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The GNSO Council has, unanimously, adopted this resolution on today's call: Expansion of the gTLD namespace should be a bottom-up approach with names proposed by the interested parties to ICANN. Expansion should be demand-driven. Furthermore, there should be a set of objective criteria to be met in any future expansion. The development of this set of objective criteria should be the subject of a new Policy Development Process (PDP). These ideas are expanded in the a report together with the responses of the GNSO Constituencies and the ALAC which will be forwarded to the Board in June.

The "report" referred to will be a revised version of what has been circulated on the gtld-com list, and is supposed to be a summary of the discussions the Council had on that list. There will be no public comment process on this particular document, since it's expected to be used as input into a formal policy-development process.

Writes Ross Rader: Next week, there will be a community sponsored, open teleconference to discuss how we can work within the ICANN process to start implementing first steps towards a Whois that more appropriately suits the needs of all affected stakeholders. ... a group of registrars, business leaders, intellectual property interests, generic and country registry operators, consumer rights and other related parties are in the process of putting together an open forum that will occur next week. Our goal is to start an open and honest dialogue between impacted parties and identify points of agreement that we can start building on. I must stress that this will be an open forum with an agenda.