Participants: F Seye Silla, H Diakite, M El Bashir, B Schombe
Staff: F Teboul, N Ashton-Hart, M Langenegger
Minutes taken by the ICANN staff in the first instance.
The meeting was called to order at 1310 UTC.
F Seye Silla was elected chair for this meeting.
Update on current areas on Policy Developments ( ICANN Staff :Nick Ashton Hart )
The Staff gave an update on current Policy Developments activities.
The Staff noted that the ICANN Budget and Operating plan are prepared and will be commented on and adopted in Paris. There will be French and Spanish versions of the draft Budget, which will be distributed to the ALAC for comment. The first draft is expected to be up on 16 May. All proposals put forward by the community were included in the first draft spreadsheet that was prepared by staff.
The consultation period for the GNSO improvement document has ended and the ALAC chair put forward a statement to the ICANN Board which contains the views held within
At-Large.
The Staff noted that another statement that was sent to the ICANN Board concerned ICANN’s travel policy for volunteers. The consultation for the travel policy ended on 24 April. We are still far from having a final travel policy for all of ICANN. However, Doug Brent, the COO of ICANN could get a feel for the views held within the various constituencies. Perhaps a travel policy is ready for the Cairo meeting. There is no statement from ICANN’s senior management regarding a deadline for that at the moment.
Both statements will be translated into French and Spanish.
The GNSO has approved by a super majority a way forward on the Domain Tasting issue. This is a real success for At-Large as this represents the first time that an advisory committee used its ability to request an issues report in the GNSO to drive a policy debate forward. The GNSO has not suggested eliminating the five-day add-grace period altogether but has come up with a number of initiatives to reduce the abuses.
There is currently a working group on WHOIS-services in the GNSO and it has three representatives from At-Large (W Seltzer, D Younger, B Brendler). The goal of this working group is to explore the possibility of conducting factual studies that could help to induce a new dynamic on the WHOIS issue. There is currently an impasse in the WHOIS discussion between those who favour privacy and those who stress security issues.
The Staff then went on to inform the participants that Fast flux hosting was another issue that was gaining interest. Fast Flux hosting basically refers to a practice used by criminal gangs which abuses the possibility to frequently update host record information in such a way that it is impossible to determine the actual location of a host that engages in criminal activities such as Phishing and Pharming. The host records are updated as frequently as once every minute.
Double flux is a similar practice, which updates the name server recorded for a domain. The SSCA published a very accessible articles about these topics and it is currently discussed whether they will be translated into Spanish and French.
The SSAC is currently inquiring on the possibility to regularly translate their report in French and Spanish. The GNSO decided to do a study of the issue. This brings up the larger question of what ICANN’s role will be in the future if the DNS system is used for fraudulent activities. Is it within ICANN’s scope or is it a law-enforcement issue?
Domain space front-running continues to be a hot topic. It describes the practice by which a registrar reserves a domain name whenever a potential registrant searches for the availability of a domain name on its website. The argument put forward by registrars is that this protects consumers from losing the domain name to someone else. Some members of the community dispute the significance of this argument.
The Staff noted that the ALAC has asked the new gTLD policy working group to conclude work on a new gTLD policy in time to be discussed at the Paris meeting. There was a draft statement in November but it was not finalized. A member of ICANN staff will brief the members of the Working Group on the issue. There were nineteen recommendations submitted by the GNSO and the Board sent five of the proposals back to the GNSO to revise the feasibility of the implementation of these proposals.
Africa input on current policies
F Seye Silla asked the participants about their involvement in recent policy developments.
M El Bashir noted that he was a member of the GNSO improvement report. Furthermore, he was active regarding IDNs. He noted that IDNs was not a hot issue in Africa. He noted, however, that Arabic IDNs are frequently debated in the northern African Arab-speaking countries.
H Diakite asked about languages other than Arab that was being discussed. M El Bashir noted there is currently no other African language being discussed besides Arab as most other African languages use the ASCI script keyboard, which is not part of the fast-track implementation process.
Budget
F Seye Silla noted that at the F&B Subcommittee is was discussed during the last F&B Subcommitee to have regional meeting with invited regional liaisons from other RALOs who would then report back to their region.
B Schombe supported this idea.
The Staff noted that the travel budget is currently under review and that there is a strong likelihood that At-Large’s travel budget will be reduced to match the travel budgets of the other ICANN constituencies.
Communications & collaboration tools for Africa
M El Bashir noted that he thought the monthly teleconference was a good start and that he wished for stronger African participation in the working groups. He suggested to identifying participants from the region to be involved in the working groups.
The Chair suggested involving more people on the AFRALO mailing list as it is currently mostly the regional ALAC representatives who participate.
It was noted that the Secretariat should be more involved in the activities of AFRALO.
The Chair suggested having a person who encourages the participation in the region. F Teboul from the Staff will be involved in this effort.
H Diakite suggested having more communication via text messaging since email is not always a useful tool in the region due to connectivity problems.
The Staff will inquire this subject and find out about sending out news alerts and other announcements via text messaging.
Updates from Afri-ALSes on their activities
M El Bashir suggested reaching out to the community and giving a presentation on ALSes at the Moroccan AfriNIC Meeting.
M El Bashir will contact AfriNIC to inquire about the possibility to make a presentation on ALSes at the Morrocan AfriNIC meeting.
It was decided that the monthly AFRALO teleconference would be on the first Wednesday of each month at 1300 UTC.
The next AFRALO teleconference will be on 4 June at 1300 UTC.
The meeting was adjourned at 1444 UTC.
