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FINAL VERSION TO BE SUBMITTED IF RATIFIED

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FINAL DRAFT VERSION TO BE VOTED UPON BY THE ALAC

If ratified by the ALAC, the text below will be sent as a Correspondence to Cherine Chalaby, Chair of the ICANN Board's New gTLD Program Committee, with a copy to Steve Crocker, Chair of the ICANN Board. This is not a statement of the ALAC to the Board.

"The ALAC welcomes the Board's efforts to consult its community on metrics for evaluating the benefits of the current gTLD expansion program.

As the entity chartered within ICANN to represent the viewpoint of Internet end-users, the ALAC has an acute interest in this issue. It is important to us that the metrics address the evaluation needs of the global Internet end users and not be biased towards those of the domain industry.

Towards that end, a number of At-Large members participated in the GNSO Consumer Trust, Consumer Choice, and Competition Working Group and made valuable contributions to the process.  During the course of the work a number of metrics-related issues that were important to the At-Large were deemed by other members of the Working Group to be out of scope, too difficult to scope, or potentially embarrassing to new gTLD operators.  Despite the objections of the At-Large members, a last minute change demanded by domain industry representatives was asserted as consensus.

While we acknowledge that the final report of the Working Group provides metrics that are useful to a number of ICANN constituencies, we believe it to be significantly incomplete.  Implemented alone, we foresee that such efforts would not serve the needs of global Internet end users and could easily be dismissed as a mere public relations stunt on the part of ICANN.

As a response to address this imbalance in the proposed metrics, the ALAC is assembling a team to define a number of evaluation metrics that address matters of public trust in the new gTLD program as well as its effect on the broader domain namespace.  Amongst the issues that the team will consider in its proposed metrics are:

•     End-user confusion
•     Growth in use of both domain-based and non-domain-based alternatives for Internet resource access
•     Complaints to, and action taken by, police, regulatory agencies and advocacy groups
•     Transparency of contact information and domain-allocation policies for all gTLDs
•     Accuracy of new gTLD promotion to end users
•     Technical issues encountered (including application support)

The team will present the end-user-centric metrics for ALAC approval at the ICANN46 Meeting in Beijing, which will then be forwarded to the Board as ALAC Advice." final draft version to be voted upon by the ALAC will be placed here before the vote is to begin.

FIRST DRAFT SUBMITTED

The first draft submitted will be placed here before the call for comments begins.

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