions
yet.  But one thing Pat said I think is right.  It's this particular
business model of selling the registrar in a box that, you know, I look
at the registrars who are the most problematic.  And many of them had
the same name or two names on the accreditation applications.  And so
one of the things that we as staff have done is we've drafted a
procedure called the registrar disqualification procedure.  And this
would allow staff to take a person who is affiliated with the registrar
and put them on a disqualified list so that they wouldn't be allowed to
apply for future accreditations that was posted for public comment, the
draft procedure on 27 February.  It was open for I think 90 days.  The
comment period is closed.  We're currently synthesizing that.  But I
expect it will get posted again for another public comment period
because there was a pretty great diversity of views on it.  So, if you
have an interest or want to put feedback into that, by all means,
you're welcome to do that.

Frankly, I mean, it's envisioned to take care of a lot of situations. 
But that's one that I think is the most problematic for us.  And we're
most hopeful it will have an effect.  

In answer to the question about the version of the RAAs, most
registrars right now are still on the -- what you call the old RAA. 
There's just a handful right now who are on the new one.  I think that
the -- you know, the new RAA, you know, will have some stronger
compliance mechanisms that will help to, you know, allow us to take
action more quickly for registrars that are problematic.  But I think
we're kind of in a period where a lot of the practices that registrars
were doing that were profitable are no longer profitable or at least
not as much.  So I think that you're going to continue to see
registrars either voluntarily terminating their accreditation
agreements, hopefully responsibly.  And you're still going to see more
who turn off the lights and walk away, if they bother to turn off the
lights.

 >>MICHAEL YOUNG:   So, Mike, I think, in listening to what Pat and
crew have said about this, we know there are bad actors out there at
every level of the industry.  And we know there are people misbehaving
themselves.  We know in some cases they're actually criminals.  We
don't really have -- as registry operators, we really don't have the
right kind of provisions in our agreements to actually deal with those
effectively.  

So lately there's been a lot of talk about rapid takedown this, rapid
takedown that.  Perhaps we need to come up with a mechanism where, if
we have a registrar that's behaving in an exceedingly and obvious
inappropriate manner, we have the ability to do some type of status or
some type of state we can put them into, maybe that's just not
accepting new registrations.  Maybe we accept auto renewals, that sort
of thing.  But we can put them into some type of state while a defined
investigation involving ICANN staff support then begins.

Because it certainly would give us some teeth to deal with people like
this and support us.

 >>PATRICK KANE:   One of the things that we've done is we've taken a
look at it from the standpoint of what's an operational mechanism we
put in place.  So the things that flash and say here's a problem.  If
they get really dramatic, we take it from an operational perspective. 
Because we're not going to put our SRS at risk for our other customers
who are doing good business.  That's one of the provisions you have in
place in your contract that you can get more flexibility.  But you do
want to share with these guys what you're doing because they get
surprised sometimes.  The second thing I do want to point out -- I
threw Directi out there.  It's a suspect business model.  Doesn't mean
that Directi is out there supporting that.  I just wanted to put that
out there.  Sorry. 

 >>KEN STUBBS:   You know, for many years states like California -- I
use that for an example -- the alcoholic beverage control board has had
a system that allowed them to deal with bad actors.  And the first time
you, if get caught selling liquor to a minor, they may fine you.  The
second time they suspend your right to do business for a certain period
of time.  The third time -- you know, it's a tiered system.  But what
it really does is in some days it's a de facto operation for the way
VeriSign deals with some of these people.  And what you're saying is,
you know, for the next 30 days you're not going to be able to sell new
registrations.  You can renew but you can't sell.  And, you know, I
don't know how you deal with transfers because we're trying to protect
the registrant.  But the point I'm making is maybe we need to look at a
system that imposes those kind of penalties.  Now, you know as well as
I do registrars aren't going to -- would not be happy with something
like that.  But I'm sorry.  I mean, you are doing this to protect not
just us.  You're doing that to protect the integrity of the entire
process itself.  And --

 >>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   I actually think more of the good actors would
support it, based on conversations I've had.  They actually think it
cleans up the industry.  And because they have good operational
systems, right, they're not afraid of having that done for people in
the industry.  I have received nothing but good feedback from the fact
that we're doing it, if that matters.

 >>BARBARA STEELE:   I think one other item -- this is Barbara, by the
way -- to note here is, typically by the time these registrars are
going under, it's been very, very difficult to even get in touch with
anyone there.  So being able to, I guess, both sanction to, I guess,
penalize the bad players, I just didn't -- I get a little bit
apprehensive on thinking that that would be a viable solution.  Because
I just know what we've gone through with some of the recent registrars
that have gone dark.  And just trying to get in touch with anyone who
will even respond to any communications that we've had with them.

 >>KEN STUBBS:   I've got a quick follow-up for you guys.  Do you have
a system -- I constantly hear about how you're having trouble getting
in contact with them.  Do you have a system where on a regular basis
you ping these people and require an affirmative ratification so you
know, in fact, there is legitimate contacts and, in fact, if you can't
ping them or can't reach them or anything like that, it immediately
raises a red flag?  For God's sakes, if I can't reach the
administrative contact for the registrars, I've got a problem.  And
that should trigger immediate action because that's a signal for
everybody.  If the only thing you're doing is getting in contact with
them and assuming that they're getting your emails or once every four
or five months "how's everything going" type deal or if they're not
reporting regularly enough already, the problem is 60 or 90 days old. 
But you might consider doing that.  Because that process could be
easily automated.  Kent could work something out that would just take
care of that in a very simple way.

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   That's something we've been ramping up.  We've got a
system right now that is doing some e-mail checking.  And I don't fully
understand what exactly it does. But on a monthly basis it at least is
checking the e-mail addresses we've got from registrars and try to make
sure that the servers are indeed set up and appropriately configured. 
But one of things that the compliance team has got sort of the in the
works right now is a routine that would ping WHOIS servers using real
domain names that those registrars have registered on a daily or weekly
basis to ensure at least that that service is running.  I think that --
I think, personally, that's going to be incredibly helpful to us. 
Because when a registrar has gone dark, one of the things that we want
is the WHOIS data.  So, if we can nip these things a lot earlier when
there's WHOIS data available, that's helpful to us.

 >>KEN STUBBS:   Just because a guy's mail server is working if you
required a return receipt, for instance, you would know that there is a
physical person there and it's not being dropped into a box with 10,000
other messages that aren't being answered.

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   Yeah, I think that's a good idea.  The challenge I
think is that there's nothing in the RAA that tells a registrar that,
if ICANN writes to us, you have to respond.

 >>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   Ken, from an operational standpoint if you
require them to change their passwords every 30 days, you'd get a good
sense of whether they're there or not.

>>GREG AARON:  That's something we've done recently.  I think some of
the situations that are hardest for the staff and the registries to
deal with are these with unfriendly deaccreditations.  For instance,
Parava got deaccredited.  But that process evidently began in 2007 when
they stopped paying their ICANN fees.  And I would like to kind of --
as much as possible hear about those kinds of situations because they --
in a lot of cases they're brewing with the compliance staff for a long
time and then suddenly the hammer comes down, and we've got a
situation.  Online NIC, the situation there is in flux.  In those kinds
of cases I would like to hear as much as you can tell us about what's
going on.

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   So I think you raise a good point.  And that's one
that I know some of the folks at VeriSign have talked about, too, is
how can we share information in a way that isn't really violating the
rights of registrars but is giving us all sort of an early alert to
problems?  And I think that, you know, I think we're very much
interested in trying to find an acceptable way to do that.

You know?  And, if there is maybe, you know, maybe a subset of the
people in this room who would like to work with me on that, I would
really welcome that opportunity.

>>PATRICK KANE:  Chuck's been really patient.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah, this really is probably more directly for
David and Stacy on the compliance team.  But I know all three of you
work with them.  When a new registry comes on board and, in particular
when they go live with the registry, how long is it before any
compliance checks are done?  Do you know?

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   So you want to know for a registry or -- 

>>CHUCK GOMES:  Excuse me, a registrar.  My mistake.  A brand-new
registrar comes on board and they've now gone live with one of us.
Okay?  How long is it before some initial compliance checks are done?

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   Most of the obligations in the RAA require the
registrar to have names under management.  So, for example, working
WHOIS service, posting your expired domain name deletion, pricing and
policy -- 

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   So my question is:  How soon after they go live with
the TLD do you check for those things?  Is it a year?  Is it a month? 
Is it six months?

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   I probably shouldn't speak for compliance.  But my
understanding is there's not something that immediately happens or is
triggered by a new accreditation.  There are audits across all
registrars that happen throughout the year.  And so they would be
caught --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   You know what I'm getting at.  I don't have to
explain it to you, but I'll go ahead and finish my train of thought. 
It seems like, in the case of new registrars, and in the case of any
registrars that have -- where you've seen some problems, that more
frequent checks would be really wise.  And then, you know, getting back
to what Greg was saying, the communication with us would really help
us.  So I certainly would talk to David and Stacy and maybe they're
already doing it.  But, if they're not, it seems to make a lot of
sense.  Because if it's -- it could be a year before they -- the annual
compliance check happens for the registrars and affects them.  In the
meantime, a year has gone by.  And they may not have had WHOIS and may
not be doing other things.  And one of the things I've heard people say
is we need to catch these things a lot sooner.

 >>KEN STUBBS:   I'll take it one step further, because there are
observers in the room from the board as well.  And that is the kind of
issues we're talking about now could very well be emerging issues for
new registries.  I think you need to have a process in place that
ensures you don't run into these kind of bad actors and not be prepared
to deal with it quickly.  Because this could be compounded and ICANN is
going to pay the price in the long -- in the long run for not being
effectively capable of managing compliance.  Also, now we're -- we are
into a real stability issue.  Because, if the registry goes into the
toilet, you're going to have all these registrants that hypothetically
could get burned in a situation like this.  So you need to ensure that
you have processes in place to make sure that they can't even get close
to some of the problems that you've had with registrars.

You have the ability to write a contract early on to protect yourself
in a case like that.  I make comments on a regular basis about how
Louie used to complain the only thing you used to have is the death
penalty in the old one.  You don't have that in the new one.  So I'm
just suggesting this is something you should be looking at so you don't
get burned because you didn't start managing the compliance efforts
early on.  Because there's some crazy stuff that's being proposed out
there.  And you have no idea.  Just because they can pass a technical
compliance test.  And that's another area.  But the point I'm making is
just because they passed a test doesn't mean they're going to have the
horsepower, money, finances there.  Six months down the road these
people get hung out to dry.  That could be bad for everybody because
we're all going to have a black eye.

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   I agree with both of you, and I'll certainly take
that back to the folks in compliance.  Any other feedback? So, you
know, I guess there's one -- there's one thing that I've sort of
learned through doing this process now a few times.  And that's, you
know, the last time we were here, I sort of learned from you that we
needed to be a little bit more flexible in the guidance that we give
when we say we want to you disable the registrar's access.  Before I
met with the registries, we were requesting that renewal happen and
that you continue to allow renewals.  And there were one or two
registry operators who said that's challenging for us operationally. 
It's not all that feasible.  So we tried to give a little more
flexibility our instructions about how to deal with registrars when
they're deaccredited.  One of the things that I've learned is that we
need to set deadlines for when we expect something to happen.

You know, from my perspective, when we have a deaccredited registrar
or a failed registrar, it's sort of -- that's my top priority.  And
sometimes my other goals for the trimester don't get done because we
want to make sure that registrants are protected and that the DNS
continues to be viewed as a safe and secure place for all of its users.
But I forget that everybody's got other priorities that are going on. 
So I'm not sure -- in a recent case, we got some feedback from one
registrant in particular that, you know, requesting a bulk transfer in
a fairly sort amount of time was not convenient.  And, you know, we all
kind of bristled at that.  But I understand.

You know, we probably need to be more clear about, you know, our
expectations and also be receptive to hearing, you know, what is
reasonable.  So, you know, I don't know that this is quite the right
venue to figure out what exactly we should be asking for.  But I think
what you'll see going forward is a little bit more specificity.  And,
by all means, if we're asking for too much, we're welcome to hear that.
Again, it's not that we're trying to overreach and give you undoable
orders.  But I think sometimes we're maybe not making clear, you know,
our expectations in these cases.  So you take that for what it's worth.
But also know we do want to hear the feedback if we're being
unreasonable, too.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Anyone else?

 >>BARBARA STEELE:   This is Barbara.  I had a quick question.  I know
that recently you put out an RFI relating to the deaccreditation of Max
and looking for people in other registry activity, registrar, excuse
me, to take over the management of those names.  And that closed on the
19th.  I know that in the past, even though they've closed, there
sometimes has been a delay between the time it closes and the time a
successor registrar is named.  Has there been additional work done to
tighten up that process?  And when might we expect to hear what
registrar has been named after the closing of an RFI?

 >>MIKE ZUPKE:   So the process that Barbara is talking about is --
this is the deaccredited registrar transition procedure.  So the RFI
process closed on Friday.  And typically what happens in this procedure
is there's a period where ICANN states statements of interest typically
last about a week, which it did in this case.  We take all those and
review them and determine which registrars are qualified to receive a
bulk transfer.  And then from that list, whether it's short or the
same, then we take that and negotiate with those registrars to try to
determine which registrar is indeed the most qualified to receive the
bulk transfer and that process typically takes about a week.  I think
it's going to be a couple extra days just with what's going on right
now.  But, generally, the RFI takes about a week.  The second phase,
which we call a negotiation phase, takes about a week.  And then,
generally, we can take a successor registrar within a week after that
closes.  All in all it's about a 2 1/2 week process.  And we're
generally on track, give or take a couple extra days here.  There will
be more work before I leave Australia that gets done.  So rest assured
I'll be -- we'll be working on it in the --

>>BARBARA STEELE:  Do you expect that -- just a follow-up question
here.  Do you expect that ICANN will be willing to step up to publish
SLAs on the expectations?

>>MICHAEL ZUPKE: I'm not sure I understand the question.

>>BARBARA STEELE:   Sorry.

>>MICHAEL ZUPKE:   I don't think I understand the question.  An SLA in
what aspect?

>>BARBARA STEELE:   Just, you know, what the time frame is for making
these decisions so, I mean, you detail it and you anticipate that it,
you know, typically will take two and a half weeks.  Right now the
whole process does not define, I guess, the timing of how long you're
willing to, you know, step up to or commit to in making the decisions
as far as evaluating the responses and then the negotiation and then
making a final decision and announcement.

>>MICHAEL ZUPKE:   I mean, that's something I think we could work into
the procedure.  The procedure itself is posted, I think that the first
period, the RFI period does specify it's about a week.  I wouldn't call
it an SLA because, you know, it's not really an agreement with anybody
that could be meaningfully enforced but, you know, I mean, that's
something that we can work into the procedure.  And we do review the
procedure on a periodic basis and, you know, we'll make modifications
to it as we learn so that's something that we can make a note of.  I'd
be reluctant to commit before, you know, we're really experienced in
using it but I think it's reasonable.  If there are no other questions,
I would like to say, thank you for your time and for letting me have
this opportunity.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you, Mike.  We appreciate your coming in. 
Craig, I believe you're up next.  Do you have the agenda?  It's the
process to provide registries and sponsors with their registrars'
contract information.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   David, I've actually got a couple of small agenda
items.  If I could squeeze them all into this block of time, that would
be great.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Sure.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   So on the registrars con- -- should be "contact
information," we've almost since the beginning of when I joined ICANN,
almost now three years ago, we'd been hearing from the registries about
how it would be helpful to have, on some kind of a regular basis, a
download or a dump of all the current registrar contact information
that is primary contact information that we collect and maintain.  And
starting maybe about two or three months ago, we were having
conversations with registries about whether it would be helpful to
provide a complete dump of all the registrar contact data or to provide
simply a dump of registrar contact data that had changed over a certain
period.  And what we did on June 1st was we provided registries that
were interested in receiving a full download of all of their
registrars' contact information, we provided that via an encrypted file
and it's something that we said we would commit to doing on the first
of every month.  In addition, we would continue the e-mails that either
Patrick Jones or now Kimberly Austin send out that provide registries
with an e-mail when registrar contact information or change of
ownership, that type of information has changed.  So I still think we
have a long way to go in coming up with a solution that works best for
most of the registries that are interested in getting this.  But I'm
curious to hear, for the folks that got the information on the 1st of
June, was it helpful, and there should be another download of
information, I guess, a week from this Wednesday is July 1st, and we'll
supply, again, the full database of your registrars' contact
information.  We're still really new in the process, but I'm open to
hearing comments or questions or concerns that registries or sponsors
have about the way that we've approached this and how we might look at
doing things that are more useful for you or delivered in a better way.

>>GREG AARON:  I know my tech support department's very happy to have
the information.  They do tend to use it to do spot checks, if they
need to call someone, they sometimes verify against what you've said
I'm wondering if at some point we could have a secure Web site we could
log into where we could look up a registrar because it's point-in-time
stuff that's actually most useful for my team, actually.  Something
like that might be interesting.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   Right, so we've got this radar database system now
and at one point we had talked about giving some type of secure login
access to the registries.  We're actually in the process of making some
pretty significant enhancements to that system.  And I don't know how
much Mike could speak to that right now, but I think what we decided
was until we were a little bit further along in our development we
didn't want to let something out that was not ready, you know, not
ready for prime time.  So in the meantime, these monthly dumps, we
hope, are helpful.  You know, if they're not then we'd like to know
what we could provide that as.  So seeing no further comments on that
particular item, we've got two other items to bring up with you.  The
North American regional registry-registrar gathering is scheduled for
August -- I believe it's the 20th and the 21st in Toronto, Canada.  And
this last year we had just two regional gatherings, an Asian event and
a European event, and because of the timing and the sequencing of the
ICANN meetings, we didn't have a regional gathering this last April,
but our schedule moved forward with a North American event in August. 
The challenge, and I particularly feel this, I don't know if Tim Cole
feels the same way because at each regional gathering there's a
different set of reg- -- a different set of registrars participating
but at least from the registries it's the five or six of you that have
to commit time and resources to going to, you know, these three events,
if you so choose to, in addition to the big ICANN meeting.  So we
certainly don't want it to be burdensome.  And if there was feedback
from the community that doing something less than three events -- three
events a year is prudent, then I think we would need to, you know, we
would need to consider that but, in the meantime, we've got this
Canadian event scheduled for August and it would really be great to
have input from registries and registrars about how to make these
events more valuable.  What we've done in the past is we've now
included policy staff and have them providing a policy update and
generating some dialogue about what's happening in the GNSO.  We are
also starting to include Greg Rattray and his security team a little
more frequently so they can talk about issues that are happening in the
DNSSEC and where ICANN is on some of that.  There's always some type of
compliance discussion, there's generally some kind of IDN discussion,
but for registries that come to these events several times a year who
are very involved in the ICANN process, it's really important to me and
it's important to ICANN that it be of value to you so to the extent
that we get feedback from you on what can we do more differently, what
would make it more valuable for you I really welcome that input, Michael?

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   So, Craig, I really can't complain too much about
the Canadian meeting since, you know, it's going to be about 10 minutes
away from where I live but having said that, I think Ken made a comment
earlier in the day that I think is very valid here and that is further
investment remote participation tools would make these meetings, I
think, a lot more valuable and a lot more useable for a lot of the
community.  You know, I think videoconferencing would be a really nice
feature to add to some of these meetings as well.  Because there's a
world of understanding when you can see somebody's face when they're
speaking.  So I do think that adds value Schwartz I've heard some --
for folks who are participating in this ICANN meeting via Adobe
Connect, I've already heard some really great feedback that, you know,
they can see everything live and they can participate if they like.  So
maybe adding Adobe Connect to something for the regional gatherings is -
- maybe we move to that direction to enable the smaller registries who
typically don't come to these events to participate.  So that's a great
suggestion.

>>KEN STUBBS:   Dennis, did you want to make a comment?

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   Make it a good one, Dennis.

>>DENNIS JENNINGS:   Just to say exactly that and also, very simply,
the board -- Rita Rodin Johnson isn't here, we used a Skype connection
and a technician-controlled camera at our end and that worked extremely
well.  That's point-to-point but the Adobe Connect is working
multipoint extremely well, I hear.

>>KEN STUBBS:   I think that's an excellent idea and I think this is
something we've talked about before and this is a good opportunity to
broaden the base for the use of some of these conferencing -- this
conferencing software, Craig, so I think if the staff goes back and
puts some pressure -- you know, it's going to make it more effective
for you, you're going to get much broader participation in this thing,
plus the fact it allows ICANN, hypothetically, to save money because if
a presentation is required in a meeting like this by somebody on your
staff that, let's say, is in Brussels or in another part of the world,
it can be made on that kind of a function and makes it that -- just
that many more resources are suddenly available to your conferences to
make it more effective for you as well.

>>RAYNOR DAHLQUIST:   One suggestion, Craig, I think you know, we were
having regional events as a registry for the last 10 years, right?  I
think for the registrars too, they end up going to this event, the
regional event for ICANN, the regional event for some of the
registries, I know some of the other registries have regional events
too, you might consider reaching out to the registries and seeing if
you could combine, you know, the time so that the registries could run
their tracks and their program at the same time you're doing yours, I
don't know, it's just an idea, saves everybody travel, the registrars,
the registries, you guys, you know, it's just one thought, so.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   Thanks.

>>DENNIS JENNINGS:   Just another comment.  Do you use jabber or chat
for -- on the phone conferences?  We use them all the time on the board
conferences, it's enormously useful.

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   You know, to that point, a number of us on various
calls over the years have put together our own loose networks of
instant messaging.  And I think if we had something formal and prepared
for the meetings, like the Adobe Connect has a chat feature and so
forth, that kind of thing makes a huge difference.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   So I hear your -- I hear the comments about remote
participation and that's great and I think it's something that we can
look into and it's pretty cost effective to do these days.  The flip
side to all of this is substantively, what are the kinds of items that
we should be including in the agenda aside from what we have typically
done, you know, security, policy, compliance?  Mike has done
presentations on registrar data escrow which obviously is not so
relevant to you, but for the registrars that participate, and folks may
not have feedback right this moment but certainly call me or write to
me and if there are subjects and topics that you'd like to see
incorporated into the work that we do, we're bringing -- we're bringing
registries and registrars together to share ideas and not just so ICANN
staff can sit in front of a desk and speak to you the whole time.  We
really like it to be a lot more interactive than it is.

>>MICHAEL YOUNG:   Well, Craig, you know, I think we had an obvious
one come up today with what was being discussed with VeriSign staff and
best practices basically in terms of dealing with bad actors with
registrars, detecting them and addressing them and so that's a perfect
example, you know, set up for in-depth workshops on best practices. 
You know, it would be really nice if we had the right people at a
meeting like this from all our different organizations and sent them
off into a room for a couple hours to come up with a really, you know,
pristine best practices document would be useful to the entire industry
so that type of event I think could be -- add a lot of value around the
regional meetings.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   And if you combine that with the suggestion that
Raynor made because the key thing there is having the right people
there, like you said.  It makes it a lot easier to have the right
people there and that means, probably, more people, if there's, like,
three events a year where that needs to happen rather than six or
seven, where we're each doing our own thing, but if -- it makes for a
little longer period of time, probably, in your regional meeting but it
would make it a lot easier I think to have the right people there.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   So I think what we also need to do is we need to
communicate earlier when we're thinking these events will be and in
terms of region and dates and even solicit input on when it is
registries are doing their events, and to the extent that we can,
piggyback them so you do get the right people at the table and you get
the -- you know, you get a good showing.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   It's a very good point, Craig.  I can tell you that
the people that arrange our registrar regional events typically come to
me and say "Hey, do you know when the ICANN event is going to be?"  So
they can try and coordinate it.  So the coordination across all of us
in that regard much earlier 'cause it really does have to be done much
earlier would really facilitate that.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   Point noted.  I have one more brief item.  And
that is there are a number of people in this room that have been
participating in what I'm going to call the DNS collaborative group. 
And it -- this group grew out of the community's response to the
Conficker worm and Greg Aaron has been a part of this and Adam Palmer's
been a part of this, and while ICANN is not playing a leading role in
events like Conficker and how to respond those events, we did pull
together this collaborative group of registries and registrars to
figure out how to communicate with one another and to develop a process
moving forward the next time an event happens like this.  And the
collaborative has been meeting once or twice a month for probably the
last three months.  And ICANN and Greg Rattray and I together have
developed three documents that are kind of the path forward with how do
we deal with a situation like this in the future.  And one of the draft
documents is called an expedited registry security request.  And I'm
not going to get into a lot of it now, but the reason I bring up these
documents in this group is that we -- we're going to be participating
in your registry constituency call on July 8th, the second hour, to
talk more in depth about what this collaborative is and how it might
function going forward and what I'll do is provide copies of these
draft documents to everybody about a week -- sometime early next week,
so folks will have an opportunity to look at them before the call on
the 8th.  Certainly we welcome any feedback that you might have.  But
this was a -- just an opportunity to introduce what the subject is and
to say that we appreciate having time on the 8th to speak with you and
to continue to work with the constituency on these types of issues.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay, thank you.

>>CRAIG SCHWARTZ:   I think that's it for me.

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Kevin, you're on.

>>KEVIN WILSON:  Thank you.

>>CHERIE STUBBS:   (Speaker off microphone).

>>CHUCK GOMES:   David, a question, we have -- we have probably 30
minutes, and I hope there's plenty of time for questions and comments. 
And so Kevin, do you know how long it's going to take you to do the
presentation?

>>KEVIN WILSON:   It's -- it's about 10 or 15 minutes.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Oh, that's good.  So there would be just as much time
for questions -- do you want questions as you go or would you rather go
through it?

>>KEVIN WILSON:   I'd rather go through it just to make sure I get the
-- and the last slide is the one I'd like to focus on too.  So I have
it now.  I moved over here not -- because there was a spotlight over
here.  I know you want to put me under one, but I'm going to try to get
out of it anyway.  So I do control F8 to get it?

>>COLIN DOYLE:  This gentleman will help you.

>>KEVIN WILSON:   Let everybody see my e-mails.  Chuck, that includes
about five minutes for me to get set up.

>>CHUCK GOMES:   Five less minutes for questions, huh?  A good way to
get around them.

>>KEVIN WILSON:   All right.  Good, shall I go ahead and start, David?

>>DAVID W. MAHER:   Go ahead.

>>KEVIN WILSON:   Okay.  Hello, everyone.  My name is Kevin Wilson,
I'm the chief financial officer for ICANN.  It's a pleasure to be here.
And thank you for allowing me to present the fiscal year '10 operating
plan and budget.  The purpose of this is to briefly update you all --
many of you are very, very familiar, but I'd like to just make sure
that in case not everyone is, to briefly update you on the process to
get to where we are right now, which is just a few days away from the
board meeting.  And hopefully adopting for the -- for the board to
consider and hopefully adopt the budget on the Friday board meeting. 
Also to provide highlights of the draft FY10 operating plan and budget.
The registry constituency was fairly actively involved in Mexico City
and prior to Mexico City and after Mexico City in reading the framework
so I'll highlight the changes from the framework.  And then have a
further engagement of the community in refining any assumptions,
answering any questions, et cetera, and finally ensure that the board
after community feedback is prepared to adopt the budget, fully
informed.  This slide really captures it in a nutshell which is that
the community feedback confirmed what we thought from our reading of
the financial press, looking at ICANN's internal operations, and just
being sensitive to the requirements of the community that we keep
spending under 5% and so we've done that and continue the plan from the
framework.

As you know, the bylaws require the budget, draft of the budget be
posted by the 17th of -- 45 days before fiscal year-end so we did that
on the 17th of May.  And for the second year, we married the budget and
the operating plan process together and posted both of them before the -
- last year before the Delhi meeting and this year before the Mexico
City meeting, with the intention that there's, I think, a little more
than four months of community consultation and then comments in Mexico
City and before on the framework and then comments were received on the
operating plan after the draft budget.  I think I'd want to highlight
that there's been more comprehensive analysis.  I know that we receive
comment from the registries in particular that they appreciated the
organization and the level of depth of the reporting.  And that's --
that's continuing, we're in that process.  At some point I think there
probably will be comments about we have too much information but
anyway, we're still in the process of preparing lots of information, as
well as more views of the budget and that's what I wanted to show.  And
then process that.  So as far as substantially what -- from a substance
standpoint what's in the budget, the revenue's been reduced from what
you saw in the framework in Mexico City to 63.6 million and that's
reflecting a registrar fee reduction to 18 cents.  Essentially to
accelerate the universal adoption of the new RAA.  So those registrars,
the plan is for those registrars that do adopt the RAA either because
they're in their anniversary date for this fiscal year or early, then
they would be eligible for that 18 cents fee.  I mentioned about
operating expenses being held at 4.9% and then some other reductions,
for example, contingency, we heard from the community feedback that the
contingency could come -- be reduced so we sharpened our knives and
identified areas that we thought we were a little more comfortable in
the prediction of cost estimates so we were able to do that with
comfort.  And still allow for a contribution to the reserve fund.  Not
as much as suggested in the strategic plan but still 4.99.  And then
just to reiterate, I think most of you know, but just to make sure, the
revenues and most expenses for the new gTLD launch are assumed to be
not in this budget.  There are some new gTLD costs that are in this
budget, certainly.  But the $185,000 fee revenue and the processing
costs of the panels and whatnot are not included in that budget. 
That's soon to be covered in a budget amendment.  So who participated? 
We had conference calls, meetings and more groups participated I think
this year than ever.  We -- with more working groups, et cetera, worked
on that.  We even ventured into the land of twitter so I'm an official -
- I officially tweeted the ICANN budget.  We had 23 downloaded budgets
from that, 15 of which were human, that's what the statistic was.  The -
- and the registrars pointed out that I said 15 human, 11 from the U.S,
does that imply that those are not human, I'm not sure what they meant
by that.

So, but seriously, there were lots of comments, lots -- I think by the
nature of the open community forum for the budget, there were lots --
we received more comments on the quality and quantity of the comments
were I think the highest ever.  We also made a special effort, we heard
feedback last year that although we said we had read all the comments
and we said we had synthesized it in the budget, we didn't have -- we
hadn't communicated exactly how that was.  So this year we've -- we
more than ever followed the Kurt Pritz method like was done in the
guidebook and I actually analyzed each comment and how that flowed
through.  I can feed through here what was -- I can walk through this
quickly, what was said, wanted more details and in different views.  We
did that.  The checks are items that were actually directly reflected
in the draft budget.  The circles are ones that were indirectly
addressed.  In other words, they're handled in other ways.  Happy to
come back to this slide if you want to.  But that's pretty self-
explanatory.

The changes in the budget is that we provided more travel support. 
The GNSO, we, based on community feedback we felt it was important from
the community standpoint to have more support to the full GNSO level. 
The GAC had made its request for the second year and so that's in the
travel guidelines, that they have an incipient travel -- travel support
for the GAC.  I'm trying to think if there's anything else in there, I
think I talked about all the other ones.  This is the cycle of the
strategy plan and operating plan that hopefully you're familiar with. 
This is a chart essentially showing -- it's a busy chart, but it just
shows how the budget and operating plan cycle has progressed over the
years, where we're plugging in earlier and earlier.  And that black bar
there, the dumbbell bar -- which looks like the weights that I lift --
are longer and longer each year, so that's the intention.  Follow the
strategic plan.  Here's the snapshot of the operating plan, 54.4
million, obviously, significant costs for the new gTLD program which is
expected to launch in the fiscal year '10, that's the financial
assumption 

And then, as we mentioned before, contractual compliance, technology
operation security, and then the only real addition to this about
$300,000 is for travel support.  Only addition from the framework that
you saw in Mexico City.  That's the budget.

So let me just highlight a couple of the revenue line items, the
changes, what this is 67 million in -- when we presented this.  The
framework in Mexico City.  So that's 63.6 million.  And that reflects
the registrar fee reduction in there.  Obviously, the dot com stepup to
18 million.  And we also received community feedback that we needed to
have more accurate estimates of the cc revenue.  Don't hide that
essentially.  So we did more work on saying what do we think it really
will be?  This is obviously separate from the other broader discussions
that are underway.  We also updated the transaction volume.  Some of
you provided the registrars and registry provide some feedback on that.
But we like to do that.  And I think it's a reflecting the current
transaction volumes that we're seeing in our billing cycles.  So the
changes to the RAA, this might be of interest to you on the economic
impacts to ICANN.  The transaction fee reduced to 18 cents.  The plan
is at the 25 cents reduced in the last 2 years, for example, to 20
cents, that would be reduced to 18 cents.  And the plan is -- the
current plan is, for those who don't sign the RAA, either because
they're on their cycle or because they don't sign it early, there would
be in fiscal year '10 a fee charged of 20 cents for those who don't
sign. And then the thought being that after that they would go back up
to 25 cents.  If someone couldn't sign it earlier than fiscal year '11,
they would go back up to 25 cents.  We're at -- the budget assumption
is that everyone will -- all registrars will adopt it.  So it will be
at 18 cents.  So that will be a variance, if they don't.  The variable
fee reduction.  The 3.8 million is reduced by 10% for those registrars
that sign it.  Two, hopefully, nonbudget impacts are one is the annual
registrar fee can be paid a thousand dollars per quarter.  That's just
an impact on those for cash flow but not overall budget impact and late
payments of 1.5% per month in the new RAA.  So in current enforcement
and timely payment.  We haven't put in the budget an estimate for that.
We're assuming that all registrars will pay on time.

Okay.  This is the operating expense highlights.  I think I mentioned
that the contingency fund is down by 1.5 million.  This brings to the
contribution 4.9 million, which I think we mentioned.  The separate new
gTLD budget, if there are any questions.  But I think you're familiar
with that concept that there would be a separate budget amendment to
handle the revenue and most of the costs about 90 days prior to the
budget.  

We also included the 3-year financial impact analysis.  We had done
the analysis with the board finance committee over the last 9 or 10
months.  And that was actually posted in an appendix of the draft
budget.  So you could review that if you'd like to.  

The implications, the key implications are that there's going to be an
opportunity, we believe, for reduction or changing of the mix of
revenue sources, as the ICANN model matures, that we -- that the ICANN
model works and that we also need to strengthen the cost account
reporting and methodology and, more importantly, the communication of
that.  So we'll have a draft paper by Seoul outlining that the
characteristics of that.  So they'll be comfortable with that.  

And then this is the last slide I wanted to show you is here's the
traditional accounts view that we've seen.  By community feedback and
now post on the website on the dashboard we're showing it as functional
reporting, which is identified as the areas of the purposes of ICANN,
the new gTLD, IDN contractual compliance, the 15 categories in the
ICANN budget and operating plan and then now we have for open for
public comment, this is really a direct response for community
feedback.  In fact, Chuck and others have provided a good feedback on
that that they'd like to see the ICANN budget shown and expenses shown
in the way that you're doing.  The paper perhaps oversimplifies it as
saying that the traditional accounting is the way you might --
household budget might be doing it with, you know, the expenses that
you have.  Rent, tuition, transportation -- those might be the ways
that a traditional accounting budget would do.  The functional
reporting might be in areas that you purposes for spending.  So, say,
Entertainment.  Entertainment might be food and hotel costs, for
example.  And then the EAG, expense area group reporting, is more along
the lines of how much you're spending for your child.  So a portion of
rent, a portion of clothing, a portion of food might be allocated
towards that.  Might be overly simplified.  But the red is gTLD support
and GNSO support.  The green is the Cs.  And the way these categories
were determined was from the ICANN functional -- excuse me, the ICANN
structural chart that's on the Web site.  So that's where the
categories are set up.  And the budget -- and the paper that's posted
on the public comment area now is asking for feedback on this both on
the categories as well as the methodology.  We'd outlined the
methodology to come up with those costs.  And, assuming the board
finance committee has asked us to seek comment, the ccNSO this morning
actually asked us -- appreciated they received a longer presentation on
this particularly they asked for.  And they asked for a couple extra
weeks.  So we'll extend the comment period for this.  So we'd really
like your feedback and treat that as a way to answer your questions
that you've been asking for a while on how much are we spending by area
of interest. Okay? 

any questions?

Yep?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Thanks, Kevin, for a really good job on the budget. 
And for the first time I think it's not too hard to figure out that
certain organizations are being heavily subsidized by the g side of the
house.  It will be curious to see what the cc comments are.  I'm sure
they're not too crazy about this picture.  But we don't need to talk
about that here.  I do have a few questions, and I'm sorry I didn't get
these in by the 17th.  I didn't get the chance to go through the budget
in too much detail until my trip here, which was the 17th.  I realize
some of these things are too late to have any impact now.  But possibly
you can answer some of the questions and may be helpful in the future.

First of all, I notice that the --

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Chuck, can I interrupt for one second.  Craig, can
you take notes or the transcript --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   It's being transcribed.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   I don't have notes, but thank you.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   And, of course, send me an e-mail if there's
something that we miss.  But I notice that the constituency support
budget only went up by 3.2%.  And I say "only" because with the GNSO
improvements that are happening that likely will happen the end of this
year and certainly the latter half of the fiscal year '10, that I
suspect there's going to be a lot more costs for constituency support
and stakeholder group support.  And I assume it includes both, not just
constituencies --

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Right.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   -- in this next fiscal year.  I hope there's enough
there.  I'm not asking you to respond.  I'm sure that the ICANN staff
looked at that very closely.  But that did look like a small increase
for what could be quite significant increases with the GNSO
improvements.  So that's just a comment.  Unless you have anything to
add there, which I don't --

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Well, let me -- do you want me to respond one by
one or --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Sure.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   That was one of those that had a circle up there
that was an indirect response.  And there certainly is, you know, that
the indirect one is in an area of efficiency.  So, for example, I know
Denise has talked to you about how the idea of having a cross -- a pool
of resources for that.  And then one that's near and dear to my heart
because I took this on, the responsibility of the travel guidelines. 
And so the policy staff that had traditionally been so involved in
travel and booking travel and figuring out who was going to go and who
is supported are out of that game now.  So I know that Glen and others
have been very, very appreciative of the work that we're doing on the
administration side.  So it's kind of --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Combination.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   It's a little bit of the squeaky answer for you by
saying that we're freeing up their time to provide more support.  But
that's part of it.  And then when the issue about the --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   -- the working group changes or that's true also
with other -- the GNSO structure changes and other changes that have
been proposed through the year, we'll have to handle that.

You know, look at the impact of those.  And we're trying to apply
discipline on what's the costs of implementing those.  And then let's
either fix it -- move things around within the budget.  Or, if we need
to, go back and request more budget. Okay?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Thanks.  That's helpful.

On figure 3 on page 14, next to the bottom there's a change in net
assets row.  And excuse my ignorance there.  But it's a change from what?

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   What is change in net assets?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   In a for-profit world, that's revenue minus costs.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Oh, okay.  It's revenue minus costs.  

>>KEVIN WILSON:  I'm not allowed to say "profit," because we're not
for profit.  

>>CHUCK GOMES:  I'm used to profit.

>>KEVIN WILSON:  That's the GAAP accounting for not for profits.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   All right.  With regard -- actually, I think you
answered this next question I have.  So maybe I'll just go right on. 
Yeah.  You did.  You answered it why your presentation.  So I can skip
that one.

Now, with regard to ccTLD contributions, I appreciate the fact that
you lowered the estimate in fiscal year '10 --

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Lowered the budget.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah, right, exactly.  But 1.6 million still seems
pretty high compared to what the actuals are projected for this year. 
Is that just a dream?  Or what is that?

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   We -- there's, I think, three factors.  Let's see
if I can add them up in my head quickly.  I'll list them, and we'll see
if it comes close to three.  The first one is we billed really late
this year.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Oh, okay.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   I'll own up to part of that.  We can talk about the
reasons why.  But, anyway, we've clarified that.  Bart is the leader on
that.  I'm kind of the financial leader on that as well.  So we billed
late.  There's people at the Sydney meeting who are handing us checks
because they just got their final letters recently.  So we believe some
funds will spill over into the next fiscal year.  So that's part of it.
The second one is we won't bill late this next fiscal year.  We're
committing to do that.  We have a specific timeline where we could
share with that view that specific timeline.  So by billing on time and
I think that's going to help as well.  And then third, there's, I
believe that there's an overall theme here.  And, judging from the
feedback I received in the ccNSO meeting, I think that -- I'm not going
to speak for the overall politics of volunteer versus contracted. 
That's a bigger topic than finance.  But I'm more and more confident
that we're making progress on that and the sense of commitment is
stronger.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Do you have any sense -- and maybe you can't answer
to this.  That's okay.  But do you have any sense as to whether it
helped the ccNSO players to see the gap in terms of the funds that are
used to support them and what they're actually contributing?

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Absolutely.  Yeah.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Okay.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   It's good.  The dialogue is healthy because they're
first thing is I don't believe the numbers as you hinted out earlier
and we're showing them the numbers, we're showing them the work and
they're like wow, I guess I could question whether this person is 60%
or 70%, but it's not a zero or 100%.  It's not -- we're closer in the
estimation. and they've asked for more numbers, more analysis, which
they'll get or the community will get.  So I think that's all positive.
The point you told me my very first meeting on the g/c challenge, I
think that will come out more and more as we become more and more open
and transparent.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   That's what I was hoping, of course, and why I
recommended that, because I don't think they were really aware of how
much was being spent to support them.  That's great, thanks.  Thanks.

Now, on page 23 of the budget, I note that there's $470,000 being
spent on data escrow services for registrars.  My thought there is --
and forgive me for digressing here a little bit because I'm going to go
to the new gTLD process.

But registries are now, if you look at the budget -- I know it comes
from registrants -- but are contributing considerably more now even
than registrars.  $470,000 going to support escrow services for
registrars -- and I'm not opposed to that.  But we're being asked,
under the new gTLD program, for registries to pay for RSEP services. 
So I just find a little bit of a disconnect there.  I'm not asking you
to comment on this, but I think it's a strange thing.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Okay.  Yep.  I understand.  Thank you.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   In the policy development support -- this is on page
35, if you care -- there's a department secretariat there.  Do you
happen to know what that is?  Or is that -- I know that's not your
department.  But --

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Who is the secretariat?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Not a name.  I'm talking about what's the role
there, a department secretariat?

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   It's in the policy area?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah, policy development support.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   It's Glen for the GNSO.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   That's -- oh.  No, it's at -- let me clarify.  It
says, "Retain two additional staff members -- a department secretariat
and policy director."  So is that an additional secretariat to help Glen?

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Yeah, I don't know if -- I don't want to
characterize --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   I should ask Denise.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   For the specifics.  I don't think it's to help
Glen.  But it ties in with Denise's new program to do a shared resource
concept.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Okay.  Good.  That may be it.  Let me -- here's
another one.

On the ICANN financials on page 40 -- oh, I guess I really already
covered this.  That's the ccTLD issue.  Oh, I know, my question is that
-- and I must have just overlooked it when I was reviewing this on the
plane.  But what is the reserve fund now -- going into fiscal year '10?

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   It's just topped back over $30 million.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Oh, okay.  So just over $30 million, and we're going
to add 4.9 to it hopefully in the next year.  Is that right?

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Yeah.  There's actually $30 million in the reserve
fund.  There's about $25 million in the working capital fund.  And,
after we finish our investment policy review, we have a draft study of
that, by the way, the finance committee has asked for.  So the plan is
in the July board finance committee, they'll finish their review of
that and then transfer excess working capital into the reserve fund.
And then, like you said, the plan is for the budget of FY '10 that will
contribute 4.9 --

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   And there's some more that can be added after new
gTLDs happen that come back in?

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Right.  Plan is 12 1/2 million for that.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Thank you very much.  And my compliments.  You've
done a really nice job.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Thank you very much.  Chuck, I personally want to
thank you for your feedback into the budget.  Your specific and pointed
questions made the budget stronger for everyone.  I appreciate that.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Any other comments?  If not, thank you very much.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Thank you.  I think we're getting closer to
achieving my personal goal, which is to make this and travel a very
routine and boring subject.  I put a couple of you to sleep, so that's
a very good sign.  Thank you.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Okay.  At this point we are -- oh, Tina, you're
here.

 >>TINA DAM:   I have a couple of slides, if you want to -- if you're
ready to switch to the next topic.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Yeah, could we get some help on --

 >>TINA DAM:   No, no.  I can do it.  I just wanted to make sure that
you're ready to go to the topic of IDNs.  Okay, cool.  I can also do
that.  Thank you.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   David, do you mind if I stay and sit in the up front?

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   You're welcome to stay as long as you want.

 >>KEVIN WILSON:   Thank you.  Tina has a much nicer background than I
do.

 >>TINA DAM:   The background is the beach in Denmark, since I'm not
there too often.  I'm sure there's much nicer beaches in Australia.  

Usually I come in here and just go like well, which topics under IDNs
do you want to talk about?  This time I brought a couple slides just to
see if it could generate a little bit more discussion.  And I don't
have anything on background because I kind of assumed that all of you
know pretty much, you know, where we're at and so forth.

But this first slide are the technical related issues that are ahead
of us.

There's a topic of variant TLD reservation or blocking which has been
a major topic this week and I think will continue to be for some time.

It's not specific to the fast track or the gTLD program.  It goes for
both.  And the problem is that we have a community asking for variant
TLDs to be allocated in the root because that's how things function for
users.  And the example I have up there is specifically in Arabic
because some of the -- I think some of the biggest problems comes out
of Arabic where you can't see any difference between the two strings. 
They both mean Pakistan, but they are different.  And it just happens
to be that, if you're in one part of the local region, you will type
one of them in.  And, if you're in the other, you'll type the other one
in or in general, just use one or the other.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Tina, excuse me.  I think we're going to try to
increase the size of the screen.

 >>TINA DAM:   Oh, I didn't even notice this.  Yeah.  I know how to do
that.  Of course.  Sorry.  Yeah, just did that actually in another
meeting.  So -- there.  Now the only thing is I can't see it on my
screen.  So -- I can get half of it.  This is fine though.  Now you can
better see it.  

The two strings, obviously, mean the same, look the same but are
different. And so mostly it's from the Arabic speaking nations, and
it's from China.  We've gotten this request.

But I think there's others who need it as well.  But the problem, of
course, is that we don't have a technical solution.  We thought for a
long time the D name would enable aliasing in the root as it has been
the case at second levels.

But it doesn't -- it just doesn't work that way.  Autonomica was
testing it out,  and a couple other members of RSSAC was testing it
out.  So the solution so far that we came up with was that variant TLDs
will be either reserved for potential future allocation or they will be
blocked.  So sort of like a safety mechanism, if you want to call it
that, to make sure that those strings are not allocated to someone else.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   So Tina, would ultimately then both be allowed by
the appropriate party to be registered?

 >>TINA DAM:   Well, if we can get a technical solution that provides
aliasing in the root, yes.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   But it's dependent on the aliasing?

 >>TINA DAM:   It's dependent on that.  I think the fast track and
gTLD program are slightly different on the topic in the sense there's
no policy process for allocating them either.  But, obviously, they
would need to go to the same entity.  That's the whole purpose for
aliasing.  So yeah.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Yeah.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   Can I jump in?  You heard my thoughts on this
yesterday as well.  But you mentioned that the IDN ccTLD fast track and
the gTLD would be different?

 >>TINA DAM:   In the sense of policy process allocation.  I mean,
neither of them are talking about this topic.  But, you know, I think --
well, the gTLD is a little more specific on it than the fast track is
in the sense that a gTLD is not -- process is not allowing allocation
of confusingly similar strings, which this would be.  So, whether or
not there needs to be, like, a policy process development of some sort
or not, you know, is kind of hard for me to say.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   Okay.  But both tracks are -- point to the IDN
guidelines which point to the implementation of IDN tables,
essentially.  And the IDN tables should pretty much dictate how the
variants are managed.  At least in my point of view.  I think we
disagree somewhat on this point.  But so -- that seems to be rather the
guiding policy rather than anything else specifically on the variant
issue.

 >>TINA DAM:   Well, I don't know why we disagree on that.  I mean,
obviously, I agree with the IDN guidelines and the IDN tables and so
forth.  But there's no specifics on how to do that at the top level
other than the fact that ICANN has said we want to implement things in
the same way and we're using IDN tables that are used at the second
level also at the top level.  But there's nothing that says that at the
policy it's like an obvious logic solution. But it doesn't say that
anywhere.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   I think we agree with that part.  What I'm saying is
that we sort of disagree is I don't think there is much difference
between the IDN ccTLDs and IDN gTLDs on this particular issue.

 >>TINA DAM:   Okay.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   And isn't this what you raised yesterday in our
joint meeting with the ccNSO?  So that we form a little group to start
looking at this?  And you, I'm sure, Tina, would be involved.

 >>TINA DAM:   So that would be great.  Yeah.  I mean, the only thing
that I'm saying is that the gTLD process is very specific around not
allocating confusingly similar strings.  Variant TLD strings or
whatever you want to call them are -- I mean, at least the example that
I have on the screen is a -- are two confusingly similar strings.  So
that's what the gTLD process says.  The fast track is not talking so
much about that.  Obviously, ICANN have -- ICANN has a role in ensuring
that things are secure and stable.  That also includes not allowing
confusingly similar strings being allocated in the root.  And then,
when you look at variants, there is an addition to that, which is
unless they're aliased.  But neither one of the two policy processes
talk about how to deal with aliasing or variant TLDs.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   I want to clarify one point, which is the
confusingly similar string issue.  I'm pretty sure that both the GNSO
and the IDNC does talk about that.  I don't think the IDNC would have
recommended that confusingly similar strings be introduced.

 >>TINA DAM:   No, of course not.  I'm just saying that the gTLD --

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   So I sort of think, again, they are the same at this
point.  And the other part, specifically, on this, though, I remember
quite clearly in Mexico, although it wasn't a -- I forgot which
occasion.  But we asked Kurt this issue about confusingly similar
string, whether it is contemplated at least it was our assumption that
it is a confusingly similar string, then the appropriate entity, which
is the one who's running the current TLD would actually have an
exception to be allowed to apply for it.  If that is not the case, we
have a much more serious issue with the whole gTLD process, I think.

 >>TINA DAM:   Okay.  So I remember the exact situation actually.  And
it was in Mexico and you asked me.  And then you asked afterwards if
Kurt agreed with me and he said yes.

The thing that has changed between Mexico and Sydney is that in Mexico
we proposed that -- for the fast-track process, we proposed that
variant TLDs would be either allocated or blocked.  And, since we
didn't have a technical solution for allocations, the proposal was to
allocate -- let's say, there's two strings, right?  There could be
more, right?  But let's just say two.  Allocate the two strings
separately, assign them, of course, to the same entity and ask that
entity to ensure that some files or the trees under each of them would
be handled in the same way.  

The feedback that was received on that was that that is not a stable
situation for the name space.  And so then from that proposal in Mexico
to the proposal in Sydney was changed to say reserved versus allocation.

So in Mexico you asked -- at least if this was the situation that I
remember it was -- you asked, since you're proposing to allocate IDN
TLDs in the fast-track process, wouldn't you also do that in the gTLD
process?  It should be the same.  I said, "Yeah, if this is what we end
up with, it should be the same."  And then you asked Kurt, and he said
yeah, he agreed.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   Those were two different questions, actually.  The
first question was specifically about variants.  The second question
was about confusingly similar TLDs.

 >>TINA DAM:   Okay.

 >>EDMON CHUNG:   So which -- they're related, but they're completely
separate questions.  And I want to make sure that the clarification is
on -- first of all, the new gTLD string especially given that we do
believe that there are situations where it is confusingly similar but
could be completely different languages that are still confusingly
similar.  For example, let's easily take dot Asia for example.  We
would like to apply for like dot Asia in different languages.  And we
would consider them confusingly similar.  And we would like to still be
able to apply for it.  And I think I'm not speaking for anybody else. 
But I'm sure there are similar thinking there.  In terms of variants,
you know, I think that's a more specific issue on that.  And in terms
of the security issue, you heard my sort of logic yesterday, you know,
you mentioned that if there's no mechanism to alias the two, which we
do not at this point and neither do we have it at the second level. 
So, if you're saying that there is a security issue, we need to address
it as a global issue.  And whoever is implementing a variant system may
have to be advised to stop at the second level as well.  And
personally, I don't think that should be the direction we're taking. 
And I'm pretty confident that the technical uncertainties, if you will,
could be addressed and have been proven to be -- have been addressed
by, you know, different registries that have implemented variants at
the second level.

 >>TINA DAM:   Yeah, I mean, I haven't heard from anyone who's
implemented variants or aliasing at the second level that they have run
into security levels either.  So I don't think that's the case.  So I
think --

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Tina, I'm sorry.  We're getting to 4:00 when we
were due to meet with the registrars.

 >>TINA DAM:   Oh, well they can wait.  I mean --

[Laughter]

 >>TINA DAM:   I'm sure they're busy down there.  Let me say one more
thing on the variant stuff.  I think one of the things that are coming
out of this meeting is that we may want to look at different
definitions of variants.  And, if it's variant TLDs that are
confusingly similar, such as the example I have up there, then we're in
one situation.  If it's variant TLDs that have the same meaning but not
necessarily look confusingly similar, then maybe we're in a different
situation.  And I don't know how to go about it.  I mean, that was
something new that was brought up yesterday to try to look at it and
split it up into different categories.  So it's something that I need
to look at it and I don't know even know if it's possible or not.  

So since it's one minute to 4:00 and you guys need to go meet the
registrars, I don't know what else to do.  There's more issues ahead of
us, and I have a slide on the status of the fast track and a slide on
the status of IDNs and new gTLDs.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   You're probably aware of those, but you have to
comment on the IETF work.  What do you think is going to happen?

 >>TINA DAM:   Well, I put up there the next meeting is in Stockholm
at the end of July.  I said yesterday and I'm still of that opinion
that I'm in the camp that believes that the protocol revision will be
finished in time before these processes go live.  They're right now
considering mapping and having to deal with mappings, which was one of
the major outstanding issues.  So I would hope that there could be an
agreement on that topic.  And, if that happens, then I think we're
going to go into last call because that means we have solved at least
three major problems -- Unicode version, independence, and the problem
with right to left scripts where in some cases with part of the
protocol and then the mappings.  And those three together.  Or even
just the first two together is, in my eyes, a much better IDN protocol
than what we have today.  It's a huge improvement, especially for
developing nations.  So I think having diversion of the protocol would
be much better.  So that's where I think it's heading.

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Just one more question.  If that doesn't happen in
time -- we've talked back and forth for a long time.  I don't think the
IDNA revision is a prerequisite to introducing IDN TLDs?

 >>TINA DAM:   I'm sorry, the IDNA what?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   The revision that you're talking about --

 >>TINA DAM:   Is it prerequisite?

 >>CHUCK GOMES:   Yes.

 >>TINA DAM:   We've said before from ICANN that, if the revision is
not finished, then we'll go ahead and use the 2003 version of the
protocol and potentially with some additional restrictions around it to
make sure we're not overextending ourselves.  I think that's still
where we're at.  But, I mean, obviously, there needs to be a technical
review and a decision and potentially a board decision on that.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   Thank you very much.  And we're sorry to cut you
off.

 >>TINA DAM:   Well, hey, I'm sorry we can't talk about it more.  But
I'm sure you all know how to contact me, if you have any questions. 
And have a good time with the registrars.

 >>DAVID W. MAHER:   We're doing the ballroom upstairs, ballroom B.

[Break]