[Advisors] What did we talk about - ICANN68

Thu Jul 2 11:31:56 PDT 2020

Thanks Darlene for weighing in. I am sure people are thinking "what on 
earth could they be talking about all night???" In response to that I am 
attaching a file on At Large talking points for this meeting -- i.e. 
these were the issues we were concentrating on in discussions either in 
plenaries or with other specific constituencies like the Government 
Advisory Committee, the ICANN Board, the Non-Commercial Stakeholders 
Group, etc.

This PDF is not that user friendly and (sadly) the links don't work. It 
has been an issue for years that there is a great need for documents 
that are accessible to any person in the general public who might want 
to know what goes on at ICANN meetings. We are not there yet, so here is 
my little attempt to demystify things.

In summary, At Large concentrated on 5 topics:

1. DNS Abuse -- this is an attempt to get ICANN.org to take more 
responsibility for abusive practices like pharming, phishing, botnets, 
etc. that circulate on the web by tightening up contracts and contract 
enforcement. Seems like a no brainer. But when it comes to relationships 
between the contracted parties, ICANN, end-users and others -- everyone 
has a different version of the problem and how to fix it.

2. Privacy and data protection -- this is in response to the European 
General Data Protection Rules (GDPR) concerning the release of data 
about who owns and/or is responsible for domain names in the European 
context. It is a tug of war between the need to protect individual 
privacy and the need to make sure bad actors can be identified quickly 
and dealt with. I have not been deeply involved in this discussion -- 
came to it a bit late. But I can tell you, it is a very fraught 
discussion that seems intractable as there are hardliners on both sides.

3. Subsequent procedures -- this is an awkward name for a very complex 
negotiation going on to reset the rules that would allow ICANN to begin 
another round of selling top level domain names -- i.e. that string 
after the last dot. -- .books, .hotels, etc. I am involved in this 
discussion in trying to make it easier for some of these opportunities 
to be taken up by communities of various kinds -- e.g. indigenous, 
various minorities, language groups, smaller clusters of interest, etc. 
-- who don't have the deep pockets of commercial applicants. these is a 
community support program and a community priority evaluation process 
but they did not really work the last time around. This discussion also 
includes the contentious geonames issue.

4. Registry voluntary commitments (formerly called Public Interest 
Commitments) -- sometimes, an applicant for a top level domain name 
offers public benefits in return for being assigned the name. Best 
example I have of this is the fact that the .amazon issue was finally 
resolved with amazon.org offering concessions to the people of the 
amazon region with respect to the use of second level domains, local 
languages, etc. The issue here is around the enforceability of these 
commitments.

5. Universal Acceptance -- You can have a domain name in non-latin 
characters but 80% of websites are not set up to recognize them. This is 
an awareness raising issue, not something that ICANN can resolve except 
by supporting advocates around the world who try to contact 
non-compliant websites. Because At Large is an end user constituency, At 
Large members are best positioned to play this role.

Hope this sheds some light on some very protracted discussions. Progress 
on any of these issues is as slow as "molasses in January."

Marita

On 7/1/2020 10:23 AM, Darlene Thompson wrote:
> I, too, think that TC should be part of this process.  If there is any 
> way that I can help, just let me know.
>
> Thank you for being the one staying up all night at an ICANN meeting - 
> been there, done that and came up looking like something the cat 
> dragged in!
>
> Darlene
>
>
> On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 9:57 PM Marita Moll <mmoll at ca.inter.net 
> <mailto:mmoll at ca.inter.net>> wrote:
>
>     Hello advisors. Hope you are all well and managing your way
>     through this
>     co-vid crisis. I have just finished a week of middle of the night
>     meetings at virtual ICANN68 -- Kuala Lumpar time zone. This is the
>     future of international meetings for some time to come, I'm
>     afraid. It
>     is simply too dangerous to have such gatherings until a reliable
>     vaccine
>     is found.
>
>     Here is an opportunity for us to lend our voices to a national
>     campaign.
>     Open Media has started a coalition to lobby for reliable high speed
>     access for all Canadians. Please take a look and let me know if you
>     think TC should be part of this coalition.
>
>     https://action.openmedia.org/page/60429/petition/1?ea.tracking.id=vurl
>
>     I think it would be highly appropriate
>
>     Marita
>
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