[council] Registry Operators

[Bruce Tonkin]

I have been advised of another category to the list below.

(5) Data Escrow providers

They are contracted to ICANN so could be in the contracted parties house
- but don't fit neatly into either registry or registrar constituencies.
They also probably provide services to those in the user house.

Regards,
Bruce
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-council at gnso.icann.org 
> [mailto:owner-council at gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Bruce Tonkin
> Sent: Wednesday, 15 July 2009 11:25 AM
> To: Council GNSO
> Subject: RE: [council] Registry Operators
> 
> 
> Hello All,
> 
> 
> > 
> > 
> > Agreed, it is an old, important issue that is still 
> > unresolved and must be
> > resolved before the GNSO restructure can take place.  
> 
> It is certainly worth considering further.
> 
> Membership of the registry and registrar constituency has 
> generally been
> very clear - based on the legal entity being a contracted party with
> ICANN as either a TLD manager or a gTLD registrar.  This 
> information is
> publicly available on the ICANN website.
> 
> There are other parties involved in the process of the domain 
> name value
> chain.
> 
> E.g
> 
> (1) Consultants - there are many consultants and lawyers that provide
> services to the members of the registry and registrar constituency or
> members of other constituencies - these consultants and lawyers can be
> split across the business constituency and the IP constituency.
> 
> (2) Internet Service Providers - while some purely provide 
> connectivity
> - many of these companies have moved into value added services - and
> many are significant suppliers of domain names (either as accredited
> registrars, or as resellers of accredited registrars).
> 
> (3) Other domain name resellers - e.g portals (e.g Yahoo), software
> companies (e.g Microsoft), search engines (e.g Google), web hosting
> companies - there are wide range of domain name resellers.  
> Some of thee
> are very large companies and supply large volumes (e.g over 100,000
> names) of domain names to their customers.   At different 
> times staff or
> consultants/external lawyers of these companies have been members of
> registrar, business constituency or IP constituency.
> 
> (4) Domainers - these companies operate a portfolio of domain names -
> they often do not supply domain name registration services to other
> parties - but may sell some of their domain name licences from
> time-to-time.   They may be accredited registrars (usually to get the
> lowest possible wholesale price for domains), or may simply be
> resellers.  Where they are not registrars - it is not clear what
> constituency that should be members of.  They would probably consider
> themselves to be members of the business constituency - as they are
> "business users" of domain names (earn revenue from 
> advertising, or from
> the future sale of the domain name licence), and not involved in
> supplying domain name registration services to third parties.
> 
> For consultants or lawyers it is often complex as they may have some
> customers/clients that are associated with the domain name supply
> industry and some customers/clients that are not.
> 
> In many cases large companies have different departments (or legal
> subsidiaries) - e.g a legal department, network connectivity 
> department,
> domains/hosting department -  and it can be convenient to have staff
> members of different departments/subsidiaries to join different
> constituencies (e.g Registrar, ISP constituency, IP constituency).
> 
> So do you make the decision on the basis of the corporate 
> entity (could
> be operating across multiple area of interest in the GNSO), or on the
> basis of the individual (may work for a particular department of a
> corporate, or may work for many clients).
> 
> Ultimately this will probably be hard to resolve.  Perhaps the best to
> hope for is that members of constituencies clearly define their
> potential conflicts of interest.   This could be at a corporate level
> and at an individual level (e.g identify clients involved in different
> constituencies if a consultant).   It would also be useful to require
> this to happen at the beginning of establishing working 
> groups (not as a
> method of exclusion - but to clearly state potential conflicts).
> 
> 
> The reality is that many members of the GNSO community can potentially
> participate in multiple roles.   Trying to create very tight exclusion
> rules (e.g you can be a member of constituency x - provided 
> you have no
> other relationship with any member of another constituency) may
> unnecessarily restrict participation.
> 
> Regards,
> Bruce Tonkin
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>