The APAC Space was held on 8 November during ICANN57, Hyderabad. More than 80 people participated in this face-to-face meeting. The participants continued discussion on encouraging APAC participation in ICANN by focusing on Work Track 1 (WT1) of the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures Policy Development Process (PDP).
Welcome Remarks and Self-Introduction by Community
The meeting welcomed the following APAC community members who were recently appointed to ICANN leadership positions in ICANN57:
- Akinori Maemura, Japan, ICANN Board member elected by the Address Supporting Organisation (ASO; succeeding Kuo-Wei Wu)
- Guo Feng, China, GAC Vice-Chair (succeeding Thailand's GAC representative Wanawit Ahkuputra)
The meeting congratulated Izumi Okutani, JPNIC, for receiving the ICANN Leadership Award.
The meeting also thanked Kuo-Wei for his contributions as a Board member.
Current Status of New Subsequent Procedures PDP – Work Track 1
Steve Chan, Senior Policy Manager, ICANN, introduced the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP relating to the PDP's timeline, scope. He also updated on the issues discussed particularly in ICANN57 Working Group (WG) sessions. Effort has been made for more people in the APAC time zone to participate in the WG discussions.
Christa Taylor and Sara Bockey (WT1 co-group leads) were invited to the session to share their updates on WT1 progress and take questions from the APAC community. Out of ten discussion topics, WT1 is currently discussing the first two on Accreditation Programs and Applicant Support. They also briefly introduced the overarching issues in the two discussion topics, such as registry service provider accreditation, limited utilization of applicant support program, and applicant guidebook.
Community Discussion
Edmon Chung, CEO, DotAsia, led the subsequent community discussion and Q&A. The salient points of discussion are:
- The analysis from the New gTLD Program and Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice (CCT) Reviews are used to determine how effective the new gTLD program was in the current round – whether it was successful, and what challenges there were. On behalf of the CCT Review Team, AM Global issued a report on interviews conducted for the New gTLD applications. The various CCT Review surveys and reports can be found at: https://community.icann.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=56135383
- Need for greater outreach on Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) program. APAC community could work together to bring awareness on providing applicant support to IDNs and not limit the applicant support criteria to the previous round.
- On outreach to under-served economies on new gTLDs, a community member highlighted that with market competition, general Internet users would gravitate to domain names that are freely available. The community should consider what the cost and value would be in having registry operators from under-served economies.
- On general capacity building and newcomer programmes, a community member suggested better classifying such programmes for beginners to build leadership and language capacity in an accessible location. For instance, there could be dedicated webpages to programmes such as NextGen@ICANN and ICANN Fellowship.
- The meeting noted that the discussions on PDP and the various work tracks are recorded and readily available. This would be useful for the PDP members, who are relatively new, as well as other interested community members. To prepare for participation in the WG, please refer to the final issue report outlining the discussion topics.
- To sign up for the WG, please email the GNSO Secretariat at gnso-secs@icann.org.
General Discussion on Promoting Diversity in GNSO
Pam Little, Zodiac Holdings, provided background to the issue of promoting cultural diversity in GNSO. She noted that APAC Space had previously provided a comment to ICANN, with regard to the Independent Examiner final report of their review of the GNSO. The comment supported, and asked to prioritise Recommendation 32 of the GNSO Review as ICANN currently only measures geographic diversity. [Recommendation 32 states: That ICANN define “cultural diversity” and that relevant metrics (encompassing geographic, gender, age group and cultural, possibly by using birth language) be monitored and published.]
The Independent Examiner report also stated that geographic diversity was not a proxy for cultural diversity.
However, due to the difficulties in defining and measuring cultural diversity, the Board decided not to implement Recommendation 32 as it was too broad for only the GNSO to implement.
Mary Wong, Senior Policy Director, ICANN, clarified that for future Cross-Community Working Groups, a set of uniform principles (for both ccNSO and GNSO) have been set to consider diversity in future WG memberships. In addition, the Cross-Community Working Group (CCWG)-Accountability Work Stream 2 (WS2) will study improvements to diversity as part of its main work.
To sign up for the CCWG-Accountability WS2 on Diversity, please contact acct-staff@icann.org.
AOB
Paul Wilson, APNIC, promoted the upcoming Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF). As the original host au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA), Australia, had withdrawn the host offer, he invited interested parties to submit their bids to host the 2017 APrIGF.
The APAC Space presentation and session recording can be found at: https://icann572016.sched.org/event/8czw/apac-space.
