ICANN

ICANN's 37th international meeting doesn't officially get underway until Monday, but for many attendees work has started already. I got to the meeting venue in Nairobi this morning and I'm happy to report that apart from some truly horrendous traffic, the Kenyan capital looks like being a very pleasant place to be in.

But I won't have much time for sightseeing over the next few days. This meeting promises to be challenging. Not just for me, although it will be that as well. The GNSO Council Chair Chuck Gomes is not making the trip over to Nairobi, so his chairing duties should have been split evenly between me and fellow GNSO Vice Chair Olga Cavalli. However I learned this morning that Olga is also unable to make the trip for personal reasons. I will therefore be chairing all the GNSO meetings, including the open Council meeting on Wednesday and the Council wrap-up on Thursday. Talk about being unexpectedly thrown in at the deep end…

But this meeting will also present several challenges for ICANN itself. First and foremost, will the organisation be able to keep this meeting relevant even though many of the usual suspects have chosen to stay away? The Board has some key topics on its agenda, not least a possible reconsideration of the .XXX application and the need to decide whether to okay the proposed Expressions of Interest for new gTLDs. It is imperative that this work not be slowed or delayed because there are less people physically present than usual. Otherwise the whole rationale for having this meeting could be questioned.

One way to ensure this will be to guarantee a high quality of remote participation for those not physically in Nairobi but who still wish to take part. Remote participation hasn't been a strong point at past ICANN meetings. Most of the time, remote participants have been relegated to the role of silent observers due to the inherent difficulties in making themselves heard in a room full of people onsite. For this meeting, the remote participants will definitely want to speak and be active. A lot of them are regular ICANN attendees and they have no qualms at all about speaking publicly. If their voices can be heard, Nairobi will be a more productive meeting.

Following a ruling in its favour by ICANN's Independent Review Panel (IRP), would-be .XXX operator ICM Registry is pushing ICANN to honour the 2007 contract which should have allowed it to run .XXX for the last 3 years.

ICM Chairman Stuart Lawley has written to ICANN Chairman of the Board Peter Dengate Thrush. "I sincerely hope you share (…) the view expressed by so many (…) that the completion of the first ever Independent Review Process following the issuance of the Panel’s recent ruling is a defining moment for ICANN," writes Lawley.

Lawley told me recently that he expects his legal fees alone to exceed USD 6 million. But ICM is not asking ICANN reimburse these or even make reparations for the loss of revenue ICM has undoubtedly suffered from not being able to launch .XXX in 2007. What ICM is asking for, however, is that it be considered a part of the 2004 application round and not be amalgamated into the new gTLD program. "Nothing in the declaration would justify a decision to reconsider the ICM application in connection with the upcoming new gTLD round," Lawley argues. "Nor is there any principled reason to apply new rules or requirements to a proposal that was already determined to comply with the rules and procedures governing the 2004 sTLD round."

Lawley will be making the trip to Nairobi next week for ICANN's 37th international meeting, where he is hoping to meet with Dengate Thrush and ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom and to see the ICANN Board revisit the .XXX issue.

The ICANN Board met yesterday and reconfirmed its commitment to the 37th international ICANN meeting in the Kenyan capital Nairobi from March 7 to 12.

Security concerns expressed by some participants in recent weeks combined with a recent terrorist alert on the convention center where the meeting is to be held have contributed to many of the usual attendees deciding not to come.

That includes whole groups, such as the GNSO's intellectual property constituency (IPC) or the gTLD registries. The IPC and the registries are even planning alternative meetings in "safer" locations such as New York during the Nairobi meeting week. Sensibly, the Board has said that no funding would be available from ICANN for such meetings.

ICANN staff and the Board have been working in recent weeks to gauge the true extent of any security threat and ensure that if the meeting did go ahead, it would do so in relative safety. Various reports, both from governments, people onsite and recent visitors to Nairobi, show that the terrorist threat is actually not very credible and that the level of security on the street is no worse than at many other major cities. Touch wood… I hope no-one finds out otherwise in a couple of weeks!

After much worrying, talking, arguing and hesitating, ICANN has gone and done the right thing. Despite certain security concerns from participants from countries like the United States or the UK, the Nairobi meeting is on.

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom confirmed Nairobi after Friday's special meeting of the ICANN Board, convened specifically to discuss the situation.

"We recognize that many developing country cities have higher ambient levels of street crime and much of the world (the U.S. and Europe included) faces international terrorist threats and attacks," Beckstrom explained after the meeting. "Both are simply facts of life."

It's good to see some measure of common sense returning to this Nairobi debate. Yes there are risks, risks are everywhere. But ICANN is a global organisation and as a member of that organisation, I would rather not see it slap Kenya or any other country in the face by snubbing it (this would have been the second time for Kenya, a fact which would have understandably irked the Kenyans).

"Given that ICANN is committed to "One world. One Internet. Everyone connected." we have engaged and will continue to engage with the whole world," concludes Rod Beckstrom.

I couldn't agree more.

Although unconfirmed at this stage, the ICANN grapevine has been buzzing the last few days with the news that ICANN's Vice President for policy development Denise Michel was about to be replaced.

Former Manager of public participation Kieren McCarthy has just confirmed the news on his personal blog with a scathing piece. "Of the hundreds of people I have worked with, some of them very difficult, I have only truly disliked two," writes Kieren, before going on to explain that Denise was one of them and that she "infected the whole work environment with destructive and negative behaviour."

Since becoming a GNSO Councillor, the GNSO being responsible for setting policy for the generic namespace, I have obviously worked with Denise on several occasions, but never closely enough to know whether Kieren's words are an exaggeration or not. 

But I did work closely with Kieren on several projects within ICANN. I know him to be an extremely fair and honest person that will always tell it like it really is. So if he thinks that "when, in six months’ time, everyone is much happier about the process used to decide vital policies for the global Internet, you will be able to track it back to this day," adding "the Internet has become a better place today" I tend to trust his judgment.

Kieren names David Olive as Denise Michel's replacement and the new person in charge of what is one of ICANN's key departments.

I believe ICANN has just lost of man of great talent. And I wager that few within the ICANN cognoscenti would disagree that when he left a few days ago, General Manager of Public Participation (GMPP) Kieren McCarthy tore a big hole in the organisation's ability to look beyond itself.

Kieren's final act as ICANN GMPP highlights this better than any diatribe from me could ever hope to. He wrote a "leaving report", with the same iconoclastic take on ICANN that he exhibited during the 2 1/2 years he worked there, and in which he makes a number of recommendations for future public participation efforts. The report makes for fascinating reading for anyone interested in the way the Internet is governed.

I obviously won't go over the full 20-page (mercifully short for an ICANN document) report here. I would however like to add a couple of points.

It's always a surprise for us domain industry people to realise that the "outside world" is also interested in what we do. Especially when it pertains to Internet governance and ICANN.

So last week, when two leading French newspapers, Le Figaro and Les Echos, ran a short piece on my election to the GNSO Council Vice Chair position, I was more than a little surprised. Up until then, I thought that outside of an ICANN meeting corridor, the four letters "GNSO" wouldn't mean a thing to anyone.

Fast forward to today, and Les Echos is running a half page piece on me as GNSO VC! A half page, right in the middle of France's leading business paper!! All I can say is: I'm gobsmacked!

Left to right: Olga Cavalli, vice chair, Chuck Gomes, GNSO Council chair and Stéphane Van Gelder, vice chair. Photo INDOM.

Today was a landmark day for the Generic Names Supporting Organisation, aka GNSO, the place within ICANN that relates to generic top level domains (gTLDs).

The GNSO has been undergoing a restructure for over a year. It is a structure that aims to encompass all those parties who have interests in how gTLDs are managed and handled at policy level.

The new GNSO structure is bicameral, i.e. it has 2 houses. The Contracted Parties House, as its name suggests, groups those entities that have direct contracts with ICANN: the registries and the registrars. The other house is, unsurprisingly, called the Non Contracted Parties House. In it are the intellectual property people, the Internet service providers, the business users, and the non commercial users. In short, the contracted house is for the suppliers and the other is for the users.

The final step on the road to the new GNSO structure was scheduled for today, when a new Council would be seated which paralleled the new bicameral structure. Instead of the previous system, with a single chair/vice chair combo, the new configuration has one chair and 2 vice chairs, one from each house.

All the way through the run-up to today's Council meeting here at ICANN Seoul, during which the election was scheduled, there was doubt that with its new split structure, the Council would ever be able to coalesce around a common choice for chair.

ICM Registry Stuart Lawley is in Seoul for the 36th ICANN meeting, where he met with Peter Dengate Thursh (Chairman of the Board) and Rod Beckstrom (CEO) to discuss .XXX.

ICM have spent the last 2 years and USD 4,5 million in arbitration with ICANN before the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR). Several hearings were held in Washington, where Paul Twomey (Beckstrom's predecessor) was amongst the people heard by a three person arbitration panel.

Overall, Lawley reckons ICM have spent USD 8 million on .XXX. "We did everything ICANN asked us to do," Lawley says. "We even negotiated 5 draft contracts with them." He now hopes to have the result of the arbitration soon. "We're not asking for any damages," he adds. "We're not asking for money. We are asking for ICANN to sign the contract and let us launch .XXX."

It may take a few months for the arbitration panel to give a result. In the meantime, ICM are still accepting pre-registration requests from would-be .XXX domain name owners. "The pre-registration is completely free," Lawley explains. "And we're still getting requests every day. We're now up to 104,000 pre-registrations." Not bad for a domain that doesn't even exist yet.

Namesmash is running a piece on the Sydney ICANN meeting in which I'm quoted on the IRT and the amount of work it meant for the people who took part. Although I genuinely feel that the IRT members selflessly put in a lot of their time and effort into the process, I hope it's clear that my quote is also a tongue in cheek attempt at highlighting the fact that in the end, the result is really the only thing that counts.

The namesmash piece is here.

The GNSO, ICANN's policy-making body for generic TLDs, is overseen by a Council made up of representatives from the GNSO's various stakeholder groups. For example, I sit on the Council as a representative of the Registrar Stakeholder Group.

The GNSO is currently being restructured. At the next ICANN meeting in Seoul, a new GNSO structure will be implemented, with a new Council being seated. As part of that new structure, one of the Stakeholder Groups, the NCSG (Non Commercial Stakeholder Group), has been awarded 6 representatives on the Council. But due to somewhat complex internal politics within the NCSG, it was decided that half of those reps would be chosen by the ICANN Board for the inaugural seating of the new GNSO Council.

So yesterday ICANN staff sent the Council a note indicating that the 3 Board appointees were Mohammed Rafik Dammak from Tunisia, Rosemary Sinclair from Australia and Debra Hughes from the United States. We were also told that their selection was the result of extensive due diligence and a careful review of the many people that had applied to the Board for the job.

All well and good, until I was made aware of an email from respected ICANN community member Bret Fausett sent to the At Large (another of ICANN's community structures) mailing list.

On Thursday October 1st, ICANN is set to party! Invites have been sent out to selected VIPs (don't worry, I'm not one of them, I'm either too French or too irrelevant (probably both) for ICANN to feel that my presence would in any way add to the quality of the proceedings) for a "reception to recognize the conclusion of the Joint Project Agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce" as it says on the card.

So it really does look like this is it as far as Memorandums of Understanding, JPAs and other contracts linking ICANN to the US government. Last week, a remarkably well informed article published by The Economist claimed that the JPA won't be renewed and that it would be replaced by an "affirmation of commitments" giving ICANN a lot more independence.

Now this party… The writing definitely seems to be on the wall as far as the JPA is concerned.

There's a flurry of activity going on around ICANN, domains and new gTLDs at the moment.

First came a letter written by US congressmen and sent to ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom on September 15. The letter can be summarised as a call to delay the introduction of new gTLDs and to see ICANN put under a permanent contract with the US government.

In passing, I cannot help but once again be flabbergasted by the US politician's apparent lack of regard for a) a policy development process that has been on-going for years (new gTLDs) and b) the fact that it's hard to consider the Internet as still being America's plaything these days, as opposed to a world resource.

But I digress. Rod Beckstrom wasted no time in responding to the Congress letter. On September 22, he penned a note of his own in which he addressed the points raised by the Congressmen in detail. Looking below the surface of Rod's letter, there are a few new elements with regards to the gTLD program that can be ascertained. For example, on whether ICANN intends to implement the IRT recommendations, Rod says that "ICANN may ask the GNSO to begin an expedited review of the recommended solutions". That in plain language seems to imply that we on the GNSO Council are going to have a whole plateful of new work thrown our way as ICANN looks to put the IRT recommendations back into its standard policy development process.

While Rod Beckstrom was tackling the US Congress, ICANN Chairman of the Board Peter Dengate Thrush was dealing with another group of politicians: the GAC. Governmental Advisory Committee chairman Janis Karklins had written to ICANN on August 18 to voice its concerns over elements of the new gTLD program.

Peter's letter in response, dated September 22, also provides insight into some of the avenues ICANN is currently looking at for the new gTLD program. One that caught my eye is a discussion of the possible categories that new gTLDs could fall into. Peter identifies the following possible TLDs: single owner, geographic, intergovernmental organisations, socio-cultural, community and open. But he makes it clear that categories would only be considered after the first application round.

All this correspondence is well worth a read to gauge the current mood around ICANN as a whole and new gTLDs in particular.

Great news for all European Internet watchers, especially those from Belgium and France, ICANN's June 2010 international meeting will be held in Brussels.

The meeting itself promises to be a crucial one. If ICANN's current calendar doesn't change, the first round of new gTLD applications will have opened a few months earlier (February 2010). During the June 20-25 Brussels meeting, attendees should therefore be able to learn more about which new TLDs have been requested and evaluated.

ICANN's European office is in Brussels and the Belgium capital is also home to many of the European Commission's offices. So the June meeting may also provide an interesting backdrop for ongoing discussions between Europe and the US over whether ICANN should be an international organisation or continue to be placed under US control.