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

["Dominik Filipp" <dominik.filipp@xxxxxxxx>]

Roberto,

first, thank you for your constructive input out here. Wish all posts from the council members were like that, we could have got much further with the issues.

As regards the .com and other agreements, I can't bring more new ideas on top of what's already been presented here. I, especially, agree with Ted's and Karl's distinctly formulated thoughts on the topic.
I'm not sure what you've thought of when talking about the 'common GNSO consesus not reached'. If GNSO was expected to deliver an official statement on this in Sao Paulo, and it didn't then, yes, it is a GNSO's fault. I doubt it would have influenced the result of the voting, particularly, when unanimous consesus was reached, but this shouldn't happen anyway.

A short note, the thesis that .com agreement was approved, take it, sounds fine. The only problem is we soon might be facing serious problems and will spend long time by fixing the agreement flaws somewhat indirectly. The tricky section about commercial use of traffic data in connection to domain tasting speaks for all. And, as Danny writes, all that could have been avoided if only the board was more willing to listen.

As regards the tasting, I appreciate ALAC's effort and the speech in Sao Paulo. I only hope the ALAC's enthusiasm will continue further. And I would also like to see the issue officially opened.

Regards

Dominik


-----Original Message-----
From: Roberto Gaetano [mailto:roberto@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 12:40 AM
To: Dominik Filipp; 'Veni Markovski'; 'icann board address'
Cc: 'General Assembly of the DNSO'
Subject: RE: [ga] ICANN Board unanimously approves .biz/.info/.org registry agreements by 13-0

Dominik,

On the main subject, I was not a voting member at that time, although I have followed closely all the debate, within ALAC and within the Board. Based on this, I can tell you why I would most probably vote in favour of the agreements if we had the vote now.
It all started with the .com agreement. It has been a serious debate, and at the end the call was close. Anyway, it was approved, and it is now part of the landscape.

You might disagree, but one of the guiding factors for the Board is uniformity of treatment for all participants. The famous "level playing field". The moment that one specific operator has clauses that other competing operators don't have, we have a problem. The GNSO attacked the problem by trying to define a set of policy rules, and asked the Board to defer decision allowing debate in Sao Paulo. The Board postponed approval, initially scheduled at the November teleconference, therefore accepting the request of the Name Council.

In Sao Paulo, from my observation point, two things could have happened:
either the GNSO was close to a consensus recommendation, suggesting therefore the Board to wait more and propose modified clauses for the contracts that could come from the GNSO (at the same time planning to amend all other contracts when coming up for renewal), or the GNSO was still far from reaching consensus, and in that case there was very little justification for not providing to other registry operators clauses similar to the ones in the .com agreement.

The second case happened.


On the other issue raised, the 90%, 95%, or 99%, or whatever % of the comments being against, one cannot just count the for and against, and consider the total: what ICANN requested were comments, not a referendum.
So, IMHO, ICANN needed to evaluate the motivation for the ÿes"or "no", and identify the factors for agreement or disagreement.
I confess that I did not read the comments one by one, but from the summary I read it seemed to me that the two factors that were originating the protest were the raising of the price cap and (to a lesser extent) the renewal presumption.

To my reading, it was obvious that consumers would be against any raise in price, even if only potential. Having joined this circus when the cost was $35, my instinctive reaction was to calculate how many years of consecutive raise it will take to get back to the 1998 prices. I don't want to underestimate the importance of price, but I thought that one point was missing, that was IMHO even more important than the rise of the price cap:
the levelling of the field, to allow all competitors to play by the same, or at least extensively similar, rules. This would, still IMHO, bring benefits to the consumers.

You might argue that my analysis is faulty: fine with me, what I wanted to do was not to convince you, but to explain how I would vote should the item be re-voted today, and why.


The last point is the domain tasting. It is incorrect that it has been on ICANN's radar screen only in Sao Paulo. The matter has been debated extensively, but the point is that the Board did not feel to take action in absence of a complaint by who was perceived to be the suffering part, i.e.
the registry that had a lot of traffic and DB operations for little or no benefit.
It was ALAC, in spite of the claimed uselessness ;>), who brought the problem up from a different point of view, the damage to the registrants and users of the system.
Incidentally, there was a panel already in Marrakesh on Domain Name Tasting, I participated representing ALAC.

Regards,
Roberto