RE: [ga] ICANN Board unanimously approves .biz/.info/.org registry agreements by 13-0

[Danny Younger <dannyyounger@xxxxxxxxx>]

Roberto,

I am sure that you will recall this language:  "The NC
is responsible for ensuring that the Board is informed
of any significant implementation or operational
concerns expressed by any responsible party."

Just as the NC was tasked with this set of
obligations, so too do is the ICANN Staff tasked with
the obligation to relay significant
operational/implementational concerns to the Board
that have been expressed by members of the public
through the public comment process (all the moreso if
Staff has taken it upon themselves to draft a summary
of such comments for Board review).

I am very concerned that the brevity of ICANN Staff
summaries has failed to do justice to significant
comments that were tendered in the expectation of
actually being read by members of the ICANN Board.

Specifically, I cite this comment put forward by the
Intellectual Property Constituency submitted for
consideration on 28 August:

"The practice of ?domain tasting? has attracted
considerable attention and controversy in
recent months and was one of the topics explored at a
well-attended workshop at the ICANN
meeting in Marrakech last June. We note with some
concern that section 3.1(f) of the draft
agreements would allow registry operators, without any
scrutiny or review whatsoever, to
provide a commercial service to identify ?pre-tasted?
domain names ? those non-existent names
within an particular gTLD that have attracted the most
traffic during the preceding weeks or
months. Without pre-judging the merits of such a
service or its potential impact on
cybersquatting, trademark infringement, and other
adverse consequences that have already been
observed to result from the ?domain tasting?
phenomenon, IPC is confident that such a service
would at the very least merit some review under the
new registry services procedure. Under the
draft agreements it would apparently receive none.
This is a significant flaw."

According to Sao Paolo transcripts, the Board relied
heavily upon the Staff summary (that in my view failed
to properly report the above-mentioned concerns).   As
such, the Board may well have acted without full
knowledge of the breadth and scope of the issues that
were iterated in the public comments.

This is problematic, because the lack of Board-level
transparency makes it impossible for us to know
whether the concerns of the IPC and others received a
fair hearing from members of the Board, or if instead
they were, for all practical purposes, lost within the
brevity of the Staff summary that failed to fully
detail the operational/implementational concerns that
were clearly raised by the community.

My assessment is that a fair hearing of all these
concerns did not happen.   The Board relied a upon a
poorly drafted Staff summary that on the topic of
traffic data merely pointed to concerns over personal
identifying information and ignored the IPC concerns
-- this then led to the Board believing that a "new
restriction on the use of traffic data" dealing with
personal identifiers was sufficient.  It was not. 

Concerns raised have not been addressed, and they
remain unaddressed.  

The revised contract language is still deficient and
you can bet that traffic data related problems will
soon emerge.

My advice:  don't rely upon the Staff to provide 
summaries.  Do the due diligence and and in the future
read every comment even if it takes a long time(you
can be sure that most active participants on the GA
list did read every comment).

regards,
Danny





 
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