GNSO Council Teleconference Minutes

17 February 2005

Proposed agenda and related documents

List of attendees:
Philip Sheppard - Commercial & Business Users C. absent, apologies- proxy to Grant Forsyth/Marilyn Cade
Marilyn Cade - Commercial & Business Users C.
Grant Forsyth - Commercial & Business Users C
Greg Ruth - ISCPC
Antonio Harris - ISCPC
Tony Holmes - ISCPC
Thomas Keller- Registrars - absent - apologies - proxy to Ross Rader/Bruce Tonkin
Ross Rader - Registrars
Bruce Tonkin - Registrars
Ken Stubbs - gTLD registries
Philip Colebrook - gTLD registries
Cary Karp - gTLD registries
Lucy Nichols - Intellectual Property Interests C
Niklas Lagergren - Intellectual Property Interests C
Kiyoshi Tsuru - Intellectual Property Interests C.
Robin Gross - Non Commercial Users C. - proxy to Marc Schneiders
Marc Schneiders - Non Commercial Users C.
Carlos Afonso - Non Commercial Users C. - absent - apologies - proxy to Marc Schneiders
Alick Wilson
Maureen Cubberley

17 Council Members

ICANN Staff
Dr. Paul Twomey - ICANN President and CEO
Paul Verhoef - Vice President, Policy Development Support
Kurt Pritz - Vice President, Business Operations
Maria Farrell - ICANN GNSO Policy Support Officer
Glen de Saint G�ry - GNSO Secretariat

Barbara Roseman - ICANN Staff Manager - absent

GNSO Council Liaisons
Thomas Roessler - acting ALAC Liaison
Suzanne Sene - GAC Liaison

Visitors: (participants and contributors at the Amsterdam Consultation meeting)

Chuck Gomes - Verisign Naming and Directory Services
David Maher - PIR Senior Vice President
Mark McFadden - Internet Service and Connectivity Providers Constituency chair
Marie Zitkova - gTLD Registries Chair
Jordyn Buchanan - Co-chair Whois task force 1/2

MP3 Recording:

Quorum present at 20:10 CET.

Bruce Tonkin chaired this teleconference.

Item 1: Approval of the Agenda
Agenda Approved

Item 2: Approval of the
Minutes of 13 January 2005

Ken Stubbs moved the adoption of the Minutes of 13 January 2005
Motion unanimously approved.

Decision 1: The minutes of 13 January 2005 were adopted

Item 2: Report on Amsterdam Consultation on the ICANN Strategic Plan 7-8 February 2005.
Marilyn Cade summarized the outcome of the Amsterdam Consultation on the ICANN Strategic Plan on 7 and 8 February, thanked Dr Twomey, the participants, presenters and ICANN staff for their support. The first day was devoted to presentations and the second day to rapporteurs who presented a synthesis of those comments that received broad agreement. The consensus comments were divided into 2 categories:
1. Consultation Process Recommendations for the development of the current plan
2. Substantive Comment Recommendations consisted of comments on the plan which received broad agreement associated with the four key areas of the Strategic Plan.

Tony Holmes emphasized 3 important factors needed for ongoing success:
- Call for ICANN to make sure the next version of the plan was published in advance for the Mar del Plata meeting
- Organize the event in Mar del Plata for further discussion
- Process developed in Amsterdam is moved forward in terms of the next strategic plan.

Bruce Tonkin commented that there were 3 documents that should be provided
- The Strategic plan for the next 3 years (2005, 2006, 2007)
- The Operational plan for the next 12 months (July 2005 to June 2006)
- The Budget for the next 12 months (July 2005 to June 2006)

Dr. Paul Twomey thanked the Council for the invitation and all those involved in organizing the Amsterdam Consultation meeting. Some of the output was consistent with other output received during consultations while, some was different.
There was agreement on the terms of how to move forward. Past experience had shown that it takes some years to get a set of organizational planning documents and cycles right for an organization, and the feed back from the first strategic plan was not surprising.
In terms of the cycle, it would appropriate to break down the documents in 3 parts:

1. Strategic overview
2. Operational plan
3. Financial implications

Currently, and since ICANN's creation, the operational plan and the budget document are merged together with much of the past discussion focussed on the budget and finances. The feedback would be useful to look at the three parts together. Evolving the planning process including consultation was more important than spending all the community's and ICANN staff's remaining attention on one particular document. The feedback from several consultation meetings is that the operational plan is the next priority.
Consequently the feedback from the Amsterdam and other consultations should be taken to look at what would affect the strategic overview broadly. The operational details in the present document could be separated,and used as input into the operational/budget planning process due to be presented for board approval in Luxembourg, and a document that focuses on the strategic overview could be prepared for discussion at the Mar del Plata in a public meeting after which the Board could approve.
Following the Mar del Plata meeting, ICANN staff in consultation with the community would be working on the operational plan, taking into account the operational aspects, achievements aimed at, specific projects and timeframes for the next year.
Dr. Twomey commented that this year, 2005 the operational plan will need to be combined with the development of the budget, but the desire was, and this seemed to come out of the Amsterdam contributions as well, to move to a planning cycle, namely:
- July to December 2005 would focus on the strategic overview and the revision of the strategic overview document.
- December 2005 through to May /June 2006 would focus on operational planning documentation and the budget
This would start building a yearly cycle where discussions and consultation would take place on the strategic overview, the operational plan and the budget aspects.
Dr. Twomey concluded by saying that an enormous amount of time and effort had gone into producing the strategic document and appreciated the consultation. He felt the community would not benefit much from a significant re-writing of another version of the document, but rather should focus on trying to take another cut at the larger picture, the strategic overview, based on the input received from the community, and then move on to the operational aspects for the next 12 months.

Grant Forsyth asked where we were in the operational and planning cycle, where did the current plan sit in that?
Dr. Paul Twomey responded that in the past ICANN had produced a combined operational plan/budget for the period July to June. The bylaws require the budget document to be completed by certain stages and by June. The budget preparation has started and initial discussions have been had with budget advisory group. More input is required on the the operational aspects of this document. Some of the things listed in the strategic plan document had already been completed. The document was a new type of document for ICANN, and it was difficult to write to meet the objectives of providing a strategic overview of ICANN as well as provide enough detail on the operational activities of ICANN for those not familiar with ICANN.
Some things at the operational level have been or are being implemented and this is partly the reason why it is now better to take a cut through the present document and distinguish which belongs to the strategic overview of ICANN and what needs to be achieved as part of the operational plan. More project specific items should be part of an operational document which could be incorporated in the budget process.

Bruce Tonkin clarified saying that he supposed there was a framework for a strategic plan when the 2004/2005 budget was produced and what Grant Forsyth was referring to were the dates in the strategic document that refers to the current budget year (July 04 to June 05), whereas we should now look at a three year period starting from July 2005.

Dr. Paul Twomey agreed, the budget process being looked at was for the financial year July 2005/ June 2006.

Maureen Cubberley agreed that it took up to 2 years to establish an appropriate planning cycle and suggested that as a starting point for determining the planning process it might be useful to develop an overlay that looked at the fiscal year milestones, key Board meetings, decision milestones, and the groups that fed into those decisions and than try to structure a 2 year timeframe so as to find parallel points to put the planning process forward and critical deadlines.
She explained her understanding of the strategic overview as a shared responsibility, less of a consultation by the staff with the stakeholders and more of a participatory process from the beginning and asked whether Dr. Twomey agreed that it was a shared responsibility and would there be a process for that?
Dr. Paul Twomey explained why the document was a challenge, why there were several versions and why it did not come through the consultation process earlier. It was partly because there were several external audience groups and some parts of the document could be seen as desirable by some and undesirable by others. He added that it was natural in a community where many people voluntarily contributed much time and experience they could not be expected to draft a document from scratch. The intent was to produce a document that could be responded to and not a final version.
He went on to make a practical observation that when targets in any planning document were not met by an organization, the reason was often that new issues emerge which required resources to be reallocated because of the pressing nature of the new situation. ICANN, he felt, was prone to such emergencies, and while a plan and projects were needed, practical realities happened during the year.
Tony Holmes requested clarity on one element that seemed to have fallen away and looked back at the process recommendations from the Amsterdam meeting.
1 focus on the strategic plan for the future coupled with the budget activity
2. Operational plan to be published before Argentina meeting.
If understood correctly that would not happen.
Dr. Paul Twomey replied that the current ICANN budget was an attempted operational plan backed by spreadsheets and the 2004/2005 budget as posted, gave information on what was going to be done. He stressed the benefit in getting the constituencies and the community to focus on the project aspects of the operational plan/budget document rather than how they would be funded. Budget, in the ICANN sense meant some version of the operational plan and the budget.
Bruce Tonkin summarized that for the Mar del Plata meetings a new version of the strategic overview document would be produced which would take into account the output of the Amsterdam meeting plus other consultations, but may strip out some of the operational material and put that in a fresh document that would be the first draft of the combined operational budget document.

A public consultation, still to be scheduled, will be planned separately from the public forum in Mar del Plata to discuss and consult on the Strategic Overview.

Maureen Cubberley encouraged cross consultation to which Dr. Twomey commented that some of the constituencies specifically asked to be consulted apart and that it was not being disrespectful to cross constituency consultation.
Dr Twomey agreed that both separate consultation with individual stakeholder groups and joint consultation was required in the process
Bruce Tonkin thanked Dr. Twomey for attending and all those who attended the Amsterdam event that were on the call.

Item 3: Update on procedure for use by ICANN in considering requests for consent and related contractual amendments to allow changes in the architecture and operation of a gTLD registry.
Bruce Tonkin reported on having an action item on the topic but considered that the current priorities should be focussed on Whois.

Item 4: Update on WHOIS task forces

Jordyn Buchanan commented that there were two issues:

I. Task Force 1/2 developed recommendations relating to improving notification and consent for the use of contact data in the Whois system.
The recommendations were submitted to the GNSO public forum during Cape Town meeting, Constituency statements and comments have been solicited, 2 constituencies have indicated reservations on the recommendation, the task force has not yet determined how to deal with the issue.
2. The second recommendation relating to a procedure for conflicts when there are conflicts between a registrar's or registry's legal obligations under local privacy laws and their contractual obligations to ICANN had fairly broad support from the task force. The ICANN staff reviewed the recommendations and staff expressed their concerns. The task force has requested dialogue with Senior staff on the policy and legal side, but has not yet been able to schedule a meeting with relevant staff.
3. Tiered access - not much work has been undertaken. The task force intends to have outside experts present on implementation aspects of tiered access.

Bruce Tonkin proposed working closely with the GNSO Policy Officer to develop a single document combining Whois task forces 1, 2 1/2 and 3 discussions.
This document would incorporate the material required in a task force report as defined in the bylaws, such as the constituency statements, current recommendations, and degree of support for the recommendations (including where necessary a summary of majority and minority positions). It would also include a summary of documentation on the Whois issues using documents already prepared over several years, and identify which aspects of the WHOIS issues fit into the mission of ICANN.


Bruce Tonkin proposed that the combined WHOIS task forces meet as a group fairly regularly in the period prior to the Mar del Plata meetings to focus on the Whois issue working from one document and documenting the levels of agreement.

Item 5: Election for ICANN Board seat #14 (currently held by Michael Palage)
- the GNSO Council must affirm the vote of Board Seat #14 no later than 5 May 2005
- the elected Board member takes up seat #14 on 5 June 2005
- Proposed process: -
-- Call for nominations: Friday 11 March 2005 Call to be sent out on Council list. (only Council members, based on consultation with their constituencies, can nominate)
-- End of nominations: Friday 25 March 2005
-- hold election in person at the GNSO Council meeting in Mar del Plata, 6 April 2005 (note a majority of the Council votes must be in favour of the successful candidate
- this may require multiple rounds of voting)

The Council discussions indicated that a separate election process by email vote would be preferable, and to accelerate the nomination period to allow sufficient time for an email vote prior to the Mar Del Plata meeting.

Bruce Tonkin seconded by Maureen Cubberley proposed:
- that Council agree to start the nomination period earlier
- then conduct an e-mail vote
- ratifying the e-mail vote at the Mar del Plata meeting

The motion was carried unanimously by voice vote

Decision 2:
- that Council agree to start the nomination period earlier
- then conduct an e-mail vote
- ratifying the e-mail vote at the Mar del Plata meeting

Action Item: Errors on the website relating to the term of office for Alejandro Pisanty and Michael Palage be rectified by the secretariat.

Item 6: Report from ICANN staff on current complaints raised by Internet users and registrants

Kurt Pritz reported that after the 3 months of the transfer policy a draft report is being prepared stating the registrant, registrar and registry experiences.

The focus of the report:

1. Authentification and verification methods - their success
The transfer policy - complaints
- Failure in making transfers because registrars were locking all names and it was difficult to unlock them
- Opportunity of fraud, theft and hijacking of names - one real circumstance and 2 unsubstantiated cases

2. Dispute resolution process
- procedure that was required by the registries in case there was a dispute whether a transfer should be made or not.
In the first 3 months there was only one instance where it was invoked, instead what appeared was that ICANN staff worked regularly on addressing registrant complaints on the transfer process.
Most complaints were that the registrant wanted to transfer and could not because the name was locked.
The purpose behind the dispute resolution process and the fee associated with it was that the fees would inflict some amount of pain for those not complying with the transfer process and it was a self policing mechanism. The fact that ICANN staff was doing the dispute resolution worked around the fee. A topic to be addressed at a later stage to examine whether the Dispute resolution process could be made more affective.

3. Undo mechanism
The registries were required to implement an undo mechanism to assure that unauthorized transfers could be reversed. This appeared to be effective, the only complaints were about timeliness. and this would be the subject of further study.

Statistics

Analyzing a sample of the comments and emails concerning the Transfer Policy:

Over half complaints state that transfers should be easier to make than the new transfer policy allows.

Between a third and 40% of the comments to date complain that losing registrars lock domain names so that they cannot be transferred or resellers use some other form of nacking the transfer.

Approximately 10 % commented that the whole process should be faster.

Less prevalent complaint was the quality of the Whois data, especially at the reseller level interfered with transfers. Correction to the Whois data would help the process itself.

Approximately 18% suggested altering the form of authorization to make it more effective.

The other (smaller percentage of) comments included different sorts of suggestions, for example: adding additional lock identifications, types of authorization, and the fact that the forms of authorization are screened by some spam filters.

Approximately 18 % comments said the transfer policy might increase susceptibility to name theft.

The Transfer Policy three-month review report will be released shortly. These statistics may change somewhat based upon a more complete review of information.

Item 7: Update from ICANN staff on new appointments, and plans for issues report on re-registration of recently deleted names
Paul Verhoef introduced Maria Farrell the new GNSO Policy Officer who started on February 7, 2005 and reported that Olaf Nortling, a Swedish citizen would start on March1 2005. Both would be based at the Brussels office.
Maria Farrell introduced herself saying that she had come to ICANN from the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris. Her background was policy development on Internet related issues with different constituencies over the last few years.

Item 8: Any other business:

a. Amsterdam discussion.

Bruce Tonkin stated that during the last meeting, January 13, 2005 a budget was approved, in the mean time money had been spent and a copy of the invoice had been sent to all Council members thus the council should formally approve the expenditure of those funds.

Bruce Tonkin, seconded by Ken Stubbs proposed:
that the GNSO Council approves the payment of invoices for the amount of 5131 Euros in accordance with the invoice as presented to Council members and that those funds will be dispersed from the DNSO/GNSO Funds account.

Formal nominative vote:
24 votes in favour 2 votes absent (Kiyoshi Tsuru, Lucy Nichols)

Motion carried.

Decision 3
The GNSO Council approves the payment of invoices for the amount of 5131 Euros in accordance with the invoice as presented to Council members and those funds will be dispersed from the DNSO/GNSO Funds account

b. The Mar del Plata meeting schedule
Marilyn Cade expressed concern about the naming of Constituency day and concern that the schedule change on the website caused inconvenience in personal traveling schedules.

Bruce Tonkin proposed planning
- a joint WHOIS task force / GNSO Council meeting and a GNSO Public Forum in Mar del Plata where comments would be invited from the public.
- 3 April - GNSO Council and GAC meeting on Sunday morning with a paper prepared on both sides
- 3 April - Sunday afternoon GNSO Council meeting for operational planning session with GNSO Policy staff
- 4 April - Monday morning GNSO Council Breakfast
- 4 April - Monday meeting with constituencies
- 5 April - Tuesday morning Whois joint task force meeting with Council
- 5 April -Tuesday afternoon Deleted Names issue
- 5 April -Tuesday WSIS

Bruce Tonkin suggested continuing the discussion the Mar Del Plata planning on the Council list.

c. Cary Karp commented on an issue that has been discussed in the community regarding possible security problems with IDN domain names that look similar to a typical user. He reported that the registry constituency had prepared a statement explaining how the registry operators have addressed the issue and this statement would be made known to the Council

d. Alick Wilson raised the question of the vacancy on the Nominating Committee.
Bruce Tonkin proposed contacting John Jeffrey on the issue
Alick Wilson proposed that the candidates should make a statement about themselves and the position that they wished to take

e. Thomas Roessler announced that he would be leaving the Council as he would be replaced by the newly appointed ALAC representative by the next Council meeting.
Bruce Tonkin, on behalf of the Council, thanked him for his contributions.

Bruce Tonkin declared the GNSO meeting closed and thanked everybody for participating.
The meeting ended: 21:10 UTC.

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