>>DAVID MAHER: Thank you, Jeff.
We had our regular Tuesday stakeholder group meeting here in this tent. Not exactly the best venue for discussion, but we still got through the agenda.
We started out with GNSO updates. We went through the council motions, the motions pending today before the council, including the PDP process, RAA, relationships with law enforcement, the UDRP. We moved to brief review of the Affirmation of Commitments review team in all of the three items -- accountability, transparency; the WHOIS; security, stability and resiliency.
We talked briefly about the WHOIS studies that are going on in the council. At 11:00 -- pardon me -- at 10:00 Kurt Pritz, John Jeffrey came to our meeting.
And we had a -- about an hour-long discussion of the new gTLD process developments, including the continuing operations instrument, the EBERO, and a extensive discussion of the IDN proceedings. One of our particular interests is the single letter IDN possibility. And we had an exchange with the ICANN staff about that status.
We brought up a question of the applicant guidebook, the fact that there have been suggestions for revisions and what is labeled the final version. There was a -- there have been comments about that. And we asked a status of those provisions. The answer seemed to be that we'll find out at some point.
We discussed -- we asked questions of ICANN staff about the cross-ownership inquiries that have been made to competition authorities. And then, finally, one of the things we learned is that Karla
Valente, who is one of our interim registry group representatives, will continue in that role until possibly new staff is hired.
We then moved to the stakeholder group business. We had a treasurer's report from Ken Stubbs. There were no proceedings to vote on. And, at that point, we broke for lunch and at 1:00 moved on to the new form of our meeting with the ICANN board.
I thought that that meeting from 1:00 to 2:00 was one of the best we've had. A good deal of interchange -- not a lot of questions from the board, but we had an opportunity to make the points that we thought were important, including cross-ownership, continuing operations, the JAS proposals, ethics issues, the question of amending ICANN's ethics roles, the revolving door issue.
There was a brief discussion of takedown issues, the relationships between registries, registrars, law enforcement. We made the point that we regard our relationships with law enforcement as very successful, very positive. To our knowledge, there's no friction. We're looking for better ways to cooperate.
At that point in our meeting with the board, Rod Beckstrom left the room. And we had a very candid discussion with the board about our thoughts on the selection of a new CEO. Following that board meeting, we came back here and discovered, to our -- not to our surprise, that the temperature had risen considerably. Notwithstanding, we had a very good presentation from Maguy Serad about ICANN contractual compliance issues, followed by a very thorough presentation from Adam Peake, Vanda Scartezini regarding the NomCom. And we urged NomCom to take into consideration a very interesting technical point that the NomCom representative, in effect, can become a tie breaker. So it's a very key appointment. And we had a lot of discussion of that.
Finally, Kathy Kleiman appeared and gave us a brief presentation about the status of the WHOIS review team, the Affirmation of Commitments review team. And we emphasized that -- we urged that team not to take on the role of developing policy, but rather to raise questions about policy.
And we concluded at about 4:30. Moved on to a joint meeting with the registrars stakeholder group. Fortunately, in an air-conditioned room. And had quite a number of topics for discussion with the registrars, the RRA, the new gTLDs, and the amending the bylaws of our -- or the charters of our respective groups so that we can make sure that we don't have people voting in two separate stakeholder groups or constituencies. Thank you.