RE: [council] Registry Operators

["Rosette, Kristina" <krosette@xxxxxxx>]

Am I the only who is troubled by the fact that restricting membership in
the registrar and registry constituency to entities that are ICANN
contracted parties effectively gives ICANN control over which entities
are and are not members and the timing by which entities become eligible
for membership?  

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-council@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-council@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Bruce Tonkin
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 9:25 PM
To: Council GNSO
Subject: RE: [council] Registry Operators


Hello All,


> 
> 
> Agreed, it is an old, important issue that is still unresolved and 
> must be resolved before the GNSO restructure can take place.

It is certainly worth considering further.

Membership of the registry and registrar constituency has generally been
very clear - based on the legal entity being a contracted party with
ICANN as either a TLD manager or a gTLD registrar.  This information is
publicly available on the ICANN website.

There are other parties involved in the process of the domain name value
chain.

E.g

(1) Consultants - there are many consultants and lawyers that provide
services to the members of the registry and registrar constituency or
members of other constituencies - these consultants and lawyers can be
split across the business constituency and the IP constituency.

(2) Internet Service Providers - while some purely provide connectivity
- many of these companies have moved into value added services - and
many are significant suppliers of domain names (either as accredited
registrars, or as resellers of accredited registrars).

(3) Other domain name resellers - e.g portals (e.g Yahoo), software
companies (e.g Microsoft), search engines (e.g Google), web hosting
companies - there are wide range of domain name resellers.  Some of thee
are very large companies and supply large volumes (e.g over 100,000
names) of domain names to their customers.   At different times staff or
consultants/external lawyers of these companies have been members of
registrar, business constituency or IP constituency.

(4) Domainers - these companies operate a portfolio of domain names -
they often do not supply domain name registration services to other
parties - but may sell some of their domain name licences from
time-to-time.   They may be accredited registrars (usually to get the
lowest possible wholesale price for domains), or may simply be
resellers.  Where they are not registrars - it is not clear what
constituency that should be members of.  They would probably consider
themselves to be members of the business constituency - as they are
"business users" of domain names (earn revenue from advertising, or from
the future sale of the domain name licence), and not involved in
supplying domain name registration services to third parties.

For consultants or lawyers it is often complex as they may have some
customers/clients that are associated with the domain name supply
industry and some customers/clients that are not.

In many cases large companies have different departments (or legal
subsidiaries) - e.g a legal department, network connectivity department,
domains/hosting department -  and it can be convenient to have staff
members of different departments/subsidiaries to join different
constituencies (e.g Registrar, ISP constituency, IP constituency).

So do you make the decision on the basis of the corporate entity (could
be operating across multiple area of interest in the GNSO), or on the
basis of the individual (may work for a particular department of a
corporate, or may work for many clients).

Ultimately this will probably be hard to resolve.  Perhaps the best to
hope for is that members of constituencies clearly define their
potential conflicts of interest.   This could be at a corporate level
and at an individual level (e.g identify clients involved in different
constituencies if a consultant).   It would also be useful to require
this to happen at the beginning of establishing working groups (not as a
method of exclusion - but to clearly state potential conflicts).


The reality is that many members of the GNSO community can potentially
participate in multiple roles.   Trying to create very tight exclusion
rules (e.g you can be a member of constituency x - provided you have no
other relationship with any member of another constituency) may
unnecessarily restrict participation.

Regards,
Bruce Tonkin