[Gnso-newgtld-wg] Notes and Action Items - New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP WG - 01 October at 03:00 UTC

Thu Oct 1 19:11:54 UTC 2020

Dear Working Group members,

Please see below the notes from the meeting on 01 October at 03:00 UTC. These high-level notes are designed to help WG members navigate through the content of the call and are not a substitute for the recording, transcript, or the chat, which will be posted at: https://community.icann.org/display/NGSPP/2020-10-01+New+gTLD+Subsequent+Procedures+PDP.

Kind regards,
Julie

Notes and Action Items:

Actions:

CPE Guidelines and WG Recommendations / Implementation Guidance
4-B Opposition:
ACTION ITEM: Add to the Guidelines where it says for non-negligible size consider the proportion to the overall size of the community that the applicant is aiming to serve.
ACTION ITEM: Check to see if the issue of whether there is a direct or remote connection between the group opposing and the string being applied for is captured in the existing Guidelines (see At-Large proposal).

Notes:

1. Updates to Statements of Interest: No updates provided.

2. Public Comments on Draft Final Report:

-- The public comment forum closed today.
-- We’ve received comments from the GAC, the Board, and ICANN org.
-- Staff will produce a Public Comment Review Tool in the next few weeks that is arranged by topic, so you don’t need to rely on the Google spreadsheet that is posted, which is hard to read.
-- Staff also will post a more easily readable and downloadable version of the spreadsheet.
-- Staff will prioritize input into the tool for those topics that we want to discuss at the two ICANN69 sessions (Closed Generics, Predictability, etc.).  These are the same topics we covered in the Webinar a few weeks ago.
-- We aren’t going to do the type of quantitative analysis – number and type of response – with the donut charts as they did in the RPMs PDP WG because we are focusing on doing a qualitative assessment.

3. CPE Guidelines and WG Recommendations / Implementation Guidance with WG redlines/comments: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ih_1NARViJXNNewDg-q87sQzQoC1dCtC/view?usp=sharing and also the redline submitted by Justine Chew reflecting the changes from the Proposal by At-Large dated 11 Jun 2020:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RS13a70f3BGx0b1gOyjvvRCoAKvxtlfO/edit – start at 4-B Opposition in the WG document, page 19, and then proceed to Criterion 1/overall comments from Justine

4-B Opposition:

-- We did make a recommendation on are a couple other recommendations, namely that evaluators can question, those that submitted letters of support and or opposition: “Letters of opposition to a community based application if any must be considered in balance with documented support for the application.”

Discussion:
Re: “Relevance” and “relevant” refer to the communities explicitly and implicitly addressed. This means that opposition from communities not identified in the application but with an association to the applied for string would be considered relevant.”
-- Comment from Jamie Baxter re: “Relevance” -- As discussed on the last call, guidance for “relevance” in 4-B must include a balance of opposition in relation to documented support, and not just an isolated determination of whether the opposing entity is part of the community explicitly or implicitly addressed. One misaligned community member/entity should not have the power to impact CPE scores of a largely aligned community, yet that was the EIU’s interpretation and practice in the 2012 round.  To illustrate this point, if an applicant has hundreds of organizations from around the world supporting an application, and those endorsements represent the voices of tens of thousands of other local and regional organizations, then an expression of opposition from one single, small and even locally based organization from within the defined community among the thousands globally expressing support should not be able to put 1 of the 2 CPE points for this criteria in jeopardy.”
-- It's also about the size of that opposition compared to the scope of that community.  One small segment in a larger community really doesn’t have relevance in the larger picture.  Make sure we capture that concept.
-- That is included in the balance part of our recommendation.
-- The definition of relevance is incredibly important because as you see there if just one group submits a letter of opposition and it's deemed to be relevant, then the score automatically goes you know down a point and in an evaluation, where one needed to score 14 out of 16.  That is pretty substantial against an applicant.
-- There just needs to be a better calculus here because otherwise, it doesn't give the applicant any way of understanding how they're going to rule on a lot of this stuff.  “Non-negligible” is a bizarre definition with no real basis.
-- Who we appointed as the evaluator becomes important. Okay, so that's that goes back to the At-Large request to have more communities participation and saying, who is appointed as the evaluator.
-- Recommended the introduction of a challenge mechanism for those applicants who thought they had been misjudged.
-- We haven’t addressed the role of applicant comment in totality.  The identities of the commenters should be established.
-- Don’t think we have established a fixed period of application comment for Community Based-Applicants that should be the same as all other applicants, and there shouldn’t be a separate call for letters of support or opposition.
-- The GAC has said that the evaluators should be experts in communities, with a list of criteria.
-- Do need to include whether opposition is negligible or is of non-negligible size in proportion to the overall size of the community that is being represented by the applicant – that the applicant is aiming to serve.
-- At-Large proposal: The bit about whether there is a direct or remote connection between the group opposing and the string being applied for that may not be captured in the existing document.

ACTION ITEM: Add to the Guidelines where it says for non-negligible size consider the proportion to the overall size of the community that the applicant is aiming to serve.
ACTION ITEM: Check to see if the issue of whether there is a direct or remote connection between the group opposing and the string being applied for is captured in the existing Guidelines (see At-Large proposal).

Overall Principles (At-Large Proposal):  Delineation between economic and non-economic communities.

Criterion #1: Community Establishment: “Any distinction between a Community based on a common economic interest (CEI model) and a Community advocating for Human Rights (CHR model) should not serve as a basis for preferring one over the other.”
-- For scoring 1 point changed to “reasonably delineated community” rather than “clearly delineated” so there's a bit of flexibility there.
-- We also attempted to introduce community expertise into the fold by suggesting that any reasonably delineated community that is recognized by, say for example, United Nations or maybe any international other international organizations or Subject Matter Expert with international or regional standing, they recognize the community as existing then it should score high that that community should by right feature quite highly.
-- On Delineation: If it's an economic grouping you score high if it's a human rights grouping you also score high, so long as they are you know either clearly delineated or by a general governmental organization or some expert of reasonable standing, and if the grouping is less clearly delineated it could still score one.
-- Question: Why do you say “non-economic community” instead of “human rights” community?  Not sure what a human rights community encompasses.  Answer: The concern that was raised when we were discussing this was a clear distinction between economic groupings and non-economic groupings, but in particular with the non-economic groupings they would encompass mostly human rights.  Some human rights are not rights in some countries and could even be illegal, which could prevent some people from being members of a certain grouping or declaring support, but that group should be at a disadvantage if it can’t have a clear membership.
-- Question: Could you instead have two groupings, one that is based on economic or common economic interest and one that is not, to avoid using the term “human rights”?
-- If you look at the United Nations, there are various protected classes.  The opportunity here is to allow an applicant to show how they're delineated based on existing standards or prior identifications whether their classes or whatever. And that is how they establish third delineation.
-- Why not just say any distinction between a community based on common economic interest and a community, not based on a common economic interest should not serve as a basis for prefer one over the other.

Scoring Threshold:

-- The working group to consider recommending lowering the threshold for preventing CP from 14 to 12 points.
-- We will need to have a separate conversation on the threshold.  You might say that if you got a zero on any criterion you should be excluded.  Need to think about how it flows through the sub-criteria.
-- If the criteria and sub-criteria are not linked then the likelihood of that happening is actually very low.
-- From the AGB: “The sequence of the criteria reflects the order in which they will be assessed by the panel. The utmost care has been taken to avoid any "double-counting" - any negative aspect found in assessing an application for one criterion should only be counted there and should not affect the assessment for other criteria.”
-- If the applicants hadn’t been under such scrutiny in the 2012 round the scores probably would have been higher.
-- Improving the scoring criteria and lowering the scoring threshold would provide the best improvement of the CPE.

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