[council] IOCRC

[Stéphane Van Gelder]

Councillors,

I want to bring to your attention the current situation in the IOCRC Drafting Team.

On March 1, 2012, ICANN Staff sent a message to the IOCRC DT that is currently looking at ways to implement the June 20, 2011 Board resolution directing the GNSO Council to develop policy to permanently protect Olympic and Red Cross names at both the top and second level as part of the new gTLD program. The message contained suggestions "to assist the team in their work".

Members of the DT, including its Chair Jeff Neuman, reacted strongly to the comments from Staff. From the DT's mailing list, it can be seen that there is worry on several issues.

One major worry seems to be that in the context of a June 20, 2011 Board resolution that appeared to modify the GNSO PDP on new gTLDs with respect to the issue of Reserved Names, Staff suggest in their letter that the DT or the Council now should provide a rationale for why these names should be protected.

This is what I have been told by the DT Chair:

"The DT asked Staff to provide the rationale for the June 20, 2011 Board resolution from the outset, but Staff did not. In addition, there is no mention of the rationale behind the Board’s motion in the minutes from that meeting.  Although there is some information about the IOC/RC issue in the Board Papers posted well after the meeting, the entire rationale for the motion is redacted as being privileged and confidential.

The DT is surprised to see Staff now ask it to provide this rationale instead.

 Even more surprising is that fact that without any consultation of the GNSO community, ICANN staff chose to implement the ICANN Board resolution in a manner unlike any other “reserved name” in the Applicant Guidebook.  The DT saw this as a flaw in the implementation of the resolution.  When it tried to provide a recommendation on fixing that perceived flaw, ICANN staff asked for a detailed rationale along with a lengthy 42 day public comment period.  The message sent by staff essentially is that no public consultation is necessary for ICANN staff’s unilateral discretion in implementation matters, but if anyone wants to change that implementation (even if flawed), that requires public consultation."

I see one of my main duties as Chair of this Council to be to defend the community-driven, consensus-based, bottom-up policy process that is at the foundation of ICANN, and the policies the GNSO produces.

The DT has expressed a clear worry that the original board motion coupled with the staff’s implementation of that message may be an instance where the policy process has been circumvented. I am not saying it has. But having been informed of this by the DT, I am taking that possibility seriously.

As such, I have asked Kurt Pritz, who sent the message from Staff to the IOCRC DT, to provide detailed answers to the questions asked, not by me, but by the DT members themselves. No answers have been provided yet, but we should of course all be mindful that we are in the run-up to an ICANN meeting and everyone's schedules are pretty hectic right now.

I am hopeful that answers will be provided soon.
As a group, we are stewards of the PDP in general and minders of policies that this Council has adopted in the past. As such, I wanted to make sure you were aware of the situation.

Stéphane
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