Page History

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1.2) The GNSO Review Working Group (of which I am a member). The Board took notice of the release of a draft document being posted for subsequent discussion in San Juan. I already posted a detailed report and solicitation for comments on June 19, see here:

http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/pipermail/alac_atlarge-lists.icann.org/2007q2/001076.html^{Image Removed}

I am still awaiting any collective opinion by the Committee.

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Full minutes for the call can be found here:

http://www.icann.org/minutes/minutes-18jun07.htm^{Image Removed}

The Board then met again during the San Juan meeting. The main issues affecting the At Large on the agenda were:

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The proposal was first presented by staff to the Board on Sunday; it envisaged a negotiation process between staff and registrars, with a subsequent public comment period. I was immediately vocal against the proposal, as it would practically have excluded us and the general public from having any serious input into the negotiation. My initial proposal, which had been already exposed in Lisbon, was to set up a small working group consisting of staff, registrars, us and other interested parties, to work out a consensus on which changes were necessary, and other possible actions (for example, changes in the accreditation process, education programs, staff activities etc.) The initial reaction to my objection wasn't very warm, as people were concerned about not alienating the opening that registrars had been making in accepting to revise the RAA in certain sections.
In the workshop on Monday, the same proposal was presented, and I was again quite hard against it, clearly saying that it was unacceptable. This provoked irked reactions by some registrars from the floor.
Transcript here: http://sanjuan2007.icann.org/files/sanjuan/SanJuan-ProtectionOfRegistrants-25June07.txt^{Image Removed}

In any case, when the first draft of the resolution came up for discussion for the Board (always on the same lines), I tried to gather consensus among Directors for changing it into something better for us. Thus, the next draft of the process required that staff would hold a consultation with us and with the general public, which would gather input on what should be improved, not just about the RAA but also about related policies and processes. This would be used as input for the negotiation between staff and registrars; the resulting draft RAA would then be subject to comment by us and by the public before consideration by the Board.

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In the weeks leading to San Juan, I had expressed concerns about the possible disconnect between the different parts of such a complex project, and the apparent lack of a comprehensive program plan. Several Board members agreed, and staff was asked to present a "state of the art" in San Juan. I will not enter into details (our IDN liaison already posted reports), but the Board decided to take the following actions:

• It authorized the procedures to add experimental IDN TLDs in the root zone. These will be domains of the form ".test" in various scripts and languages, which will be used for tests only (no user registrations possible). Elaborate procedures have been created to allow for immediate interruption of the test, and removal of the entries, if anything bad happened; I can't imagine what could go wrong, but still, in theory, ICANN is legally not allowed to alter the root zone on the fly as it likes, so there was the need for policies to allow this for the test domains in case of an emergency.

• It received the list of questions on the possible introduction of ccTLD-like IDNs, that was elaborated jointly by the ccNSO and the GAC. This is seen as a possible shortcut to meet the enormous pressure for some IDN TLDs to be added asap, while letting the full policy making process for new TLDs to proceed at normal speed. The Board asked for answers to these questions (in the first draft of the resolution it only asked to the ccNSO and the GAC, but I made sure that the ALAC was explicitly added as one of the respondents). I recommend that the ALAC initiates as soon as possible the work to prepare and approve such answers.

• It encouraged further discussions on the few remaining technical issues, though it seems clear that it's not the technicalities that are slowing down the process.

2.4) Transition to IPv6

One Board member raised the issue - which is going to become quite hot - of the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, and specifically:
a) how to encourage the transition, which still is not really happening;
b) how to allocate the scarce remaining batches of IPv4 addresses.

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The full transcript of the Board meeting can be found here: http://sanjuan2007.icann.org/files/sanjuan/SanJuan-ICANNBoardMtg-29June07.txt^{Image Removed}

The text of the approved resolutions can be found here: http://www.icann.org/minutes/resolutions-29jun07.htm^{Image Removed}

Some other issues were discussed, outside of the agenda, during the private Board workshops or on the Board mailing list:

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