ICANN consultation session transcript

ICANN consultation

Improving Institutional Confidence

Tuesday, 26 August 2008.

1330-1500

KEITH DAVIDSON:

Kia ora tatou, tena kotou katoa.

TRANSLATION:

Hello everyone, greetings to you all.

KEITH DAVIDSON:

I'm pleased that Internet NZ has been able to participate in hosting APNIC 26 in New Zealand. I'll be chairing this afternoon's sessions including this session which is an afternoon ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) consultation process and afterwards for the Internet governance hui. First of all, we have Paul Twomey, CEO and President of ICANN who is joining us by video link and Marilyn Cade, international Internet governance expert and a member of ICANN's President's Strategy Committee. Welcome to you both.

The theme of the session is Improving Institutional Confidence in Internet governance. In the audience today, we have ICANN staff members, Save Vocea and Donna Austin and also Leo Vegoda. Could you all please stand up so other members of the audience could identify you. Thank you.

And I did that deliberately, so that if you have any questions that you don't feel like putting in a public arena, please do talk to the ICANN staff or to Marilyn Cade during one of the breaks. Paul and Marilyn, can I remind you that this audience today are primarily a group that operate in the IP addressing space and they may not be familiar with all of the acronyms and abbreviations that are common to you both. So I ask you please to take time to ensure that the audience are familiar with the terms that you introduce during your presentations.

This session runs through to 3pm, so that allows a good hour and a half for discussion, but hopefully, we will get some time for some presentations.

The slides for this presentation are on the APNIC website, so for those of you who have a laptop, perhaps you want to collect them from there for while we're crossing to Paul Twomey on the video conference link, we will from time to time flick between the slides and Paul, but those who want to follow the slides closely, please load them from the APNIC website. Please welcome now Dr Paul

Twomey. Paul, the screen is yours.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Thank you, Keith and I don't know if you can hear me well. Can you confirm that?

KEITH DAVIDSON:

Yes, we can hear you.

OK, can I say, thank you very much for your introduction and I would like to particularly thank Paul Wilson and Sam Dickinson for helping to coordinate this session. My apologies I have not been able to attend in person. Your meeting is actually quite close to where I am today, I'm actually in Sydney in Australia, but unfortunately, it's also my daughter's 12th birthday and if I wasn't

here today, my life would not be worth living. You would be reading my obituary in the newspapers tomorrow. So excuse any attendance virtually.

The purpose today is to share with you as interested members of the broader ICANN community, and perhaps it is worth making the point to the audience, that ICANN of course is not a coordination forum just for domain names, it is also importantly, it plays a key role at a high level for some of the coordination of global policy for IP addresses and obviously, it's also very interested in other unique identifiers such as AS numbers and others in the Internet.

The purpose today really is to share with you a dialogue that's taking place in our broad community and to give you some context of that dialogue and give you input as we look at the process of sort of - confirming a 10-year project of building institutional confidence in the ICANN model. So, I'll ask the people who are looking at the slides to go to the first slide, entitled Introduction. It says Page 2 on mine. ICANN was launched in 1998 after an extensive consultation by the Internet community across four continents in a series of meetings responding to first a Green Paper and then a White Paper from the then US administration of President Clinton. As part of the process that emerged out of the formation of ICANN and the United States Government recognizing ICANN as being the sort of international multi-stakeholder body that they were looking for to take over the coordination of the functions that had previously been done under contracts between academics and others and the United States Government, there was established, a memorandum of understanding between the

Department of Commerce and ICANN which, in its early days was a fairly description document that set out if you like, almost adventure capitalists type of model for due diligence, to ensure that this new organization was growing in the sort of way that could give confidence about its stability.

That's essentially been a pretty successful process, and the final variation on that document is a thing that is referred to as a Joint Project Agreement, a JPA. You'll hear us referring to the JPA this afternoon, that's a Joint Project Agreement with the Department of Commerce and that JPA which is actually quite a brief document, only about two pages long is set to conclude in September 2009.

We're inviting you as part of the broad ICANN community to tell us at ICANN how we should complete this planned transition to privatize the private sector coordination and management.

The instrument that we're using for these consultations and have done so for the last two years now is called the President's Strategy Committee. It is referred to as a President's committee; these are people who are giving advice to the president and strategy issues. It was created to give advice to the President of

the Board. The focus since 2006 has been on ICANN's strategy and identity and regional presence and conducted online consultations and face-to-face workshops with the community. It produced three reports with recommendations and hopefully on the screen there, you can see the URL for the reports and I would ask you to have a look at that, because the material that we're going to share with you today, myself and Marilyn who is a member of the community, is not just something that we've written up in the last month, this is actually a continuation of nearly two years or more of ongoing consultation with our community.

The next page which is Page 4 talks about the PSC members, that is the acronym for President's Strategy Committee. Peter Dengate Thrush, Peter's apologies, I should convey his apologies; Peter was very keen to attend your meeting. Unfortunately he's in the middle of conducting a trial in the North Island and he's not able to get down, so you've got me stuck in the West Island and Peter stuck in the North Island, so apologies about that!

Myself, Raimundo Beca who you would know from your community from Chile, a member of the ICANN Board and a member of the address organization on the Board.

Marilyn Cade, Pierre Dandjinou Benin, Jean Jacques Subrenat and Yrjo Lanspuro. We've had other members on and off throughout the committee.

Moving to the next slide, Page 5 here. The current work of the PSC is focussed on the issue of building institutional confidence as we move towards completion of the Joint Program Agreement.

There was a mid-term review of the Joint Project Agreement in February or March this year, and during that review which was conducted by the United States Department of Commerce but which we were heavily involved in and engaged and engaged our own community in consultation, the ICANN chairman asked the President of the Strategy committee to facilitate discussions about our transition to the private sector. Well, I should clarify this language - the white paper of ten years ago refers to the fact that the whole process of transition to private sector management of the DNS and related coordination. When you see this, ICANN's transition to private sector coordination, it is in other words, the conclusion of the process that was foreseen ten years ago in the US White Paper. And to outline the plan for the transition framework. And today's session is part of the consultation of ICANN's ongoing improvement and transition.

I think Sam may have sent around to you over the weekend or with connections, some links online for the documentation that we've had for consultation. I know Save and Donna have available to you, documents I think in paper format of consultation documents that you can see for this piece of work. And in this part of the presentation, I'm basically taking you through the history. Marilyn

will then help you and will proceed taking us through more of the content of the proposals and then when we've done that, we'll be up for discussion and then we'll close at the end with some further details about how you can make your responses.

Going to the next page, sorry, I should have made that clearer at the beginning. Where are we actually going? ICANN will continue to be a multi-stakeholder, private sector-lead organization responsible for the global coordination of the Internet's unique systems. We don't see that system changing or the present functions changing. We do see an opportunity and we think it is important that the Joint Program Agreement comes to conclusion in September 2009, but one of the things that emerged from the midterm review was concern from the members of our community about ensuring that ICANN was a long-term and stable organization. As we have put it, we need to make sure that we have improved confidence, that people have confidence in the institution.

And the PSC's draft documents set out the requirements we think and what we've heard from the consultations that the community is looking for to have that sort of institutional confidence and the steps we needed to get there, and that's what we need to get your further feedback on today.

So, how will we get there on the next page, Page 7. The PSC identified five areas for structural improvement. The first one is to safeguard ICANN against capture. This is capture by any group and capture by governments or inter-governmental organizations, other countries about capture by contract parties**. Others are concerned about capture by activists. So we're clear that this is to safeguard ICANN from any particular constituency.

Secondly, to strengthen accountability for the multi-stakeholder community. The PSC and the Board are not looking to diminish ICANN's responsibility, indeed, we're trying to strengthen it and expand it. And then at the end of the process, you would have an ICANN that is not just accountable to one party which is the United States Government, but which is accountable to all the stakeholders and that people understand it to be such.

Make certain that we're meeting the needs of the global Internet community of the future. I have no doubt that you'll have many thoughts on that. To ensure that we are financially and operationally secure and also to ensure continued security and stability in the Internet's unique identifiers. These are what we

hear in the last 12 months or more, things that the community thinks they would like to see improvement or propositions, and in consequence, we have delivered some consultation documents. I'm now on the next page, what says on my page, Page 8.

We need your input on the best way to achieve the five key objectives. We would like follow up today, and the follow-up input through the questionnaire process that is being issued today. We would like your input with private conversation with Save or Marilyn in New Zealand there or if you would like to respond online.

And we would like you to review the documents; there are three documents which have been distributed. They are a document called Improving Institutional Confidence in ICANN. The second one is called a Transition Action Plan. And the final document is a document called Frequently Asked Questions. As I said, the documents were distributed over the weekend and members, I think there's been documented handed out. I can see people opening pages - look at that, this technology works! It looks like the people have received the documents; they have them on the desks so they're the ones that we're referring to.

Having given you a basic history of where we are now, I'll now pass over to Marilyn and thank her for extending her time in New Zealand to come and talk with you directly. I'll ask her to talk through the five key areas and the proposals and suggestions that have been made by the PSC.

MARYLYN CADE:

I'm going to go through the initial suggestions and proposals developed by the members of the President's Strategy Committee, but urge you to think about them as the preliminary suggestions and note that we very much want your comments and feed back. Most of you will have been able to pull up the slides but I'm going to go through them and I'll try to do this in an order that makes sense and then we'll go into discussion. And just to note that your reference documents, the ones you have in your folder will be really good cue cards for you when we come to the question and answer discussion.

First of all in dealing with our first topic which was preventing capture of ICANN. We made some suggestions and that is that among the things that we could do would be to ensure consensus or super-majority requirements for policy-making, based on broad and diverse participation of affected stakeholders.

We recognize that there is a need to continually broaden and deepen the participation and the diversity of what we call constituencies in ICANN in the policy development process. We need to maintain a presence - we felt as the President's Strategy Committee in a jurisdiction. We proposed that we should continue our best-practice transparency measures, seeing transparency as a safeguard against capture. We discussed limiting the cross-participation in supporting organizations and advisory committees. That was a topic that came up at the time of the green paper and the White Paper where some people suggested that it would be possible for a single entity, whether it was a Government or a corporation or an NGO to populate each of the different groups at ICANN and to perhaps distort the input by participating through and across all of the organizations of ICANN. So we have discussed that. And again, over and over, in our discussions within the President's Strategy Committee, we have discussed the need to significantly enhance participation.

Some of the proposals that the PSC discussed were that we could establish a by-law amendment to establish a prohibition against voting for the same individual or organization in more than one of the advisory or supporting organizations. Let me make a distinction between participation and voting. So, the PSC did discuss the idea that your participation should be limited, but rejected that idea ourselves. We obviously want your input on that, but we had discussed the idea of limiting the voting of an entity.

We have discussed in some detail, the idea that we would propose enhanced and clear statements of interest, so that a party who has an interest in the outcome of a policy decision that is being made should declare what that interest is and it should be - the information should be widely available to other parties who are participating in ICANN.

We also talked about the importance of strengthening accountability over and over - if you review the contributions that were submitted to the notice of inquiry, regarding the Joint Program Agreement held by the Department of Commerce, you saw a call for increased accountability. The President's Strategy

Committee discussed this ourselves in some detail and there has been a discussion within the ICANN community - it's been raised in some of the public forums and we're proposing as a suggestion that we could implement a mechanism, this would be a new mechanism that would enable a call from the community for the board to reexamine a decision it has made.

We could also establish a very extraordinary method by which the community could call for removing the entire Board, if the community was not satisfied with the reexamination that the board made in its decision. This is obviously a very big step and they spent a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of this within the President's Strategy Committee. And we believe that the periodic reviews of ICANN's structure, of the present accountability mechanisms like reconsideration and review and the ombudsman should continue, and we are calling for enhancing and expanding the contractual compliance and enforcement. So the two proposals that the PSC have put on the table is that ICANN should establish an additional accountability mechanism to allow the community, through a defined process, to request a review of the decision, of a decision that the board has made.

Secondly, if the community is not satisfied with the outcome, there could be an established process where the community could call for removal of the board collectively and a reconstitution of the board. Now, obviously in the discussion of how would that work, we have just begun to talk about what the mechanism of governing IP can would be during the process by which board members were re-elected or reappointed.

The third area that we have discussed is - I hope - reflective of the great diversity of the present stakeholders of ICANN and the future and growing important rest of the stakeholders of ICANN who may not yet be involved in ICANN. Clearly, the diversity of the community of users of the Internet as we all know and as you embody is extremely diverse and is changing even more, so we wanted to discuss a number of areas by which we could ensure that we were meeting the needs of the global Internet community. There were suggestions about confirming ICANN's headquarters in the United States, while allowing for the establishment of a legal presence or presence in other jurisdictions. We discussed the idea of establishing a subsidiary in a jurisdiction that would be a really defined jurisdiction that would meet certain defined objectives. We have talked about the importance of maintaining and developing the operations that ICANN presently provide from around the globe, and further efforts to make ICANN a multi-lingual organization, including continuing and perhaps even enhancing interpretation and translation services.

The proposal that we have included in the present documents we've given you suggest that ICANN should have a global legal presence in addition to its headquarters established in the United States.

The fourth area that we have talked about is the importance of operational and financial stability. Obviously, you can not do your day job if you aren't operationally and financially secure and stable, and so, one of the things that the PSC had talked about was the importance of examining alternative sources of income that might lessen the dependency that ICANN has on the present model of funding which is an aggregation of fees paid by registrants which is aggregated through the registrar and made in aggregate to the parties by ICANN. That's the major source of funding by ICANN today.

We did not go into detail on what those alternative sources of funding would be, and you'll see in my next slide that we are asking for your feedback about this idea. We also suggested that we want to continue to enhance the strategic planning, the operational planning and the budgeting process to ensure that international organization best-practices are achieved and that to go back to an earlier question, that people are able to actively participate in these processes. If we were able to adopt alternative sources of funding, this could lessen the dependency on the current registrar-funding model.

On item 5 which is one that I know is important to all of us, and that is the continued security and stability of the Internet's unique identifiers. When we worked together to establish ICANN, probably the first and foremost topic in the discussion was how to ensure that NUCO - because we had named ICANN at the time, that NUCO would be able to fulfill its mission with the unique indicators.

So, one of the topics the PSC has engaged in exploring is, in what ways could the IANA function be improved in efficiency or responsiveness. Does further automation play a role in that and how? And another topic that we have discussed is the implementation after discussion with VeriSign and the United States Department of Commerce of something called the Route Server Management Transition Completion Agreement.

Among the proposals that we have on the table, we had discussed amending the by laws to confirm that ICANN's headquarters would remain in the United States. We talked about how ICANN can be a thought leader on issues related to security and stability that are consistent with ICANN's narrow technical mission, but also enable ICANN to play a critical role in this area.

We've talked about amending the by-laws. In some ways, we haven't incorporated it. And we've talked about continuing discussions with the department of Commerce of the United States on streamlining the ICANN function and discussing the root server management transition.

At the end of our paper, we included three questions that we asked ourselves and we're asking you. The President's Strategy Committee laid out five areas. Perhaps there are others that you would ask to be considered. So, we're asking you whether the consultation and the discussion process as we're outlining it, and I think Paul will go into detail about that - is it right? Is it about right? Do you think it needs some modifications? Have we identified the right five key elements for an uncapturable, accountable, internationalized, stable and secure ICANN in a post JPA world? And have the initiatives that the President's Strategy Committee identified, are those sufficient to meet the objectives?

Paul, I think I'm handing back to you at this point. Do you want to... I've got the slides up. Sorry, I'll put you back up if up want me to do that at this point so you can just talk and people I think can...

PAUL TWOMEY:

Thank you, I might pick up on some of the points you've made. First of all, can I congratulate APNIC for the streaming and chatroom while you've been talking, I've actually been watching your transcript and your presentation on my laptop, it works very well. I think too, before we start the discussions, I want to make a few points about the sort of discussions that you've seen, that Marilyn has presented. Why should you care? I suppose, that might be one of the questions worth addressing, if you don't mind the pun.

For many of you, you may not participate directly in the ICANN process. I know, the EC members, Paul does very actively and a number of members do, but for many of you, you may not interact with the ICANN process directly. But your participation is very important for several reasons.

First of all, the ICANN model has become a new model for international event governance which has, as you well know and draw a lot of attention through the WSIS and the Internet governance forum process and it simply strengthened and got more acceptance, and indeed, it has become something of a beacon for the sorts of Internet governance that all of us in the organizations like the NRO and the RIRs and ISOC and others, in our different ways represent. Bottom-up, participatory, international, meritocratic, broad consensus, many stakeholders, and open processes where authority comes from the power of ideas, not from the power of position. So, in some respects, even if your view is very narrow - I'm a person who attends APNIC; I would recommend to you that the sort of things we're talking about is that, ICANN is another organization who is standing for a type of international Internet governance, a type of governance and technical coordination which we have not seen before in the international arena and which many other players are having to adapt to.

So, our aim is to put in place an institutional framework that has the confidence of a global multi-stakeholder community and which can stand for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years and be a different sort of model for coordination in the 21st century, than the sort of 19th and 20th century models which tended to direct themselves to intergovernmental organizations.

First and foremost, why should you care? You should care because we're a sister organization and in some respects are an umbrella organization, and therefore our stability is your stability.

Secondly, to come specifically to addressing the issues, especially some suggestions about not being caught up in ensuring that we don't get caught up with problems of capture, I think this is a very important part and will become increasingly important and valuable to the addressing community.

The global policies which have presently been coordinated for addressing on the formation of the IPv4 address allocation system from the IANA unallocated pool. The similar one for IPv6, the confirmation of the present processes for ASN allocation. These are all incredibly important, because A - this is a final way for all the RIR processes to come to a global conclusion. The second one and this is very important, is that it allows other stakeholders to have a view of the process, and of course, you allow that same thing in original Internet registries, but the ICANN Governmental committee is a large committee of consumers and users interest, the CC community and others have had a window and insight into this. And importantly, what the ICANN model has successfully done and proven by too many law suits that I don't like to be participating in myself, but has firmly proven that the present structure withstands any trust action.

And that the final decision-making by the Board that's brought together from a range of interests, making the decision - makes those decisions long-term and sustainable and we have defended a number of Board decisions against any Trust action and that has held up. And I think that's important and will be important for the addressing community going forward, is looking at issues that will confront you in terms of the future of addressing. That where there are times that you feel as a member it is necessary for having a global policy and then it being confirmed, it can be confirmed in a way through your participation in the address of the supporting organization and through to the ICANN Board. This confirms a way to give you stability and confidence in those processes.

So, there are a couple of points. But the final point I'll make is, Marilyn pointed out some discussion about legal entities, legal entities in residency. One of the things we will keep working on in the PSC in terms of producing papers is to share with the community, the practical administrative issues we see in trying to run international non-profit organization and how to run those processes in ways that are addressing - what are all the legal issues and administrative issues we face in trying to be this stakeholder international non-profit organization? And it is in that analysis that the PSC has seen that potentially, there might be some benefits in taking advantage of other jurisdictional legal structures, but also, in enforcing and coming to the conclusion that our present status in the United States is a good one and our headquarters in the United States we think is worth being reinforced.

So just to give you the context, we're not playing with jurisdictions, because it sounded like a fun thing to do. We're trying to address the issues of - what's the best way, even if it is the perfect way about legally giving expression to the functions we have to perform, recognizing that there is not a well-established international non-profit organization, legal basis - you know, at least not on this registry. So perhaps, there are some comments and two or three points. What we would like now is to open the floor to discussion and ask people in the room if they've got thoughts or questions to come to the microphone. I will ask if you do come to the microphone, can you speak very directly into the microphone, otherwise I won't hear you. But Marilyn, will help you to help coordinate that or Keith can help to coordinate that in the room.

KEITH DAVIDSON:

Is this microphone on? Are there any questions for Paul or Marilyn. And if you're coming to the microphones, there's one over here and one over here. And in addressing questions, could you please introduce yourselves for the scribes to record on screen.

PAUL WILSON:

Good afternoon Paul, Paul Wilson here from APNIC. I'd like to say thanks to you first of all for the useful feedback about the web cast and so on - it's good to know that it's working well for you and it's great to be able to bring you here, even if it is interrupting your daughter's birthday!

I just had a few questions, probably clarifications of things that you've already covered in the presentation, but just for the sake of clarity, about the way that the PSC, the President's Strategy Committee is meant to operate, I'm just interested to know what's the term of the President's Strategy Committee, what is its scope onboard assuming that it is ongoing, what is the scope beyond this list and it is really, I suppose that's a question as to whether we're looking at it at the PSC as part of an ongoing evolution, and will it be adding to that list as time goes on?

I didn't also notice any time frames with the five items on the list and so I'm wondering, whether any of them have strict time frames or whether they're ongoing processes in themselves? So, I'm sorry if I'm asking you to repeat anything, but I thought it might be useful to have those points of information in one answer. Thank you.

PAUL TWOMEY:

No, thank you, Paul. I'm quickly trekking back through our own website to see if I could find the right answers. When the President's Strategy Committee was established in 2005, in the meeting in December 2005, it was a broad resolution. It is an open-ended resolution. It doesn't set a term for the president's strategy committee, but the committee members themselves have turned over and the topics they have examined have changed over time. We will have to review the committee and we have a process now for the review of all institutions in ICANN every three years. We will undoubtedly have to review the PSC sometime in the future.

Very importantly, the PSC does not get to set a policy. What it is, is simply just a committee of members who are selected to give a broader range of views, but whose real job is to help drive some staff work and really put forward proposals and really drive consultation processes, and what gets reflected is mostly coming out of the consultation process. It is not a think tank that comes up with its own answer and trying to run a consultation process and then giving some context to that. And the scope is to give advice on strategic issues facing ICANN as input to the ICANN Board and community and particular input to the strategic planning process. Those of you who participated in the strategic planning process will know that the strategic plan, we revise to plan for the first half of the financial year. That is a bottom-up process, an extensive consultation with the advisory committees. That's then put up for the versions of response, and then for the second half of our financial year, we take that strategic plan and do a similar process to establish an operational plan and that falls out of the strategy plan. The PSC's role, the input issues that need to be included in the strategic plan. Marilyn, have you further comment?

MARILYN CADE:

I do, to refer you to the transaction plan, and to the back page, I want to use this as a cue card. We did suggest that the work be divided into two phases. The first phase, we call the "analysis and design project" and the second is the "implementation project", so you should think of us being in the analysis and design project, Paul, if that's helpful. And secondly, you'll see that the PSC has recommended the formation of a special expert advisory group. I think we all acknowledged in the PSC, we really misnamed that, we meant to say maybe special group advisors that could assist or broaden the thinking of the

PSC. So, that's one of the things we're asking you to comment on. Paul, we had some discussions about what and how those individuals might enhance our thinking or have access to experts who knew some things very deeply, but it is certainly something that we need your comments on, and I think that the other thing that I would say is again, do take seriously the question about, did we get the five topics right?

PAUL WILSON:

Thank you, and thank you to Paul as well.

PETER NETTLEFOLD:

My question is about the role of governance in ICANN, I'm not sure if everyone is aware but currently there's a prescribed advisory committee under the ICANN structure, the Government advisory committee and as far as I can see, there's no mention of a specific role for governments in the IIC papers. I'm wondering if that's something that's open for discussion in consultation or whether ICANN already has a position on the role of governance post JPA?

PAUL TWOMEY:

That's a good question, and we have actually - first of all, we've had members of the - on the PSC, the Chair of the PSC was on the PSC and then came off when he became Chair. Yrio is a member of the GAC from Finland and we do that as a representation to follow that on from the committee. I think what we will find in terms of Government reactions, frankly is a two-fold process. One is that clearly some Governments will talk a little bit to the US Government, and that's an integral process. But in terms of the committee, I see we're likely to get responses from the GAC members I think when the next version of the documentation comes out. That tends to be the nature of what happens in terms of their responses, but it's certainly looking for Government input.

We had a process after the WSIS conclusion where we set up a committee between the Board and the GAC members and specifically talked about ways of improving GAC or Government enhanced cooperation within ICANN and there were a series of amendments and changes that took place as a consequence of that. Probably the most important of which is that the GAC membership has become increasingly involved in issue formation around indicative policy issues inside the supporting policies, so trying to decrease the process. There's a number of other issues which Donna Austin could probably give you feedback on the side.

What is worth noting is that I think for the third time in ICANN's history, the ICANN board said to the governments, do you want a greater role on the Board? Would you like more seats on the Board? Would you like more voting membership on the Board? And for the third time, the governments and the Government's advisory committee said, we're happy with the present process of having a non-voting liaison. So, that's probably the best way to say it.

MARILYN CADE:

Paul, I'll just add on to that. When you go to the website, you'll see that there were 22 responses to the first stage of the public consultation and Steph has done a great high-level summary. But we were asked that question - a couple of GAC members mentioned, we notice that you didn't explicitly talk about us and other respondents did talk about the role of Government, which as I recall in a couple of cases, saying that the gap should continue to be advisory, but that's the state of what we've heard so far, and certainly, to reinforce or support what Paul has said, my understanding is that we will be expecting to hear more at the meeting in Cairo and probably in the next stage of the public consultation as well from the governments themselves.

BILL MANNING:

Bill Manning, shorter than Paul Wilson, so I'm adjusting the mic! A comment and a question. There was a recent NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration) comment or follow-up from the JPA midterm review - that NTIA comment is not being calculated in the current IAC papers. Will we see that calculated in some point in the future?

PAUL TWOMEY:

Bill, yes, the submission from - all submissions will be incorporated. There is a process that we've undertaken. The documents that you have in front of you are the documents that were out for consultation and when we've received significant - I suppose we're seeing how significant responses we get. And we probably should go through the timetable at the end because it clearly points out, we're doing a first phase of consultation and amendment and then seeing before we get to the final.

BILL MANNING:

The NTIA comments didn't seem to jive with it so it would be nice to see those harmonized. The second question is to do with a question about the non-severability of the IANA task items. Does ICANN see the IANA task items as severable? That's my question.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Bill, I think the best answer to that is that we have three instruments to operate the functions of IANA. There is the IANA procurement contract with the United States Department of Commerce and also a memorandum of understanding and an amended MoU with an enduring task force for those functions. And we see all three documents as being important.

DAVID WOODGATE:

Telstra Australia. David Woodgate. I hope this isn't too much off the general topic, speaking at a personal level, I'm aware of ICANN taking a very active role in domain names. I'm aware of them having the administration of IANA, but most of the policy regarding addressing seems to have been left up to the discussion in the RIRs and the IETF. Going beyond the JPA arrangement - there's somebody's mobile phone! Do you envisage that ICANN may induct getting more involved in - getting more directly involved in the policy specifications of addressing it especially as we head towards v4 exhaustion and v6 introduction?

PAUL TWOMEY:

Perhaps I'll answer the question in this way. Our formal role is very clearly laid out in the memorandum of understanding with the RIRs and the NRO and we have a policy of coming up to the supporting organizations and the ICANN Board. At the moment, that process tends to be, I'm not going to say rubber-stamped but a final-stage process and most of the consultation work takes place within your own contexts. And, we have staff members who attend all the RIR participation.

I expect in the future two things, or three things. First of all, I expect that we will further augment and have more of a technical policy staff if you like inside ICANN, the people who are thought leaders in the Internet engineering space who will contribute to all public debates, as individuals, in terms of thought leadership and not in terms of trying to change the process, the policy process but actually engaging further. That's not to undermine the people currently doing the work, who will have further capacity in that.

I think secondly, the RIR community, the NRO and others may also want to think about some of the issues that emerge. What are the benefits that the ICANN model offers them? And I think that there are clear benefits that it offers the addressing committee. One of which is that it is a structured way to make certain that one engage business, consumers, governments and other stakeholders in discussions and dialogue and do it in one place and do it in a global way.

And I don't want anyone in any way to say that that doesn't take place in the regional processes that you have in place but you may find yourselves at some stage, for certain issues you might find that capacity in ICANN useful.

The third one is that we obviously have a concern about v4 depletion and we have a concern about v6 uptake and we will speak to those issues as we think is important.

Do you mind if I take a segway from there and just to come back to Bill's question so I can be quite clear - Bill, as we said, we see that we have three instruments on the table, one that we operate IANA. We do not speak for the United States Government and we do not speak for the engineering task force. If either of those have a different perspective between them, we would think that that is probably unfortunate; we'd like to have clarity, but we don't speak for either. So I can be quite clear about that, please don't think anything that I've said as being my interpretation of how the United States Department of Commerce or how the IETF sees the memorandum of understanding.

NARESH AJWANI:

I'm a secretary of Indian service provider and president of a business that is respected by company SIFY. From the outset, let me give you a congratulations and can I convey the message to your daughter, happy birthday to her.

I also would like to make an observation that your colleague, Marilyn who made the presentation before you, very aptly, very subtly and very articulately said that ICANN is the eco-system of business. We acknowledge it. We also would like to have an understanding from you - how can we engage more stakeholders in this eco-system of ICANN? Especially from the developing countries developing countries like India where we have 180,000 cyber cafes who give access, who sell access and Internet to people for less than one cent. This 180,000 cyber cafes have got the association and we would like to play the role in ICANN. Can you tell us the way please?

MARILYN CADE:

Hi Paul, can I volunteer to take that one?

PAUL TWOMEY:

Yes, you can respond.

MARILYN CADE:

So, I am an active member of the business constituency in the GSO and how about if you and I spend some time talking about how to get you involved, at least at that level and maybe Donna can join me and we can talk about others. We did in the business constituency, we have a special category where the membership fee can be waived, so we can easily follow up on finding a way to get the association more involved in the near term and follow up on additional ways to link you in to the staff.

ICANN has a fellowship program as well which offers a way for people from developing countries to be able to get involved and get financial sponsorship to attend an ICANN meeting, so I can ask the ICANN staff to join me in that discussion and perhaps we can talk more about that.

NARESH AJWANI:

Thank you, these 180,000 cyber cafes don't need any financial waiver, they need to have a stake in an ecosystem. They are not very rich, but they are rich enough to not make their ICANN more dependant on any other financial resources other than themselves. So please let us know where we can contribute financially; we want to play a bigger role. Thank you.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Can I just say thank you very much for that and perhaps expand that request and to all people in the room to think about. Asia firstly has 533 million users of the Internet, but only stands at 14% penetration rates. North America has about 358m Internet users and stands with a 78% penetration rate and I'm talking from cradle to grave. The clear message is that the Internet is going to Asia. In terms of content and we are very concerned as a global body that we do what we can and engage as many people in the Asia-Pacific region to participate within the ICANN processes so far from that question, to ask the same question for everybody in the room, for any thoughts you've got and for any

recommendations that we can follow up on to try to get further engagement, while at the same time, not turning that into a budget engagement, but we are trying to get that further engagement and we think that that is very important.

RANDY BUSH:

Randy Bush, IIJ. If ICANN sees the relationships of the ICANN to the US Government and ICANN to the IETF or specifically IANA as separate, then I guess that we can now be comfortable that the ARPA zone will be DNS signed now?

PAUL TWOMEY:

That's a good question, Randy. But I will take it on notice I think. I will have to check what the status is.

RANDY BUSH:

My understanding of the status is ICANN is allowing the US Government to tell it that it cannot sign the ARPA zone which is under the control of the IETF. And for which you have a specific request from the IETF to sign.

RAUL ECHEBERRIA:

From LACNIC. Hi Paul, nice to see you.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Hi, Raul.

RAUL ECHEBERRIA:

So, I have participated in a similar session last week in South America, but I really want to speak very much, last week in order to get people to express themselves but it is difficult to resist twice in a few days so I will say some things.

Let me start saying that in the medium term of CPA, the number of organizations has expressed our satisfaction with the evolution of ICANN and while we understood at the time that there are many things to do yet, we thought that it was time for transferring of total functions to ICANN. Having said that, I understand that in this opportunity, what you expect is some guidelines from us and some opinions from us and what more you have to do and concentrate on the things that I think should be changed. Whereas, you speak about capture, I was a bit surprised that there is only one question in the materials that were distributed about the capture - you're offering only one question to make opinions about it. I think that that's one point which is missing in this consultation is about the capture from yourself?

I think that I have said many times in different places that the current mechanism of appointing large numbers of Board members in ICANN, is not very open and is not a very transparent mechanism. I think that the mechanism should be changed and revised. It is not in the materials that you have distributed and I think that it is a very important point.

You also make some questions about internationalization, and definitely I'm in favour of establishing, establishing legally ICANN or legal precedence of ICANN in other countries other than the United States. Trying to help you to build the best ICANN for the community, and not the best ICANN for the United States Government. I know that you have to satisfy the requirements from the United States Government, but this is not the problem of the community, it is just, I would like to say that it is your problem, it is part of your job - don't tell me about that. And saying that there is one point that is out of discussion, that the headquarters of ICANN will continue being in the United States, I think that it is something wrong.

We cannot have an open consultation saying that there are some points that are not under discussion. But, while' I'm in favour of establishing the legal precedence, the location of the headquarters should also be part of the discussion. I'm not in favour of continuing having the headquarters of ICANN in the United States. I can see the arguments in favour of that, that you have thousands of contracts signed under the United States legal system but there are other ways to deal with this issue. If you want to open the discussion to the public, you have to put everything on the table and not only some things.

The other thing that I think - the other point that I think is very important is the transference of the IANA functions. We have to remove this kind of taboo. Everything should be discussed. The location of the headquarters, also the transfers of the IANA functions. Thank you.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Perhaps I'll respond to Raul and see if you have any further comments, Marilyn. Thank you very much for the input and for your organization's assistance with this last week.

On the issue of the Committee, I think you make a good point. The question I ask is, have you shared that with the person chairing the working group on the non-committee review, and if not, I would ask you to do so.

The nominated committee has actually been under review as part of the bundled Review required processes and so there is actually a mechanism in place at the moment to look at that, and that's somewhat related to a board review that we're presently undertaking at the same time and they're related, and we expect to have those in a foregone conclusion by the Cairo meeting I hope. So, I would just reinforce if you can make the point, happily make the point to our consultation process but also, importantly make the review to the nominating review committee. I think we're conscious of the best idea for ICANN for the community, not the best ICANN for the United States Government. And to give you an example of the sort of practical things that we're concerned about, is - I'm sure it will be in stand, let's take visas for staff. We had situations with one staff member where her home country changed the rules that applied to US citizens in terms of how many times they could visit the country before getting a visa. The United States naturally reciprocated. The result of which was that the staff member who had been working in Los Angeles could only go in and out of the country twice before she had to get a new visa outside the country and as a consequence, we had to shift that person out and find another person and it took a long time to get a base in Brussels and elsewhere. There are a number of issues like that that are difficult for us. We do have other presences in other parts of the world. We have just completed the processes of a registered foreign business registration for an office in Australia to help coordinate the operational support for the western Pacific.

We have a similar arrangement in Brussels, both of them were quite difficult to put in place because of the Californian not-for-profit benefit corporation process.

Frankly, I'm not certain that it would be any different, but we don't know if it would be any different under any other jurisdiction. I'm not sure if some of the problems we face are because they're purely American, it could be the case with any other country, not-for-profit status. So, we're just doing a review of what law is out there to give some more flexibility to some of the sorts of administrative challenges we have. I haven't got a great optimism. I think we will find potentially, some options but I don't know if we're going to solve all of our problems. One of the things that you will see in terms of the USG's response to the consultation processes is a clear statement on behalf of what they consider that the IANA is opening up for review in terms of the Joint Program Agreement.

But I certainly will take note of what you've said and also will take note of what you said about the headquarters issue. Marilyn, do you want to say any more.

MARILYN CADE:

I don't think so, thank you. Paul Twomey.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Hi, Bill.

BILL MANNING:

So, I recognize that the politics are tricky and I recognize that it is easy to get drawn into the group and it is large and can occupy all of your attention. But I think that the issues around the IANA signing of zones are very pressing and I think that the politics there need to be brought to light, because I think that ICANN's position is a very functional and a very easily understood and easily supportable one. And I think that the US Government delaying anyone doing the DNS signing of anything is a position that is very difficult to support if it comes to light. I think that the recent OMB directive, you know regarding dot.gov being signed and all of the sub-domains provides a good example to people in the US Government that should be pointed out. So I would like to second what Randy said about the impropriety of the US Government directing ICANN to not sign that ARPA. I think that it may be politically difficult to simply ignore them, because of realities with, you know VeriSign and so forth, but I believe that the best way to solve these problems is to make correspondence with them public for instance. To make very public statements about what ICANN is doing to serve the Internet community. What ICANN has been directed to do by the IAB and ICANN's position with DNS generally, and I think that's the only way that we can really get forward motion for this.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Well, thank you for that. Perhaps I can just draw your attention to a letter which is on the correspondence file, the public correspondence from myself to the APNIC assistant secretary on August 16. That's a public letter that points out that we will be proposing to them by the end of the month, a proposal for the signing of the route and if you've got perspectives, I suspect that you may want to share them more publicly as well.

KEITH DAVIDSON:

OK, are there any further questions? No other queries? Last chance before we break the link with Sydney?

MARILYN CADE:

We have a few things that we would like to cover. Paul, I think we would like to cover the rest of the consultations so I'm going to go back to the slides.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Please do, and also, why don't you look at the slides for the survey and remind people about the survey.

MARILYN CADE:

Certainly. Are you going to be able to stay with us? Will you be able to stay with us for that part?

PAUL TWOMEY:

I'll stay on, but I assume that if you're going through the slides, that means that I'll veer off the screen, so why don't you put the slides up on the screen and you talk through pages 21 onwards.

MARILYN CADE:

Happy to do that. In your packet when you came in, there were a documents and one of them was a short survey which we would like you to fill out and return to Donna or Save. There is a box in the back of the room. I think Save is standing back there waving it at you. If you have a chance to fill it out today, Save and Donna will be with you for the rest of meeting so you can give it to them later but we would very much like your comments.

We're also going to launch a second phase public consultation beginning on September 7, and that's an important opportunity for you as well to give us in more detail your written comments. And some of you may want if you're part of an organization, to do internal consultation back at the ranch so to speak, so that public consultation does provide a second opportunity for you to give us your detailed comments. We will be holding a public forum. We call this - I guess we'll be calling it a public forum on this topic at the Cairo meeting in early November. And there's going to be a number of what we're calling Town Halls in each of the regions, so I'm just going to go forward a bit and look at the dates. So far, we've been able to hold Town Halls in Montevideo in conjunction with LACNIC and on the 15th of September we will be holding a public event in Geneva on the edge of the IGF public consultation. There will then be a public consultation in Washington DC on October 1, and we'll be in Addis Ababa on December 2. We are talking about a couple of additional public forums, one of which will take place in Europe, and we're also talking about if we can find another venue or even two or Africa.

So, let me talk about what we're doing with your input. We obviously have the transcript from the questions and the responses. I took notes, I know that ICANN staff with us here did as well, so we'll be looking at what you've said, but we're also going to be reading any comments that you give us via the surveys, and I promise you that I'll be reading every one of the surveys, as well as a number of the other PSC members as well. So do take that opportunity to give us your feedback.

The discussion summary is being shared, not only with the PSC, we do a discussion summary but that will be put up on the ICANN website as well, and then we will be presenting an analysis of the survey results and we'll publish the results. We plan to update our documents based on the comments we've received and that is what will be published on September 7. And then, we will further revise our recommendations based on the surveys, the public outreach, the public meeting in Cairo and we'll be after our two or three hour public event in Cairo, we'll be finalizing recommendations and submitting them to the ICANN board for their consideration at the end of 2008.

We're trying to take this couple of public consultation opportunities very seriously and trying to do what we can to make sure that we're accessible as ICANN can be accessible; to hear your voice and to hear the views you have.

The website, we have a special link where you can post comments and where you can find the comments that have been posted by others. There's also an Improving Institutional Confidence newsletter that you can sign up for and that will keep you up-to-date with the activities going on and I see Ray at the microphone.

RAY PLZAK:

A comment regarding the consultation. I notice that several of those are in conjunction with recognizable Internet type events such as this forum here. But I didn't see a similar type of thing with either the one in Europe or in North America. What is the event associated with those? Are those going to be small private type of meetings? What are you going to do to get access in a room of this size? How are you going to invite people who couldn't necessarily be there, because you're apparently not doing it in conjunction with something else, and fur'** not doing it in conjunction with something else, why aren't you doing it in conjunction with something else.

MARILYN CADE:

Since I've expressed an opinion on that, I'll share my thoughts and then maybe Paul will comment. Holding a meeting in conjunction with APNIC and LACNIC gave us access to a certain part of the Internet community but not to all parts of the ICANN stakeholder community. So, one of the things that we will be doing at the additional event, we're thinking about in Europe and also in

North America is reaching out to all different kinds of stakeholders and trying to attract them to that meeting, because while it is really important that we talk to the Internet technical community, it is really important that we talk to civil society, what we think of as the ICANN at large community to governments, to the business community and we'll be trying to reach entities and organizations to help us react with the additional stakeholders in Europe and also in North America, not cutting short the need to also reach the technical community in both Europe and also in North America.

Probably one of our challenges, Ray, I'll just say this and go back to a point that Paul made earlier, our challenge is to reach a representative group of all of the different stakeholders of ICANN. So, we are to some extent, really dependant on not just the opportunity to interact with you face-to-face, but the opportunity to ask you to help encourage people to use the remote participation on the online participation and the mechanisms as well to make their voice heard.

Paul, you may want to add on?

PAUL TWOMEY:

um, thanks, I'd reinforce that and to give you some context, Ray, for the plans for the meeting in Europe, we've been trying to piggyback on dates; for instance in the Internet governance forum advisory group has a meeting which is similar to the time that we're thinking of doing our meeting in Geneva, to piggyback on those people coming in together. If you or Axel have any proposals or thoughts about participation in the city, we would like to hear about it. I mean, I might consider this to be a list which is a final list, we obviously have limited resources, but we might be able to certainly support if you've got any thoughts; please have a chat to Donna or Marilyn or myself if you have any thoughts or suggestions, but we are, as Marilyn, we are confronted with the challenge to get as broad as possible consultation process.

RAY PLZAK:

I understand that and I wasn't advocating for this meeting to take place at an ARIN meeting or a RIPE meeting, I was advocating for it to be in a more identifiable situation. I mean, how are you going to advertise this thing? October 1 is not that far away. September is even closer and so, if anyone - I don't know how you've advertised this in Europe and I don't know how you plan to advertise this in North America. I know that there are difficulties in people reacting to get to things like this. And I certainly advocate getting to the broadest amount of the community as you can. I'm not advocating that it should be restricted to a technical forum and reach everybody that you need to. But I don't think that when you put up a little blurb that says Geneva or Washington DC, that there's any conscious event to do that. What are you going to do to broaden participation for people to attend the events in Northern America and America?

PAUL TWOMEY:

The person with responsibility for broadening out the participation and the committee itself has talked about an expert group that we're talking about. You put your fingers on it, individuals who are multipliers, to get the message out to try to do the consultation process. I don't think that we'll be taking out newspaper advertisements, but I do think that we would like to hear from you and others, particularly people who you suggest we need to include in our outreach are people who can get the message out, so Kieran has been doing a lot of that to date but I don't want to come to the conclusion that that is finished, it is a work in progress. Your thinking and our thinking are fairly aligned and we appreciate any ideas you have to keep communication there.

We've got an e-mail address which is iic@ICANN.org and that's the e-mail address for any input so if you have any ideas, please send it through to Kieran for that.

I think that e-mail address appears in the very last line.

KEITH DAVIDSON:

OK, as there's no other questions or people standing at microphones, I think that really does conclude this session and very much on time. Thank you very much Marilyn and Paul for staying here. Thank you for taking the time today and our apologies for the intrusion on your daughter's birthday and I guess it is coming up to lunchtime in Australia, if you haven't bought her a present, now is the time to do so.

PAUL TWOMEY:

Keith, you do not know how true you are. I've been sourcing the gift online while we've been speaking so I'm off to do that right now!

Can I thank you and Paul and Sam and others and members of the EC for giving us this time. We appreciate the re-organization of the agenda for your meeting and we appreciate that very much.

Can I perhaps finish with the last exaltation, a little bit about sharing our pain. As we finish - as we go through the Joint Program Agreement and come to the conclusion, many members of the community and internationally like to see that. Many people say that we would like to see this conclusion. Please understand when we come to that process, there will inevitably, what all of the parties have been involved in, particularly the United States Government who have, you know, played a positive and relatively quite benign role in the evolution of ICANN and its processes; everybody is going to need to point to evidence which says, everybody is comfortable now. This has achieved its objective. And that way of thinking is quite common in North America, and so North American interested parties are likely to write submissions.

If people in the Asia-Pacific have a view, please write it down and put a submission in. Often those of us in the Asia-Pacific go to meetings and do most of the communications over coffee or in the corridors. We don't tend to do it at meetings or microphone as much. This is one of the areas where I would ask as many members of your community with an interest in this, please communicate it and use the feed back forms and write the submissions. Any of the questions - people have asked questions, if you have the view, please convey it because we're going to need to share, particularly in a north American culture, we're going to need to point to evidence and point to the submissions and say, this is what people thought. So that's just my final comment.

KEITH DAVIDSON:

Thank you for that Paul, and thank you to Marilyn for coming to New Zealand to be with us. Marilyn is a member of Internet NZ and has since 1990-something and is one of our prime outreach advocates on this planet.

And I think Paul's final closing comments were quite useful in terms of where the rest of this afternoon is going. After afternoon tea, we have a number of short presentations on Internet governance and a useful lead-up towards the Internet governance forum in Hyderabad. So, I think probably if you don't have questions now, that you want to take forward in that arena also relating to the operation of ICANN and Internet governance and its broader sense, then you probably will have a better sense at the closing today. But anyway, my thanks to you both, Paul and Marilyn.

Now, we'll break for afternoon tea and if we could be back in the room just a few minutes early at say 3:12. We have quite a number of speakers for the last session, so we would appreciate just a few minutes head start if we could. Thank you.

(End of session)