[council] FW: Specification 13 : Letter to the GNSO

[Avri Doria]

Hi,

Thanks you for this additional information.

I am still inclined against this motion.  Some of my reasons.

- I do not think it is necessary as the Registry can tailor its
Regsitry-Registrar agreement to its specific needs.  That, especially
when combined with the lack of restrictions on VI, means they would not
be blocked from making registrations according to their specification.
This is a practice that community gTLD and geographical gTLDs, another
of the emergent categories, will need to follow.

- I think the process needs to be followed.  It is perhaps unfortunate
that ICANN or their ICANN experienced consultants did not better explain
the ICANN consensus policy affect on contracts to the applicants, but
their lack of understanding is not reason for abrogating the processes
we are fighting hard to see maintained in other issues.  This BRG
process has been going on for a while now, and we may have even been a
good way through a PDP had the RySG (I am assuming they are part of the
RySG, is that the case?) initiated a PDP process as soon as the problem
became apparent.  So even if they could not have started 2 years ago,
they might have 1 year ago.

- This is not a simple tweak to the policies, It is not similar to
'just' adding additional names to an already existing reserved name
list.  This overturns an essential principle of the relationship between
registrars and registries - the non discrimination clause. The
unintended long term consequences of this precedent needs to be
understood. Again that is what a PDP is for.

- I think that if this were an PDP we might find that the other emergent
categories of new gTLD applicant might also benefit from carefully
crafted exception processes.  For example I can imagine that
geographical gTLDs mights want to focus on local registrars, and
communities might want to focus on specific registrars - both of these
categories also provide restricted registrations. I am sure that the
idea that a Registry could pick 3 special registrars for their business,
might be advantageous to other non-promiscuous gTLDs (i.e gTLDs that
offer themselves to just any registrant).

We also have to take into account that what we are trying to work around
is an artificial boundary imposed by Staff without a prior policy
process.  At what point did the GNSO decide that a registry would be
limited in the number of registrations it could make on its own behalf.
 That limit, a policy to be certain, was imposed by staff unilaterally.
 During the original policy discussions we did discuss the notion of a
membership based organization giving free registrations to its members.
This was assumed to be possible, though we did not get into the
registration models - another lesson about the need to defining the
minutia of a policy. Why are not talking about removing the limit of
registrations a registry can use for its own purposes.  It could solve
the BRG problem and would possibly help other registries as well.  Again
this is an issue that could have been reviewed if we had engaged in a
proper PDP process on the issue of single user gTLDs - a topic we have
known about since the VI discussions.  One can argue that this problem
is not because of the Equal Treatment rule but because of an arbitrary
limit set by staff.

Rushing like this to satisfy an ICANN pressure group is something that
we have to put a stop to, in my opinion.  I do not see how we can, as a
council committed to protecting GNSO processes, approve this exception.
 Recently we put the GAC request on IGO-INGO through PDP despite their
strong reaction against it.   I do not understand how it is appropriate
to give the BRG a policy process work-around we refused the GAC.  If
nothing else we will be authorizing the Board to ignore the work of the
PDP whenever convenient.

The Board does have the ability to decide that this is a necessary
Temporary Policy. If that were to have been the solution the Board had
chosen we could then have an adequate process for resolving any of the
issues related to this issue.  Unfortunately, as I understand it, that
is not the path they took, nor the path we are recommending.

avri


On 08-May-14 04:09, Jonathan Robinson wrote:
> All,
> 
>  
> 
> Please see attached letter received today from the BRG.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks.
> 
>  
> 
> Jonathan
>