[council] IOCRC

[Stéphane Van Gelder <Stephane.vangelder@xxxxxxxxx>]

Councillors,

I want to bring to your attention the current situation in the IOCRC Drafting 
Team.

On March 1, 2012, ICANN Staff sent a message to the IOCRC DT that is currently 
looking at ways to implement the June 20, 2011 Board resolution directing the 
GNSO Council to develop policy to permanently protect Olympic and Red Cross 
names at both the top and second level as part of the new gTLD program. The 
message contained suggestions "to assist the team in their work".

Members of the DT, including its Chair Jeff Neuman, reacted strongly to the 
comments from Staff. From the DT's mailing list, it can be seen that there is 
worry on several issues.

One major worry seems to be that in the context of a June 20, 2011 Board 
resolution that appeared to modify the GNSO PDP on new gTLDs with respect to 
the issue of Reserved Names, Staff suggest in their letter that the DT or the 
Council now should provide a rationale for why these names should be protected.

This is what I have been told by the DT Chair:

"The DT asked Staff to provide the rationale for the June 20, 2011 Board 
resolution from the outset, but Staff did not. In addition, there is no mention 
of the rationale behind the Board’s motion in the minutes from that meeting.  
Although there is some information about the IOC/RC issue in the Board Papers 
posted well after the meeting, the entire rationale for the motion is redacted 
as being privileged and confidential.

The DT is surprised to see Staff now ask it to provide this rationale instead.

 Even more surprising is that fact that without any consultation of the GNSO 
community, ICANN staff chose to implement the ICANN Board resolution in a 
manner unlike any other “reserved name” in the Applicant Guidebook.  The DT saw 
this as a flaw in the implementation of the resolution.  When it tried to 
provide a recommendation on fixing that perceived flaw, ICANN staff asked for a 
detailed rationale along with a lengthy 42 day public comment period.  The 
message sent by staff essentially is that no public consultation is necessary 
for ICANN staff’s unilateral discretion in implementation matters, but if 
anyone wants to change that implementation (even if flawed), that requires 
public consultation."

I see one of my main duties as Chair of this Council to be to defend the 
community-driven, consensus-based, bottom-up policy process that is at the 
foundation of ICANN, and the policies the GNSO produces.

The DT has expressed a clear worry that the original board motion coupled with 
the staff’s implementation of that message may be an instance where the policy 
process has been circumvented. I am not saying it has. But having been informed 
of this by the DT, I am taking that possibility seriously.

As such, I have asked Kurt Pritz, who sent the message from Staff to the IOCRC 
DT, to provide detailed answers to the questions asked, not by me, but by the 
DT members themselves. No answers have been provided yet, but we should of 
course all be mindful that we are in the run-up to an ICANN meeting and 
everyone's schedules are pretty hectic right now.

I am hopeful that answers will be provided soon.
As a group, we are stewards of the PDP in general and minders of policies that 
this Council has adopted in the past. As such, I wanted to make sure you were 
aware of the situation.

Stéphane