At-Large Session Reports from ICANN78.

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

Saturday, 21 October 2023

09:00-10:00 CEST

10:30-12:00 CEST

Monday, 23 Oct 2023

16:30-17:30 CEST

In the first session, the EPDP Team took stock of the state of Consensus of the Phase 1 report. It was announced that the final report will be handed over to the GNSO Council in early Nov 2023.

For the rest of the two sessions, the team continued to examine the Phase 2 Charter Questions, revisiting the question of the definition of the source domain and variant domain set (which had to include variants at the top- and second-level labels). The meeting also discussed the question of defining the "entity" for the "same-entity" principle to apply, and also the question of transaction fees for registration and activation of variant domain names.

Sebastien Ducos, the GNSO Chair, attended the third session on Monday, and congratulated the EPDP team for the successful completion of the Phase 1 process. Later, the session continued discussions on the question of whether a fee was required for the activation/registration of variant labels.

While there are no At-Large-specific action items, the entire policy on IDN Variants has a strong end-user component.

Saturday, 21 October 2023 

10:30-12:00 CEST

What happened?

The At-Large proposal to Registrant access to Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy (“TDRP”) was put back to the working group.

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

Prepare At-Large input to the GNSO-TPR Phase 2 Public comment.

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

Since there seems not to be consensus in the WG to Registrant access to TDRP, At-Large must use the option to comment this in the Public Comment Phase for Phase 2.

Sunday, 

10:30-12:00 CEST

Hall Y 5-8 (ALAC)

Update on EPDP on IDNs:

The EPDP on IDNs develops policy for managing IDN Variants at the top (Phase 1) and second (Phase 2) levels.

The four major principles derived by the EPDP on IDNs Phase 1 work are (a) RZ-LGR as the sole source of variants; (b) The integrity of the variant set; (c) The Same Entity Principle; and (d) The principle of Conservatism. The EPDP Team’s work since ICANN77 included Processing the public comments from the Phase 1 Report, and working on the Charter Questions for Phase 2

While processing the public comments from the Phase 1 report, ALAC and RySG arrived at a consensus although they had started out with different positions on Rec 8.1, where ALAC urged caution in opening up too many variant labels, while RySG did not want any ceiling. Two specific points that were discussed in this context were: (a) Justifying the need for the number of variants gTLDs applied for; and (b) How the applicant plans to mitigate the potential risk of confusability to end-users, given the number of variants.

It was announced that as of early morning on 22 Oct 2023, the Phase 1 report achieved “full consensus” designation, indicating the successful closure of Phase 1. Since Phase 1 deals with the top level, it is important to note that the resolution of one of the dependencies of the new round of gTLDs has been achieved

The Phase 2 discussions were around how the principles were re-oriented for the second level. Specifically:

• At the second level, RZ-LGR is not used. Instead, a registry-level mechanism called IDN tables is used. In order to achieve uniformity, a further step called harmonization would be required
• There are discussions about whether harmonization should be registry-level or across registries for a given script(s)
• Also, the same-entity principle is applicable and the second level, but may work differently, as there are no mechanisms currently in place that make the identification of an “entity” feasible within or across registries
• The definition of the variant set may need to be expanded to include the second-level variants of all the top-level variants of the gTLDs
• Grandfathering would be required for some cases of existing/delegated gTLDs
• Examining how legal/contractual would change at the second level when variants are to be accommodated

In order to fast-track the work on Phase 2, a face-to-face meeting of the EPDP participants (subject to an attendance cut-off) is being planned in Kuala Lumpur in the first week of December.

At-Large Operations, Finance and Budget (OFB-WG) - Overview and Year Ahead

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

At-Large Consolidated Policy WG (CPWG) - Overview and Year Ahead

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

Joint Session: ALAC & SSAC

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

Sunday, 22 October 2023

09:00-10:00 & 10:30-12:00

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

What happened?

Presentation of SSAC's effort to determine what data is available within ICANN (and sometimes from outside sources) relevant to security and stability issues.  Also, what data would be desirable, but is not currently available?  Or even collected.  (Amazingly, this seems not to have been done before.) 

• When there is a DNSSEC-related outage, notification seems to be mostly word-of-mouth.  There does not appear to be any actual on-going monitoring and alerting. 
• There is threat intelligence on "problem" names.  But not on impacts. 

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

• If anyone in At-Large is aware of additional sources of information not found by the inventory, SSAC would be happy to hear about it. 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

• At-Large should vigorously support any SSAC efforts to improve and expand ICANN's monitoring activities.
• This open meeting was a first for SSAC.  Having people show up (in addition to our Liaison) would encourage more of this.  Security and stability, after all, impacts all those end users we represent. 

What happened?

Joint Meeting: Government Advisory Committee (GAC) and GNSO Council 

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

Five-year Planning for UA and Governance of UASG

This session examined the current governance practices of the UASG and the need for changes with a view to ensure transparency, openness, and accountability. The Statement of Interest (SoI) for all members of the list in order that every member is identified. The processes for election/selection of leaders, including UASG Chair and Vice Chair as well as Working Group leaders. Selection processes for Local initiatives and UA Ambassadors were also discussed.

The leadership team presented the draft 5-year Strategic Plan for UASG. The promotion of UA Adoption was the key message, moving from awareness building to Universal Acceptance.

The Community was requested to provide inputs to these Governance issues.

IDN Implementation Round-table

This session announced a plan for implementation of the IDN Implementation Guidelines 4.1. The 4.0 version of the IDN Implementation Guidelines was released in May 2018. The GNSO Council asked the Board to defer the implementation of these guidelines. After discussions, the ICANN Board decided to defer the implementation of guidelines 6a, 11, 12, 13, and 18 in version 4.0 as they overlapped with the ongoing work of the EPDP on IDNs. The session presented a plan of action for the publishing of the remaining guidelines which was labeled as version 4.1 by the ICANN Board.

The guidelines will be tested using automated tests from Nov 2023, and by Q3 2024, the 4.1 version of these guidelines will be in effect.

Subsequent presentations included a presentation on the current status of additional reference Label General Rules (LGRs). Prof Yudho presented the Balinese script and its readiness for being considered as a script for Internationalized Domain Names.

Finally, speakers from the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language communities presented the question of single-character TLDs. It was concluded that no new rules were required in the CJK script for single-character TLDs.

Planning for Universal Acceptance (UA) Day 2024

This session reviewed the planning for the 2023 UA Day and the learnings from it, and discussed the plans for the 2024 edition of the UA Day. While the UA Day was on 28 March, events could be organized from 1 March to 31 May 2024. The session discussed different issues such as the low acceptance rate in the APAC region, the supervisory mechanism for short-listing proposals, staffing and budgets required for organizing the UA Day.

What happened?

Discussion of issues and questions to be taken to the Board: 

• How to integrate Security, Stability and Resiliency into the Global Public Interest framework 
• Adding "Effective" to the Global Public Interest framework.  Because we have too often seen solutions at ICANN which were great, except for the detail that they did not work in practice. 
• How is the DNSSEC rollout progressing?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

While At Large certainly favors solutions which ICANN implements actually work, and deliver the desired outcomes, there isn't anything specific to take away. 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

None

What happened?

Session was attended by John Crain ICANN Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, ICANN  and andre Abed.Steve Crocker, CEO and Co-Founder of Shinkuro, Inc. Board members: Leon Sanchez and Avri Doria.

The talk was about ICANN and emerging technologies and possible future predictions. 

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

Some points

• The challenge of implementing technologies no one is implementing.
• Implementation is not just a technology issue, but it is also a policy issue.
• CPs contracts include clauses about some technologies such as IPv6 and DNSSEC
• ICANN investigates all emerging technologies.
• Buzzwords this year include artificial technologies machine learning and blockcahin
• looking at classification systems to detect abuse related to DNS abuse.
• Using machine learning to improve the science.
• Conducting research
• Publishing papers
• Some technologies are just too expensive to implement given the current scale of the ecosystem
• When there is a a decision to evaluate a new emerging technology and see how it applies both internally and for community facing. The challenge for me first is, do we have the capacity and and to skill set to to implement it and support it. Where does that skill set come from? How do we develop that skill set?
• You need to always ask the question what problem are we trying to ask

Looking towards the future Steve Crocker suggested four items

• Crypto
• Facial Recognition
• Automatic translation
• Discussion facilitation

However, Steve focused on Automatic translation and Discussion facilitation

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

Both Automatic Translation and Discussion facilitation would very much influence the At-large community due to At-large linguistic and cultural diversity. (8 years is the predicted timeline). Discussion facilitation as well would have great benefits to both the RALOs and At-large in addition to the entire ICANN community. A follow up session was suggested.

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

What happened?

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

What happened?

Discussion of the methodology for the review, and the desired outcomes.. 

Excellent description of what kind of participants are desirable for the Similarity Review Panel, 

• reflect the target "reasonably attentive user" 
• NOT typographers (i.e. experts in the way script code points can be formed).
• familiar with the particular script(s) being compared 

Note that the similarity will explicitly not be a side-by-side comparison, but rather how a label would be seen by someone who has a mental image of what label they are looking for. 

What are the At-Large specific takeaways from this session? 

At Large needs to make a serious effort to recruit At Large members to participate in the Similarity Review Panel.   We, after all, are the best source for people who can reflect what will be confusing to end users. 

What are the At-Large specific action items (next steps)?

Contact the IDN Project to make sure that we know when the Panel is being formed, in time for us to recruit potential members.