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12 May 2005 Proposed agenda and related documents List of attendees: 15 Council Members ICANN Staff GNSO Council Liaisons Michael Palage - ICANN Board member Invited guest Quorum present at 14:07 CET. Bruce Tonkin chaired this teleconference. Item 1: Approval of the Agenda Agenda approved Item 2: Approval of the Ken Stubbs moved the adoption of the minutes of 6 April 2005 Decision 1: The minutes of 6 April 2005 were adopted Item 2: Update on ICANN strategic and operational planning process Bruce Tonkin proposed discussing the process for coordinating between the GNSO council and the ICANN staff. Paul Verhoef reported work on a number of activities: Marilyn Cade suggested that a discussion on how the staff and council collaborated on generating the work topics, refinements or any additions. Item 3: Process for use by ICANN in considering requests for consent and Bruce Tonkin reported that he had revised the preliminary report on the Process for use by ICANN in considering requests for consent and related contractual amendments to allow changes in the architecture Bruce Tonkin proposed a procedural motion: The Council unanimously agreed. Decision 2. If there were no substantial comments from the consultation process within the GNSO constituencies on the revised preliminary report on the Process for use by ICANN in considering requests for consent and related contractual amendments to allow changes in the architecture operation of a gTLD registry, within 14 days, it will be published for public comment, for a period of 20 days as specified in the policy development process. Item 4: Approval of new terms of reference for combined WHOIS task Bruce Tonkin referred to the new draft terms of reference for the combined Whois task force and mentioned that Ross Rader and Robin Gross had provided feedback. "(2) The task force requests that the council clearly indicate whether policy development should continue in each of the areas in which the task force currently has work items. In the event that the council directs the task force not to continue to develop policy in one or more areas, we request that the council make appropriate provisions to conclude work and make necessary factual reports to council." Jordyn Buchanan who joined the call, added the topic of accuracy. Brett Fausett and Robin Gross supported Ross Rader . Nicklas Lagergren disagreed with moving accuracy aside because only one meeting had taken place since the December meeting in Cape Town and the Mar del Plata meeting in April as did Tony Harris who questioned what tiered access would be provided to if there was no accurate data. Bruce Tonkin stressed that it was important to look at the overall solution that addressed the terms of reference, what was the purpose of the Whois, how could its effectiveness be improved and both access issues and accuracy of information needed consideration. Council had to finalize the terms of reference and the combined task force 1/2/3 was required to do the work specified in those terms of reference. Item 5: Transfer policy report Bruce Tonkin introduced the topic stating that the 6 monthly review was due and asked council to consider issues and questions that the ICANN staff should examine in the 6 monthly review and how they should be handled. The gTLD registry constituency suggested setting up an operational working group to consider the experience gained so far and determine whether any changes should be recommended which might lead to commencing a policy development process. Ross Rader volunteered to lead the working group and ICANN staff were willing to give assistance. Bruce Tonkin proposed a procedural motion: The council unanimously agreed. Decision 3:To form a working group with a representative group of volunteers from the GNSO to review the staff Transfers report in order to seek clarification, further information and provide guidance for the 6 month review and to report back to the Council at its meeting on June 2, 2005. Item 6: new gTLDs Olof Nordling gave a summary of the current work saying that the strategy: Introduction of new top level domains was posted and the current phase was implementation. Olof Nordling committed to producing a paper that briefly identified issues for the next Council meeting on June 2, 2005. Item 7: Internationalized Domain Names Bruce Tonkin commented that Internationalized Domain Names were brought up by one of the liaisons to the ICANN Board in Mar del Plata, John Klensen representing the IETF. Item 8: Planning for ICANN Luxembourg meeting Marilyn Cade was appointed as the GNSO Council liaison with ICANN planning staff for the Luxembourg meeting. Item 9: Any other business Marilyn Cade emphasized that it was a council discussion and not a decision, and encouraged all council members to make comments, regardless of a relationship with any of the bidders, stating that when regulatory agencies engage in anti-trust investigations in general, at times of mergers or acquisitions, they invited the opinion of affected parties including competitors to the companies planning to merge. In disclosure statements Ross Rader stated that Tucows had a contracting relationship with one of the bidders and Ken Stubbs stated that he was a director of Afilias, one of bidders on the .net re delegation. Grant Forsyth spoke to Philip Sheppard's posting to the dot net re-delegation public comments. " The previous recommendation of council was that the major term of relative difference between bidding parties was competition. The Telcordia report appears to have interpreted it as competition between registrars in the registrar market as opposed to competition in the registry market. It should be noted that there is a major disconnect between the recommendations in Council's report and its implementation in the evaluation of the RFP and suggest this has led to the outcome that has resulted. Note that Telcordia in its report states that while it was left to determine the specific evaluation criteria, the criteria that it developed was signed off by ICANN. The Business constituency representatives feel that because of this disconnect between the intent of the GNSO Council's recommendation and its interpretation in the evaluation of the bid, if the ICANN Board is not of a mind to revert to the original policy intent, then Phillip Sheppard has made useful suggestions in his posting as to how the policy intent of competition can be remediated to a certain extent through suggestions that would have to be applied to the successful bidder. " Ken Stubbs in an individual capacity, not representing the views of the registry constituency, commented that a significant majority of the proposals presented to ICANN reflected concerns consistent with Philip Sheppard's comments. Alick Wilson agreed with the concerns raised by Philip Sheppard and took the position that ICANN should foster competition. Clearly the criteria that had been applied in the Telcordia report had discounted the competitive aspect to an unacceptable level. Philip Sheppard had proposed a mitigation should the Board go ahead and re-award dot net to Verisign. Alick Wilson questioned whether the mitigation Philip Sheppard proposed was sufficient and suggested that there should be a review of the criteria applied against the GNSO Council report as it appeared that the Telecordia assessment of did not address the issue of the weightings which should themselves should be looked into. Bruce Tonkin declared the GNSO meeting closed and thanked everybody for participating.
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