No Such Weblog

The DNSO GA's alternate chairman, Alexander Svensson, has gone to Bucharest, and is attending the ICANN meetings there. He's sending short reports of some of the events to the DNSO's GA. I'm archiving these reports separately. An RSS feed pointing into this archive is also available.

Bret Fausett is, it seems, also tryig to cover as much as possible of the ICANN meetings in a special Blog.

GAC member Robert Shaw reports, in his weblog, that his committee colleagues were "extremely surprised" by the Blueprint for Reform. He also mentions that the board apparently plans to actually adopt a revised version of the blueprint in the end of this week, according to statements made by Alejandro Pisanty in a meeting with the GAC. Shaw doesn't sound too amused that the board didn't tell the GAC before.

On a (not obviously) similar front, there is a story worth reading up at ICANNwatch: Under the title Legitimacy and Effectiveness Through Consensus, David Johnson, Susan Crawford, and Becky Burr argue that "for a number of reasons, both practical and profound, we think that eliminating the consensus requirement is the wrong answer to solving ICANN's legitimacy problem." Instead, they suggest that "the Board should be more active in pushing the consensus policy process along", by "appointing a facilitator who would be personally responsible for creating the written consensus policy report (and could be trusted to do an unbiased job)" within a tight deadline. The "facilitator" would work by gathering position papers, "facilitating consensus" (whatever that means), performing outrach to those "likely to be affected." According to the authors, the process outlined can "force dissenting parties to articulate the reasons why they oppose a proposed policy". It would then be the board's job to check for "unjustifiable opposition", and to possibly override some of the dissent observed. However, the board is not supposed to define the "public interest" by itself.

Of course, the document is more elaborate than what I can summarize in a couple of sentences here - you should really read it yourself. What makes this even more interesting is an anonymous comment, allegedly coming from Richard Hill (ITU-T). He writes: "Fascinating. While the details differ, the general principles and the outline of the working methods proposed by David, Susan, and Becky are remarkably similar to the working methods of ITU, and, for that matter, of all international treaty organizations and of many goverernments. [...] In the case of the ITU (and I believe that the ITU is unique in this respect) the working methods have been agreed not just by 189 governments, but also by industry (the 650 ITU Sector Members). As noted elswhere, the ITU Sector Members include many (or even most) of the well-known players in the Internet, whether equipment manufacturers or service providers."

The Annual Independent Audit report posted today by ICANN notes two non-compliances (which may be considered minor), and makes no statement on requirements H.V.1, H.V.2, H.V.4, I.2 due to lack of historical records. These requirements refer to appendices H and I of the registry agreement.

The requirements from appendix H: V. ACCESS TO THE REGISTRY FACILITY VGRS provides access to all VGRS customers through the following mechanisms and separates VGRS systems and information from systems and information of any affiliated registrar through these processes: 1. All registrars (including any registrar affiliated with VGRS) connect to the Shared Registration System Gateway via the Internet by utilizing the same maximum number of IP addresses and SSL certificate authentication. 2. All registrars have the same level of access to VGRS-generated data to reconcile their registration activities from VGRS Web and ftp servers. All registrars may perform basic automated registrar account management functions using the same registrar tool made available to all registrars by VGRS. [...] 4. No registrar affiliated with VGRS will be given any access to the registry not available to any other registrar except with regard to information specific to their registrar.

The requirement from appendix I: 2. All registrars accredited by ICANN who are authorized to register domain names in the {.com,.org,.net} registry shall have equivalent access to Registry Services provided by VGRS.

From what you can read on the atlarge-discuss list, some heated debate may be going on concerning at-large structures. Currently, we have James Love making comments in a form which is considered unconstructive by Esther Dyson, which James can't accept, talking about "Borg pep talk". I suppose there's more going to come. The list archive's index is here.

Bret points to the ccTLDs' remote participation page.

On the GA list, Chuck Gomes writes that controls were in place continuously during the audit period (2001) to ensure equivalent access, but the auditors were not easily able to go back to points in time in 2001 to verify that.