NARALO SUMMARY MINUTES: 09 MAY 2011
Participants: Beau Brendler, Darlene Thompson, Allan Skuce, Seth Reiss, Eric Brunner-Williams, Gordon Chillcott, Olivier Crepin-Leblond, Myles Braithwaite, Joly MacFie, Evan Leibovitch, Alan Greenburg, Danny Younger
Apologies:
Staff: Seth Greene
Standing Issues
1. Roll Call (Staff, 5 min)
2. Review of summary minutes and action items from 11 April 2011 (Beau, 5 min)
a) Beau to draft and circulate potential language for Rules of Procedure regarding ALS participation requirements. (See agenda item below.)
We will leave participation requirement for unaffiliated members to unaffiliated members. Beau has yet to draft his language.
b) Alan to draft and circulate potential language for Rules of Procedure putting same restriction(s) on Chair and Secretariat regarding working for contracted parties. (See agenda item below.)
Still to be done
3. Open Public Consultations (Beau, etc.; 10 min)
- ALAC Statement on the WHOIS Review Team
- ALAC Statement on the Stability, Security and Resilience of the DNS Review Team
Eric is on the DNS Review Team. There will be a related call coming up soon. The time has already expired to submit comments to the above ALAC Statement. If it hasn’t Eric will look into it.
See At-Large Policy Advice Development Schedule
See At-Large Policy Development wiki page
- ALAC Statement on Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Working Group Proposed Final Report
- ALAC Statement on the Proposed Framework for the FY12 Operating Plan and Budget Evan: There was a community meeting on this last week and staff and the CFO were asking for more information on each item. No promises were made as to the approval of any line items. Alan: He thought that the call was useful, productive but discouraging because there is no corporate memory. Each region asked for regional meetings but one region’s costs were six times higher than the others and this was not discussed. Most found the whole exercise to be rather discouraging.
- ALAC Statement on the Draft Proposal for the Study of Issues Related to the Delegation of IDN Variant TLDs
- ALAC Statement on the Inter Registrar Transfer Policy Part B Working Group Proposed Final Report
- Draft Response to 2011 GAC gTLD Scorecard
- ALAC Statement on Proposed PDP Policy
- ALAC Response to NTIA Notice of Inquiry
- ALAC Statement on the Proposed Recommendation for a Global Outreach Program
Proposed Agenda Items
4. JAS WG’s Second Milestone Report – Call for comments from At-Large (Evan, 10 min)
- Deadline: Monday, 9 May, 22:59 UTC
Evan: In a compacted time frame a very small group has been working very hard to bring together a very diverse set of ideas brought forward to that WG. There were both organizational challenges and weighty issues that needed to be continued with a revolving door of participation. Please read the report below and give your input thereto. At least we will be able to put this forward to the Board and the GAC that there are people working on this.
Alan: The fact that we are putting this to the Board has raised the ire of the GNSO. They would have preferred that they be able to review it before it gets put to the board. We don’t really have time to do this so we will be putting it to the board for Singapore. The ALAC needs to look at the report in a critical fashion so that they can tweak or add to it. We need to do this or we will have a credibility issue.
Eric: He is indifferent to what the GNSO does. We need to re-read what was written as ALAC rather than JAS group interests. It is difficult to define public interest when individual interests seem to be being brought forward – this has been a real challenge.
Evan: There are many determined people that have really moved this forward but they have been few.
Danny: Where is the money from to support these new applicants?
Evan: Have ICANN reduce its cost of entry while sticking with its costs of recovery. Some people believe that lowering the prices for one group and increasing it for others is fine – others do not. One other model is to create a foundation that will have a pool of money, initially seeded from ICANN but receiving funding from other sources to offset costs.
Olivier: We need comments ASAP. We need to get that report to the Board tonight. This is to catch their meeting on May 21 & 22. If we do not do this, it will not be considered for the Singapore meeting. We could extend this comment period until the end of the week so that we can send another e-mail with the comments. This will not go through the same length of staff time-line.
Alan: On pricing, there are several things to consider. On the actual costs that are charged out it comes to about 2/3 of the total cost. So, if ICANN has done its job right, the costs will go down for some and up for others. If the cost only goes down for a small number then it will be a very minor increase for others. The process must be self funding – not each applicant. The $185,000 doesn’t just go to pay current costs but to repay outstanding costs from before. There is no reason why this costs cannot be reduced from needy applicant’s costs. It will just mean that the reserve doesn’t get repaid quite as quickly. Also, if a registry fails, the costis much higher than the actual costs.
Eric: In a perfect system it would be possible that this would be a zero sum game; however, many of the costs are variable. So, we can’t assume that a decrease a cost for some will increase cost for others. ICANN must make this much more transparent.
Danny: If Alac submits remarks, ICANN could just kick this back to the GNSO where it will stagnate because of the contracted parties.
See wiki page for ALAC comments on JAS WG's Second Milestone Report
5. Identify priorities in coming months (Beau, 10 min)
- Policy priorities for coming trimester
- Review of ALS participation requirements
Eric: The .net contract will not expire until June. It could go on a month to month basis. There is 1/10 of the gTld market is up for renewal. In terms of competition policy perhaps .net can articulate that it is a public interest market.
Alan: The current contract gives them the presumption of the right to renew. He is not sure that there is a legal grounds to change that but is not sure.
Evan: This is how the bottom-up process needs to work. This must come from individuals and ALSs to the ALAC.
Joly: The right to renew must be taken out of the contract – can we campaign that this be removed?
Alan: We need to get more active grass-roots involvement in policy matters. We are continually getting new policy matters and we get very few volunteers and they are usually the same people.
Beau: Why do we keep seeing the same cast of characters on each group?
Alan: The learning curve is quite steep and maybe it is also a lack of recruitment.
Joly: Maybe we need to proactively make a list of ALSs with the resources and actively recruit them.
Beau: Can Eric’s statement to the list be re-written in a more accessible way on the .net issue? Then maybe we can recruit more people to this.
Olivier: He welcomes the idea of having grass-roots input to the ALAC processes and requirements from the people from the edges to answer open comments. The only problem he has the .net issue is that we are too close to the end of the comment period (tomorrow). If this was brought up two weeks ago, we might have had time to have actioned this.
Eric: About a month ago he sent an e-mail to the NA-DISCUSS and to the ALAC discussion groups but nothing was done about it.
Olivier: Usually the edges will notify the RALO and the RALO will bring it to the ALAC. It obviously didn’t happen this time and Olivier and Beau will work on this issue.
Beau to offer draft wording on ALS participation requirements.
See NARALO Rules of Procedure and other organizing documents
Alan to offer draft wording on restriction(s) on Chair and Secretariat re working for contracted parties.
See NARALO Rules of Procedure and other organizing documents
6. Any other business (Beau, 5 min)
Beau would like to alter this time slightly as he has to pick up his daughter at 3:45 every day so the time is problematic. He will take this to the list.
We will have a telephone conference one week before Singapore. If there is anything we need to discuss while in Singapore, then we need to brainstorm this then.
Oliver: Officially there has been no feedback from the Board or the GAC when they specifically asked for our input. The GAC did not have a proper secretariat in place so there may now be more movement from the GAC. Olivier will also go to Peter Dengate-Thrush to find out what they are doing on this.
