RE: [council] Question re. ICANN Annual Report

["Gomes, Chuck" <cgomes@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Kurt.  It seems to me that it might be helpful for your
clarifications to be made to the broader community.  If you agree with
that, would you like me to post my questions to the comment forum and/or
the blog so that you and Densise could respond in either or both of
those forums?

Chuck 

-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Pritz [mailto:pritz@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2007 9:58 PM
To: Gomes, Chuck
Cc: Council GNSO
Subject: Re: [council] Question re. ICANN Annual Report

Chuck and all:

If I may elaborate on Denise's email, "the establishment of new gTLD
program office" is shorthand for the implementation of new gTLD policy
currently being developed. After the policy development is completed,
the RFPs are written, application processes are fleshed out, fees are
calculated, pro forma agreements are posted, independent panels are
populated, and processes are in execution -- the program office will be
left  to "run" the TLD process on an ongoing basis, it is the entity
resulting from the close-out of the New gTLD Project. Having said that,
this does not imply the creation a big ol' program office: the word
'program' connotes the on-going nature of the entity (as opposed to
'project' which connotes an effort with a foreseeable end). The
allocation for the program office will be part of the public ICANN
operating planning and budgeting discussion.

Regarding the second issue, I think there is universal understanding
that the working group was launched for reasons described by the
posting: http://www.gnso.icann.org/announcements/
announcement-18nov06.htm. The writing in the Annual Plan you describe
predates the working group document - it is still a question that may be
considered by the working group as a subset of the issues described in
the working group posting.

Hope this is helpful.

Kurt


Kurt Pritz

ICANN
4676 Admiralty Way, #330
Marina del Rey. CA  90292

+1.310.301.5809 (office)
+1.310.400.4184 (mobile)



On Jan 28, 2007, at 7:14 AM, Gomes, Chuck wrote:

> The second sentence of the 5th paragraph of Paul Twomey's message in 
> ICANN's Annual Report (p.9) says, "GNSO and staff are working together

> for the establishment and operation of a new generic top level domain 
> (gTLD) program office, to realise the work of the Whois Task Force, 
> and to provide input in the development of Internationalised Domain 
> Names (IDNs)."
>
> Can anyone tell what is meant by a gTLD program office?  Has the GNSO 
> been working with staff in this regard?
>
> Also, on page 25 in the Policy Support section, the 4th paragraph 
> starts out with this sentence: "To consider pre-registration of IDN 
> gTLD labels in the first round for new TLDs, the GNSO recently 
> launched an IDN Working Group . . ."  Is this a misstatement or is it 
> true that the IDN working group was launched "to consider pre- 
> registration of IDN gTLD labels"?
>
> Chuck