05 November 2008 3rd Session Transcription hide ALAC 3rd Session – Policy Wrap-up Meeting – Cairo ICANN Meeting (Held November 05, 2008) Legend Name: First name of member of group Name?: If we think we might know who's speaking but aren't 100% sure. Male: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a male. Female: Unsure of who's speaking, but know it's a female. cuts out: Audio cuts out for less than 2 seconds. We may have missed something. We do not put this if it's just natural silence where no-one is speaking. We only put this if we can hear that there was briefly a technical problem with the phone line and/or the recording which resulted in temporary loss of sound. # List of Participants Important Note: Please note that this should not be considered to be an "official" list of the attendees. This is just a list of the participants that we were able to identify during the transcription. There may have been others present that didn't speak and some people may have participated that were not on the official list of attendees published on the internet. Aguirre, Carlos Aizu, Izumi Ashton-Hart, Nick (ICANN Staff) Bachollet, Sébastien Brendler, Beau Brent, Doug (ICANN COO) Crocker, Steve (SSAC Chair) Greenberg, Alan Guerra, Robert Langdon-Orr, Cheryl (ALAC Chair) Leibovitch, Evan Muehlberg, Annette Peake, Adam Salgueiro, José Ovidio Samuels, Carlton Scartezini, Vanda Seltzer, Wendy Seye Sylla, Fatimata Vande Walle, Patrick Vansnick, Rudi Xue Hong # Robert: …experts that can provide either an At-Large view or a user perspective; networking with the other groups so we can build trust with them I think is particularly important; reporting back and making sure that opportunities exist for enhanced interaction between that community and this one. You know, so I would say that apart from being active, I think building of trust, because I think that’s one thing that at times for these meetings we don’t have time to be outside of the room and so stuff that we can do outside the room between meetings I think is particularly useful. Cheryl: Carlton. Carlton: In my view, I think liaison is… I would expect liaison to be a sounding board on the other side to see what it is that they’re expecting of us as well as becoming a conduit for our concerns into those other groups. I think there’s one very important thing that I think liaison does. The issue is like an early warning signal, if you think about it, to give us some kind of an early indicator of thinking in that area, could probably help to focus ourselves, we look for common ground. The thing is we’re trying to have consensus, so, you know, that early warning signal would be important for us, I think. Cheryl: Izumi. Izumi: Yeah, quite similar to what Carlton said. I think the liaison often has a role to… sort of sensing or heads up kind of thing in the area. Even when information in general are released in a public, open manner so that any member of ALAC or At-Large has the opportunity to look into these documents such as Board review report or whatever, the fact of the matter is it’s very difficult for an ALAC member to read everything in every jurisdiction. So if we have sort of an area specialist who constantly monitors the policy areas or whatever potentially important to the individual users and consults with our colleagues or, you know, send some as I said heads-up signal, that is very important and vital. Of course, the other way around, that he or she could sense a sort of early concern of the ALAC or At-Large which may not be directly visible to that area’s, such as say ccTLD or whatever, then can bring in that issue, consult with that particular community whether this is of their interest or of their importance, and then, you know, act as a sort of go-between. Thank you. Cheryl: Patrick, then Evan. Patrick: Yes. Well, I think what we expect liaison is to be if not an expert, at the very least does have a very good knowledge of the subject he’s dealing and the other entity, either an AC or an SO. And typically this person should also be trusted by the ALAC in the sense that often this person will be required to talk and bring in the views of the ALAC without having really all the time necessary to consult properly all colleagues. So this person should have I would say a broad feeling of what ALAC thinks, and this is especially challenging when we come up to very technical issues that are sometimes discussed in ACs and SOs because often the subject itself is not easy to understand. So it is also… I think we should also expect from our liaison to come to us and explain with simpler words – I wouldn’t say “simple words,” but a language a bit simpler – what are actually the issues and what is suggested to address these issues. And… Yeah. And that’s about all. But I would insist on the fact that up to now I think, for example, Alan has done a great job as the GNSO liaison and Alan knows the GNSO very well and I think it’s important to have people who are really able to follow things on a daily basis and also who would be interested in the matter no matter of the fact that they would be liaisons or not, for example. You might have an interest in IDNs, even if you’re not the liaison to the IDN work group, because once… if you are nominated to the IDN work group, at least you will be able to get up to speed very quickly. And I think it’s important in technical groups among others to be able to jump into the discussion without having a long time to catch up with what is the gist of the discussion. Cheryl: Evan. Evan: I would just quickly make a note about language that is now in the Interim Report on the ALAC Review, that mentions about the fact that ICANN should be recognizing ALAC as the premier voice of the internet user. And the only reason I bring that up is because another thing that the liaison needs to do is almost to insert themselves upon the body they’re liaising too and make sure that body recognizes this channel. Now while that particular wording may go through some changes, the intent of the BCG appears clear in that they would like to clearly delineate the purpose of ALAC and the role that we play. And I think it’s necessary for the liaison to sort of nudge the group they’re talking to and make sure that they’re aware of this as they make their judgements. Cheryl: If I may with the indulgence just say one of the issues that we discussed when we were going through the Board liaison interviews was of course their ability to act as almost a promotion point, a way that anyone who’s taking a liaison role… It happened to be in the context of a Board liaison, but are you also meaning not just to act as a well recognized channel for us into the group but is there a promotional aspect for the good of our organization in the eyes of the group they’ve gone to as part of that? Evan: I would call it more “advocacy” than “promotion,” but yes. Cheryl: I just wanted to clarify because I think that’s an important point. You know I agree with it. Yes, Beau. Beau: Yeah, I also agree with the advocacy part of it. I think that the liaisons have to believe to some degree in the ALAC but at the same time also be engaged in trying to help it improve in the eyes of other organizations. But I just wanted to add quickly at the risk of duplicating what anybody else might have said, is there has to be a visible presence of that person here with us. You know, not naming names but… and I know it’s not a liaison, but I’ve for instance never met Ross Rader. I don’t know who he is. So we need to… You know, we didn’t meet Patrick even though he’s not an official… Not Patrick. The guy from the President’s Strategy Committee. Not an official liaison, but we didn’t him till yesterda-… or the other day. So there has to be a connection to this group if our name is going to be part of that person’s job title. Cheryl: Any other speakers on this point? Go ahead. Sorry, Adam, did I miss you? Because if I… Adam: inaudible 09:17 Cheryl: Okay, thank you. Adam: I wanted to emphasize this point about PR and relationships that… to emphasize the point of PR and relationships. I think one thing that coming new to this and also still talking to people a lot on the outside about the ALAC and getting a lot of feedback on sort of “Adam, how are you getting on in the ALAC?” it’s people basically don’t look as favourably on the hard work that I can see going on as they should do, and I think there’s a very strong role for the liaisons to make sure that work that the ALAC does is transmitted to the other organizations. And that doesn’t mean that somebody working on GNSO simply provides – and I don’t mean to… – I mean, just simply provides information on the policy issues of the GNSO, but to actually present what the ALAC does and how the ALAC does it, because there’s a lot of comments like “Oh, this is just 15 people in a room making up policy on their own” and “Oh, they don’t actually do anything.” So I think there’s a very important sort of PR role about the ALAC actually does do stuff, and you’ve done a lot of stuff and you’ve done it in interesting ways. So and I hope… I will add that we will do it in interesting ways after this meeting, but I think this PR role’s really important. Cheryl: Indeed. Any further speakers on that matter? In which case, I actually think we’ve got from the notes that I’ve certainly scribbled, and I trust staff has captured far more eloquently than I’m able to, got a few bullet points which I actually think make quite a good job description regardless of to where the liaisons are liaising. And I’d like to from this meeting now tidy these up – not do it in-session because that’s not profitable, it’s not useful of our time, and I’m painfully aware that in four minutes we will have a guest – but while we are all together in Cairo, this gets written up, popped out to the list, and if we feel warm and fuzzy about these high-level motherhood statements, when we review the rules of procedure, which is in fact one of the main things we will be doing this year at the very beginning of our time immediately after Cairo – that is when it’s going to begin – that we can enshrine these high-level expectations, without, you know, “And thou shalt do 2.57 of the meetings in every six and a half weeks” or whatever type metrics, but these nice high-level ones. Is there any further discussion or points that wish to be made on the matter of what we expect for all of our liaison and roles? We… Yes, go ahead, Adam. Adam: Can I move on slightly from liaison and ask if we’re talking about other positions – i.e., describing what ALAC members do – or is that another point on the agenda somewhere else? Cheryl: No, that’s exactly what… You’re a perfect segue, if you’ve got something to say, I was just about to say so now, let’s look at ourselves individually. laughter Off you go. Adam: Okay. I just sent a URL on the Skype chat and it will take you to the Nominating Committee’s description of leadership positions 2008, and this describes the job that I’ve just taken up. Somewhere down there you will find out what I committed to and signed up for, and it’s not a lot – in terms of descriptive text is what I mean. It’s 18 hours a month and 3 meetings a year, and that’s about 2 months, and I had to sign off from my employer to do that. And so when we consider things like requirements and, you know, performances and so on, we have to consider what people have signed up for. I’m quite aware of how ICANN works and expect to do more, but that’s the point, one of the points is if we’re recruiting people, looking for people, then they need to know what they’re going to do. The Nominating Committee in particular will be wanting a re-description, you know, a new description of this position because there will be three people selected next year, so this is something to consider. How do you want to describe ALAC, because you’re going to get three new members? Well, possible three new members. There will be three seats available, so they need to be described. Cheryl: And indeed, it saddens me greatly to know that… I don’t know what prior Chairs have done, but I do know I was approached when I first became Chair by the then leads in the NomCom nucleus, I think they called themselves, and I indicated that what people were signing up for was about one-fifth of what the actual expectations are in terms of hours and that we were not going to be surprised if when people arrive in the midst of us, they go through culture shock if not downright fear unless we start telling them up front that as a NomCom of course you can afford to stand back to some extent and say, “I’m only going to do what I signed up for,” because we have no ability for recall or re-vote as yet. But we do I think do a disservice to that and drive a wedge between NomCom appointees and those of the RALO representative appointees if energies aren’t equal, so I think it’s doing a disservice across the board, both in this committee and outside of it. Adam: I’ll just quickly respond. I think, you know, there’s just been the APRALO election and there was no description within that of what the person was being elected for. There’s an expectation that the person would probably know, but I do think it should be written down and described in terms, as the NomCom tries to do, of expectations on work, hours, and so on, because many of us do actually have to sign off with our organizations on the time we’re using. Some of us don’t, and in my case it actually doesn’t matter, but that’s not the point. But it was a formal thing that I had to do with my director and so on. So I think it’s something for all of us, not just the NomCom, to actually make sure it’s known what we’re signing up for. Cheryl: And if I can channel Darlene who would be saying this if she were here, the matters of travel. We can’t just spring extra-regional things on, we need to build in “and a possible other travel activities may be called for” because for her to travel ends up having to be signed off by I think three different levels of her department and ends up with the minister for her department. Now this is not the sort of thing that you can decide “I’ll just pop to the IGF in 29 days.” She can’t decide now she’d like to be in Hyderabad on the 3rd of December – it’s not going to work. So we need to build in job descriptions which cover contingencies. They’re not seen as requirements, but there are various contingencies and in the tighter economic times we’re in, not all our employers are going to be as generous as they have been up until now. Is there any further discussion on this matter? If not, I’m… Yes? Go ahead, Nick. Just stop drawing things to a close then. Nick: You will find that a link to the… a link to the link which Adam has put on the Skype chat is now on the Cairo Documents page. Cheryl: The ever-efficient staff catching up with us as we meander through at high speed these agendas. I want to firstly note and welcome Steve Crocker from SSAC to our table. I want to apologize for the dim lighting, but we can either see the screen or each other, so we don’t have a choice. And I simply want to wind up by making the following proposal on the prior agenda item, and that is that by the December meeting, we have on list discussed a set of proposed high-level requirements and job descriptions that will be created between the close of this meeting and our November meeting. So between now and November, we will be discussing and dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, doing the wordsmithing, and in our December meeting we will have a vote on these matters and therefore able to move forward with review of our Rules of Procedure, our accountability framework, how we’re going to measure qualitative as opposed to quantitative information, and most importantly be able to give it to Nominating Committee and any other person in the organization who would like to know what the expectation is if they think they can come and play in our sandpit. Welcome, Steve, and I think the floor is yours, sir. Steve: Thank you very much, Cheryl. It’s a pleasure to be here. Over the past period of time, I’m not sure exactly how to measure it, but some number of months, the interactions and coordination and cooperation between SSAC and ALAC have reached a much higher level of activity and success. It’s been a pleasure to work with Cheryl. Robert Guerra has been on our member… has been liaison from ALAC to SSAC. I have a very particular bias with respect to liaisons in our environment in that I like the members of our committee to be more the same than different. So my view of liaisons from other groups, whether it’s from ALAC or GAC or whatever, is that they are full members of our committee and should function as such. And on that score, we take proposed members, proposed liaisons and ask a couple of questions so that there’s a mutual comfort level. And that’s been successful and it’s been a pleasure to work with Robert. I appreciate very much… I know your schedule’s very packed and we’ve had difficulty finding a slot, and I know that this is a very constrained period of time, so I prepared just a couple of slides actually with the help of Dave Piscitello who’s double-booked elsewhere. And who else was here? Jim Galvin from SSAC, Robert of course… Cheryl: Please j-… Gentlemen, please join us at the table. We don’t like having people hiding behind. There’s a seat up here next to Steve and over next to Robert. There’s power. laughter Steve: Anybody else? We’re… SSAC does not have a natural time when all the members come together. Only a handful are actually in Cairo and there’s multiple activities underway, so… You’re talking to… Make him comfortable, go sit next to him. Cheryl: Yes. Make us all feel comfortable. Steve: It’s not for you, it’s for the… So the… I really came to respond to the two agenda topics that were listed, WHOIS and a general list of DNS topics. So on WHOIS, there are kind of two, uh… pause sore thumbs, as well, or… I’m not sure what the right analogy is, but areas where there’s a need for some attention. One is the more recent one, which is in adding IDNs to the root, the complimentary issue comes up – “Well, what about internationalizing the contact information that goes along with domain names?” And that opens up kind of a large can of worms, only a portion of which is the representation of the character set. The larger one is okay, so I want to know who’s got that registration and I go to WHOIS and I get something and it’s in Chinese or it’s in Arabic, and as a usual American who knows nothing about the rest of the world, what do I do with that information? I can’t even parse the characters much less do anything with it. So something has to be done there and we put that up there as a problem rather than what a specific solution looks like. The other area in WHOIS that demands attention is we’ve all watched this extended, inconclusive, contentious process of “Whither goes WHOIS? What is it doing?” I have the benefit or the disability, if you will, of having been around from the very beginning, and the original WHOIS mechanism was intended to provide a way to reach essentially the operators of hosts in case there was a problem. This has now been expanded well beyond the original intentions and is… Hi, there. This is Doug Brent, Chief Operating Officer of ICANN. Doug: Coming to listen for a change. Steve: Yeah. So the… We now have what essentially is a white pages for the internet in a way, and a lot of tensions that have emerged ranging from privacy concerns and very reasonable natural ones on the one hand versus “How do you track down people who are causing a problem?” as viewed from different perspectives – intellectual property, for cybersquatting, whatever, law enforcement, whatever. And the perspective that we have from SSAC is that there really are a lot of policy issues for which it’s not SSAC’s business to determine where the boundaries are where there are value trade-offs. That said, we’re also watching a really inconclusive and ineffective process throughout the rest of ICANN that is very disturbing, and it looks to us as if the essence of it is a lack of belief that it’s possible to resolve these different conflicts using technical means, and therefore people just are retreating to their corners and nothing much constructive is happening. We believe that there are technical means, access control mechanisms and directory systems and so forth which are not novel, which are relatively straightforward technology, and the real problem is that the perspective is “Oh, that would be a big change.” Yes, it would be a big change, but borrowing a line and succumbing fully to it, I think the attitude must be “Yes, we can,” and just get it done. Cheryl: laughter Male: inaudible 24:58 Steve: Yeah. Well, it’s a good line. I like to use it. Next slide. We’ve spent a lot of time over our lifetime looking at various aspects of domain registrations, protecting them and so forth. One of the things that always comes to my mind is that, whether or not it’s within ALAC’s purview and mindset to act on behalf of the users and registrations and so forth, one area that emerged over the past few months and caught… I’ll just speak personally, caught me by surprise is that… We have a lot of experience with hijacking and miscues by users who let their registrations lapse or don’t protect their access to the registrar, but we’ve encountered situations, including ICANN’s own domain was hijacked using weaknesses at the registrar and that were not due to weaknesses in the procedures within the registrant. And not that this from the theoretical point of view should have been a surprise, but the fact that it actually emerged, that registrars are getting hacked and that the users of course are getting affected by that. So we’ve looked recently at three incidents and we’ve written a report about that and gave a report on Monday, and the net of it is that registrars… there’s a spread among registrars of the business practices that they use, and it tends to be bimodal – mass production on the one side and very, very high-end and expensive on the other hand. And so here is a provocative question: Is there a need for something in the middle that provides a higher degree of protection but for broader audience and so forth? Next slide. There’s been a huge amount… Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, I see. That’s deliberate. There have been a huge amount of interest in the weaknesses in DNS. We’ve known for a very long time about cache poisoning. Some partial measures were put in place years ago to reduce the chance that an intruder or an eavesdropper could send a fake response to somebody who was asking a question and those methods were exposed earlier this year as being far weaker than had been previous thought. Dan Kaminsky found a way to sort of permeate those just instantly. And quite a lot of work during the first half of the year went on behind the scenes to bring out improvements to DNS systems. The software vendors all got together, there were a lot of urgent meetings, and this became publicly visible in the June-July-August timeframe with full disclosure in August. And as far as it was disclosed, with all of the fixes made available it also became very clear that the fixes were not as good as they had been thought to be. So we are in an awkward state and there is more patching going on, adding entropy to the queries in the form of diddling with the case, with the capitalization of the queries is a cute trick and it’s a nice partial measure. But all of this has refocused attention on DNSSEC which is another significant change to the overall system, requires a lot of people to do a lot of things, and again, you know, my view on this has always been “So what?” It’s a lot of work, but over a period of time we can do it, we will do it, and it must be done. And I think that that message is now a lot more palatable and a lot more people are paying attention to that, and I would counsel ALAC and whomever you’re able to talk to to raise the visibility of that. We’d be happy to work with you on those matters. And that may be the last slide, I think. Yeah. And so, you know, bearing in mind the shortness of the amount of time, I’m going to stop talking and turn the floor back over to you. Cheryl: And that will be rapidly turned over to questions because I know I’m accumulating a speakers list already. And predictably, I could have even without seeing known who was going to raise a question. I have Beau and I have Patrick so far. Beau: Steve, I wanted to thank you for that very clear, candid, no-BS assessment. It was really, really good. Very much appreciated. I wanted to ask you what would be most helpful to you or to the SSAC community in terms of helping with policy on these issues? The reason I ask that is some of us spent, you know, months in the process for the fast flux working group that eventually collapsed and went nowhere. The same thing with WHOIS, which has gone on for years and has now turned into this enormous grid of material that many people involved with it at a technical level don’t get, so people don’t get it obviously. What would be most helpful from this group for you, that represents users? Steve: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and I should have mentioned fast flux, another area that’s been getting a lot of attention. Well, umm, that’s kind of… that’s a great opening question of, you know… The dialogue on the WHOIS really needs to be changed in my view. And I think that insisting that we have a more informed and less heated dialogue is one of the things that you and others can do. And get the questions clarified and then ask whether or not… Help bring the focus on where the opportunities are. Let’s see, I want to try to say this in a slightly different way. The word “policy” gets used as a club, and say, “Well, that’s a policy decision,” and I hear that as “Therefore you technical guys stay the hell out of here because you don’t know anything and it’s our business.” I think that’s pretty much wrong. I have a very high respect for policy decisions and for bringing different values into an arena and having whatever the political trade-offs are, but I also have a very strong view that that has to take place within the spectrum of what’s possible. And there are two kinds of errors that happen a lot – I’m sorry I’m making a bit of a speech here. One is a lack of appreciation as to what the limits are of what can be done. There’s an old joke dating back from World War Two about the frustration of dealing with German submarines, and somebody said, “Well, why don’t we just boil the ocean?” and the response is “Well, you know, that’s sort of technically impossible,” and then the response is “I just make policy decisions. I leave the implementation up to you.” But the other side is equally bad, which is a failure to understand that there are technical solutions and a presumption that we’re limited within whatever we see right in front of us. And I think having the right level of engagement between the technical community that can tell you what can be done both in the sense of what can’t be done, what the limits are, and also what the positive possibilities are, and versus when to bring different value system trade-offs into the process I think is very important. So I would council that that is important for WHOIS. The fast flux is a relatively recent phenomena and it’s got some technical challenges to understand exactly what’s going on and when it’s useful and it’s when it’s a signal knot 34:17. I backed away from personally following the details of it and I did see that the working group fell apart. We’ve got to go pull those pieces back together and figure out what to do there. There are analogues at a different level in the routing system, just as a interesting thing. If a router fails, the great things about the internet and the routing in particular is that alternate routes are discovered and routed around. If a router fails and then comes back up, then it heals 34:53 back and forth. If the router fails, comes back up, fails, comes back up, fails, comes back… Uh-oh. Now we have the routing system going back, working very hard, packets going all over the place, turbulence in the system. And so one of the things that emerged in the history of routing system is a reaction from the… built into the system these days is reaction from the neighbouring systems, that if they see a router going up and down too rapidly, they cordon it off and say, “You’re flapping. We’re not going to talk to you no matter what you say for some period of time” – basically cut it out of the system until it settles down because that’s sort of the right response to technically phenomena that have happened. And sure enough, every once in a while there is a case where the wrong things happens. I know of a case where a major DNS operator had some problems with his software and it was causing his external appearance to look like it was flapping, and he realized just too late that he should have cut things off, fixed his software system, but everybody else cut him off the net and then he had to wait for a while before he came back up. So we understand some of these phenomena. I think we need to bring some clarity and some focus into the fast flux. When is it useful? When is it not? The other area that if you’re asking for advice, I really think that… I don’t view SSAC as owning the consumer, the user relationship with the registrars and so forth. We’ve gotten involved in that quite a bit because it’s come up, but in general I would think that there ought to be a home for somebody who speaks on behalf of the registrants. And there is no other place within ICANN where users are represented – users in the sense of registrants, domain name holders – in a broad way. Every time I ask that question, I get “Well, over at the GNSO there’s the registrars. They speak for their customers.” Well, not really. And equally about the registries. “Well, what about the Non-Commercial Constituency?” Well, there’s an awful lot of users who are not non-commercial, and in any case, they tend to be a rather specialized set. “What about the Business Constituency?” Well… None of those in my view are even a reasonable fit, much less a right place at all. So I don’t know whether that falls naturally within ALAC’s perspective, but if so I would be pleased to see a rich, strong, focussed, consumer protection-oriented voice with the appropriate amount of subject matter knowledge about the details about how all that stuff works because there’s… just having a sort of broad policy statement without engaging in the details I don’t think will be effective. Cheryl: I have a short follow-on. I do allow short follow-ons, but then just to be clear, once Beau has his short follow-on, I have Patrick, I have Robert, I have Izumi. Vanda?: And I now have Alan. Cheryl: And I now have Alan. Beau: Thank you, Cheryl, for the follow-on. A good segue to my question, which was DNSSEC, I’m very glad to hear what you’ve had to say about that and what Paul Twomey has to say about it earlier and what ICANN is saying about it. We have tried to put it in our response to the RAA, we have asked, you know, that the amendment language be added in the RAA. Is that a good idea? I mean, does that… You mentioned trying to raise the visibility of it. Is that a good venue? Steve: It’s an absolutely essential thing. One of the things that… I mean, and it’s a very broad initiative that involves basically everybody. One of the key things is that it would be very helpful for users to be signing their zones and insisting that they can pass their keys for their signed zones up through the registrars to the registries. Now there’s a lot of chicken-and-egg problems here. The registries aren’t yet ready in general – a few are, but most aren’t. When the registries start to become ready and PIR, for example, has announced and is well along the way, and MUSEUM has signed, and I’m just talking about the gTLDs at the moment. And then on the ccTLD side, we have Sweden and Bulgaria and Puerto Rico and Brazil and Czech Republic now, and a few others coming quickly. There has to be a path for the users to be able to pass their keys up or whatever, and that means applying some pressure on the registrars. I’m working with a couple of registrars, very small ones to make sure that there’s at least some path to sort of crack that egg if you will, but generally that has to be. And I think once we get that going, it’ll take off, so that would be very helpful. Sorry for going on too long on this. Cheryl: It’s passion, and we like to see that. Thank you very much. Go ahead, Patrick. Patrick: Thank you, Cheryl. Well, indeed, that was actually what I was going to talk about, Steve. It’s about DNSSEC. We as customers and as end users would benefit from DNSSEC. The trouble is that from a registrar point of view and potentially also from the registry point of view, DNSSEC is a cost, not a profit centre, and so there are very few ways for them to be convinced that they should go ahead in that direction. The only way to go ahead is to have market pressure so that they allow their customers to sign their zones. If you want to somehow convince the customers that it is actually useful, we… and I think that’s the role that we, At-Large Structures could play possibly, would be to disseminate information. But obviously you cannot… For most customers, what they need is a one-page document written in plain language explaining what DNSSEC is conceptually, not what a zone signing key is. Steve: Yeah. Patrick: They don’t care. But they want to know what DNSSEC is and how it can be profitable for them, how they can benefit from it, and what next steps they should do to actually make it happen. And once the customers will go to their registrars and say, “Hey, I want to sign my zone. Give me the tools, please,” maybe that day the registrars will move on. And well, the same applies actually to IPv6, although we haven’t talked about it yet. It’s still difficult to get IPv6 glue and zone files. Steve: You make some very good points and I think the idea of a one-page and in general raising the visibility and making it simpler to talk about is very important. And you may well – “you” in the sense of “ALAC” – may well be able to help fill in those gaps because you have more of a perspective of what’s helpful to say versus the more detailed kinds of things that the technical people tend to say – “Well, let’s tell you everything about DNSSEC.” With respect to competition and the only way to get things going, I’m not sure that’s the right perspective. It’s the unlovely aspect of dealing in security matters that it’s not always cost-effective in the instantaneous sense of “How do I make more money?” except for the vendors of these things. You know, in the automobile safety business, seat belts and air bags didn’t come about totally because they were cost-benefit model from the car manufacturers. I think a certain amount of pressure and a certain amount of visibility so this becomes “Of course you have to have this, because if you’re not, then you’re not doing a competent job of providing the services we need,” and that I think has to be the main view with respect to the registries. With respect to the registrars, there is some room for competition because not all of the registrars have to do the same thing and it’s much easier to switch from one registrar to another – not totally easy, but at least it doesn’t involve changing your domain name. So we’ll see what happens as we have at least some registrars, and then we can measure the uptake a little bit. Cheryl: Robert, then Izumi. Robert: Yes, I just want to… Having participated in the SSAC, one thing I just want to point out to the ALAC is that there’s always a comment that comes up at the SSAC, is that the very narrow-focus and that there are sometimes things that SSAC doesn’t necessarily want to scope out and to get at some of the other themes 44:17. And one of the issues that I raised on call, I think it was one of the earlier calls this week, is in regards to registrars and kind of what type of features they have and is there a way that they could be ranked – that could be useful for consumers or for users when they have to register a domain name, to see what different features different registrars have. That may be something that ALAC, maybe that’s something that I and others could work with Beau about in terms about what are features in terms of protection of domain names? Would we want to rank registrars in terms of certain types of features? That’s something maybe ALAC can do, but when it gets to SSAC, I think that really kinds of falls… You know, SSAC might be able to put in, you know, what are some key features that registrars might want to have to protect users, but leave it there. Steve: I would strongly agree that the initiative ought to come on your side. If you want to send it over to us for what do we think about all that, I think we’d be in a much more comfortable position to comment or at least think about whether we want to comment rather than try to get into a ranking business ourselves. Robert: What I was trying to say, that would be something that would be useful to users. The other thing too is there was a wonderful presentation given on Monday on the SSAC open session on a couple of things, particularly the cache poisoning, the Kaminsky attack. I think those slides will become available and it might be useful, you know, for people at ALAC to be more familiar with that as well too. Another issue I think that came up as well as too is IPv6 and also consumer-end routers and whether they are IPv6-enabled. And so that’s something that I think SSAC kind of started on, but that’s something that we might be able to do. And what I wanted to wrap up with is, you know, I’m the liaison to SSAC. What would be useful is if there are things that we can contribute to SSAC or we can contribute to other constituencies because of our contact with users, we could have them do some comments or some testing, that’s maybe a lot easier in our purview and that’s a way to contribute to the broader community. And so I just wanted to put that forward. I know that we’re overburdened sometimes, but that’s something maybe the ALSes could do. Steve: 100% agree. Cheryl: Just before we move to Izumi, of course we may not have time to come back to that, so I’ll make the point because it follows from Robert. We offer an ideal opportunity as an outreach mechanism for getting the messages that you put out out to where it needs to get sometimes. And I know we’ve done some briefings, but that’s at an At-Large Advisory Committee level with RALO involvement. The ALSes are on the ground with consumers in their local areas. Steve: So a couple of comments. When we met last, that was one of the things that emerged – clearly, and it was a good take away from my point of view, that one of the positive ways for our two groups to engage was that as a communication channel and so forth. The other thing is that SSAC is now undergoing an exercise that you’re all too familiar with called an external review. And that process just started up. I have no idea what direction it will go or how it will feel from our perspective. I know… I’ve watched the process with respect to ALAC and I know that it had a lot of feelings involved. I am basically a believer in that kind of process and strongly support it. If I have any heartburn about it, it’s that it might not be strong enough, it might not be probing enough. Let me counsel you and urge you to provide input to the external reviewers, the SSAC external reviewers, and in particular raise this point about communication because it fits into a broader theme about how effective is SSAC, how do we communicate, how do we measure the results, should there be any stronger coupling, and so forth. And I think it’s a very healthy kind of question, somewhat broader and deeper than just, you know, “Did we forget to send something to somebody?” But I think there’s a kind of a broader perspective to look at. So I’m glad you raised that, and as I say, have an extended rambling discussion if you will with the reviewers, so maybe that will be helpful as well. Cheryl: Izumi. Izumi: Thank you. Perhaps in line with that, I’m asking you the question as well as to ourselves, what’s the role of ALAC on, say for example, the DNS cache poisoning or DNSSEC or the IPv4-v6? To communicate to the… outreach to the users in general? We haven’t really done in an explicit way, say like if a user comes to our ALAC homepage, they don’t have much in a manner that is directly talking to the individual users. Somehow we are much more sort of a confined within this sort of ICANN community, although our intention may not be the case that we… I don’t think we have that much in place. Do you expect us to take proactive roles for that? Well, sometimes the security is a sort of tricky thing – if you give too much warning, then it will be sort of exaggerated. So what collectively could we do for this kind of things? This is sort of a mutual question perhaps. Steve: Well, I tend to be a little hesitant as a matter of respect about telling another group what they ought to be doing, lest they come and tell me what we ought to be doing. laughter Cheryl: A very smart man. Steve: Yes, it’s always nice to hear your opinions. And I don’t mean to be light about it – please do. But I think it’s potentially a good idea. And on the other hand, it’s not a casual or trivial undertaking, and so I can anticipate that you… you know, that would have some consequences in how you’re organized and where you put your resources and so forth. And if you took that up, that would be great, but I don’t view it as quite our role to tell you that that’s what you must do. Izumi: Right, because like one page in you 50:59… one of the challenges is how do you interpret that technical things into the layman’s language, and if SSAC doesn’t do that, who’s going to do that? And should we do that? It’s a very tricky question perhaps. Steve: Yeah. Cheryl: Thank you, Izumi, and of course it seems like perfect fodder for the ALSes to access what we provide in briefing and what we trickle down to them. Certainly we have had fast flux and everything else put straight out to the members of my ALS, and I think that’s perhaps something at the summit participation little working exercises, we could actually focus on something like DNSSEC. Alan, go ahead. Alan: Very brief comments on several of the things we’ve been talking about. The first one on WHOIS studies. My personal feeling sitting in on a lot of other groups is given the GAC’s insistence on studies, given the GNSO’s working currently on studies, it’s probably time to take a little bit of time off and wait for some of those studies to come in before coming up and saying, you know, “We have a new way of looking at this.” On the other hand, your work at how to actually implement it if we can ever come up with the policy certainly is something that can be done in parallel, but the rest, I think it’s a time off until things stabilize a bit. In terms of representing registrants, it’s clear that as the new GNSO structure evolves, there may well be home for both commercial and non-commercial registrants in the GNSO. There aren’t today and we certainly believe we have a responsibility to act on their behalf when it seems to be appropriate. The last thing, there was a discussion I think with regard to DNSSEC of “How do we convince people they can make money on it?” And I think you said, or maybe Patrick said, you know, that there are other aspects to it other than making money. And the time is about as ripe as it’s ever been to talk about security and protection, whether it’s protecting your own assets and not having your identity stolen or making sure your system doesn’t get hacked and your business goes down the tubes. The time is good to use those kind of rationales to convince people and I think we have… I think there’s opportunities for it. And the last one is talking about SSAC working with ALAC to disseminate information to ALSes, or, you know, similarly, SSAC producing something that the GAC can pass on to various governments. I sense in the air in ICANN right now there’s a real interest in working together and getting away from the completely isolated groups we’ve been in, and not only the chairs talking to chairs but just starting to establish relationships of workers within one group and the other one. And I’m very encouraged and I think we have opportunities now that we didn’t have before to do the kind of things we’re talking about, of have the work of one group directly benefit others and be passed on as appropriate. Steve: It’s good. Internally within SSAC, we’ve been trying to jot down, just for ourselves, what our operational procedures and just the sort of mechanical aspects. And one element of this is “So when we write a report, what do we do with it? Who does it go to? And what follow-up do we have on it?” and so forth. And so input into us, it would timely. Not that it would ever be out of time, but I mean we’re actually focussing, asking ourselves those kinds of questions as well. You guys are in session continuously here, I gather, all day. Female: Yeah. Cheryl: Well, there is this little thing called a At-Large Advisory Committee Review Workshop we thought we might pop into the main room for. But other than that, yes, we’re here 55:07. laughter Steve: So it would be competitive too for me to mention that there’s a DNSSEC workshop this afternoon? Cheryl: It might be competitive but I’m quite sure that because we do have to cover such broad ground that those that wish to represent us at that could bring back to the group, which is what we often rely on our liaisons to do. Go ahead, Robert. Steve: Well, we will hold in confidence if we see anybody from ALAC showing up. Cheryl: Excellent. Go ahead, Robert. Robert: It doesn’t conflict. Vanda: The start conflicts. Robert: It does not. 55:38 Steve: Oh, it does not conflict? Oh, all the better. Cheryl: It doesn’t? Okay. Robert: Just a quick comment… Vanda: Our proper time? Steve: Half. Robert: I’m not sure if it was yesterday or the day before, the SSAC reviewers were actually here at the ALAC meeting and they did ask for some comment from us… Steve: Ah, good. Robert: …which I provided some to them. Steve: Good, good. Cheryl: Any final questions? In the absence of any final questions, and one minute past the extra 10 minutes extension done 56:07, would like to thank you very much for joining us today. We really believe that with the joint work that we’ve done so far with the briefings we’ve had, we just see more and more opportunity for these perhaps loose partnerships going forward, but nevertheless what you do is absolutely essentially for our end users and we really appreciate you taking the time to explain these points. Steve: Thank you. Thank you. Well, it’s a pleasure. Cheryl: Indeed. Steve: And we’ll look forward to more. Thank you everybody. Vanda: Thank you, Steve. Steve: Yeah. Cheryl: Thank you. Vanda: inaudible 56:42 applause Cheryl: If you would all like to just get your minds back to the next item, I would suggest some of you might need to stand up, stretch your legs. Don’t leave the room, but, you know, if you need to do a stretch, do a wriggle while people move in and out. Wake your bodies back up. pause laughter Cheryl: You know I like accountability and transparency, so… laughter Vanda: Maybe we should introduce Doug to the others 57:26. Cheryl: He did, he did, he did get inaudible. Vanda: Hi, Doug. Doug: Hi. Vanda: Thank you for your visit. Doug: I just came to listen. laughter Doug: I hope that’s okay with everyone. Cheryl: It’s more than okay. Vanda: More than okay. Cheryl: I just inaudible. Doug: I have no agenda. Cheryl: Okay. That’s fine. Alright. Okay. Okay. pause O-… silence – 57:50 to 58:02 Cheryl: Part of my motivation for giving the few minutes was obviously there’s always a couple of things that need to happen at the door, but we do have a very, very tight schedule, so let’s go back into session now. Matthias, you can escape when you can escape to do what you need to do when Nick comes back or whatever’s happening. Thank you. Umm… So as soon as I have my vice chair sitting next to me and I believe Sébastien is probably just going… You’re coming back, yes? Vanda: Come back. Cheryl: Co-… We’re starting. We’re starting. It is beginning. Again. Thank you. Vanda: Thank you, we’re starting. Cheryl: As we covered this morning, the next item on the agenda is the election of the ALAC liaisons. This is not the election per se, but rather the looking at who we have putting their hands up for whatever opportunity and space is there. Can I… We do have a tally sheet. I would love to see that magically appear up on the screen. And whilst the technology catches up with the requirements of the room, I will just go over for those who were not with us at the beginning of our session earlier. One of the major points that we will be discussing now is any feedback I have received from chairs, or in the case of dotMobi, CEO, on ideal characteristics or wish lists technically a particularly organization – let’s assume dotMobi – desperately wanted to have an African-speaking member, then they would have told me and I can tell you and if there was one to choose from, that may or may not influence how you vote. So we will discuss those sorts of things. We also completed off… Still hoping that the technology will catch up with our requirements. We also finished off the discussions that Alan I’m afraid you weren’t privy to because you were doing your job as GNSO liaison, but I’m more than happy while the technology catches up with our needs to go over shortly and give you an opportunity to put what I know you would have interest in these matters. We discussed some very high-level principles. We probably have about nine points of what we expect an ALAC liaison, regardless of where they’re going, to do – as, you know, the big-picture stuff. And we’ve agreed that we will be discussing those and the specific job descriptions for each and time requirement descriptions so that NomCom can know what their appointees are actually getting into when they come and join the ALAC, discuss it intersessionally between now and the November meeting, and we will be voting, having wordsmithed it between November and December, at the December meeting. So that then puts us in a position to start looking at a fuller review of the Rules of Procedure. I trust that is music to your ears, is it, Alan? Thank you. Okay. We now have… Look, it’s caught up. Thank you very much. We have the following – she says, trying desperately to read – nominations, and these are all duly accepted and have… They haven’t made this list unless they have fitted all the criteria in terms of our rules of procedure. We have Alan Greenberg nominated by Adam Peake and accepted for GNSO. In the absence of anyone else being brave enough or silly enough to take on that role, congratulations, Alan, this is actually yours. Well done again, sir. applause Alan: inaudible 1:02:02 consecutive terms mean liaison for life? laughter Alan: inaudible Cheryl: As you will be… Female: inaudible Cheryl: As you will be driving the RoP reviews, if you can’t get it right for yourself as a draft, then there’s something very wrong. We come to ccNSO, and can I say this actually I think is a very important thing for our ALSes because so many of them don’t realize the difference between a gTLD and the ccTLD environment that probably many of them work in. They just work in their dot-whatever, dot-their country code, and think this other stuff ICANN does is all the same. And perhaps if you come from Australia and you’re as protected as we are with our eligibility criterias, you’re more easily lured in. So what the ccNSO does is enormously important. We have two nominations here. We have Adam Peake – make yourself known, lift your hand, thank you very much Adam – nominated by Jacqueline Morris who is the outgoing liaison to that organization, and he has accepted, and we have Rudi Vansnick – who’s also waving at you – nominated by Patrick Vande Walle and has accepted. Therefore we do need to have an election. We will discuss the timing of the election in one moment. Go ahead, Alan. Alan: In the cases – and I think this is not the only one – in the cases where the person is not an ALAC member and we’re not in a position to commit budget travel funds to get them to ICANN meetings, I’d like to make sure that the acceptance is in light of that and the understanding that they are willing to participate and probably fund themselves to come to the meetings prior to the election. Cheryl: Thank you, Alan. That and a few other things I was planning on doing once we had them all together, but we’ve heard that for all of the liaisons now. That’s something we won’t go back over. So we do need an election on ccNSO. NCUC. Good heavens, Beau. It doesn’t look like you’ve got any competition there, sir. And what a brave, brave man I think to follow on the work that Carlos has done for us over the last… Is it 12 months or 2 years? I thought you had it for 2 years, did you not? You’ve done two terms with them, haven’t…? Carlos: No. Ah, yeah. Cheryl: Yeah, I thought so, 2 years. And be warned, Beau, when we meet with – formally meet, not just with a presentation as it was with SSAC – when we meet with whatever group you liaise with, you co-chair. So if it was the whole of SSAC that has been here, Robert would be co-chairing with me. So now when the NCUC or whatever it becomes, whatever becomes of it, is having a meeting with us, you’ll end up co-chairing. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you until we finished saying congratulations. Beau: As long as I don’t have to co-chair something like yesterday’s meeting on houses. Cheryl: laughter No, no, no. That would definitely come at a slightly different level. So Beau, congratulations and I’m sure you’re going to do a brilliant job. applause Cheryl: We come to SSAC, and we in fact have two contenders here. We have Patrick Vande Walle – please wave your hand so we all know who we’re talking about, thank you Patrick – nominated by Adam Peake and accepted, and we have Robert Guerra who of course is our current liaison, self-nominated, and seconded by Annette. So we will have to have an election there as well. Go ahead, Alan. Alan: And a similar comment. We heard from Mr. Crocker… Dr. Crocker that SSAC liaisons must pass an examination first. Cheryl: Oh. I… Alan: We would like to make sure that all of our… Cheryl: A-… Alan: He’s already put a stamp on Robert’s forehead, but… Cheryl: No, absolutely. Alan: …we should know that prior to the election. Cheryl: And in fact, we also need to be aware that we only offer a liaison. The acceptance is up to the other side. Male: inaudible 1:06:10 Cheryl: Absolutely. Okay. Which brings us to IDN Policy… I’m sorry, Fatimata. I do apologize for not seeing you wave at me. My apologies to you. Fatimata: I seconded Beau’s nomination and also Robert’s nomination in one mail. Male: I couldn’t hear. Fatimata: I seconded… Cheryl: Yes. Fatimata: …Beau’s nomination, self-nomination, and Robert’s. Cheryl: Yes, I know, and I do know the list saw that. I think what staff has done in the pressure they’ve been under – they will change it – is they simply grabbed the first one which actually… the first one that hit the list which made it a bona fide nomination. But yes, I do agree, because part of criteria, you know, is people being actively involved, if you’ve taken the time to make an informed decision and support someone, that should be reflected. Nick 1:07:04, can I just ask you to not do the edit live, please? Carlos: Sorry, Beau’s nominated by himself but… overtalking Cheryl: Yes, he was seconded by you. Carlos: …by me and Fatimata. Cheryl: Yeah, that’s right. Go ahead, Alan. Alan: Just as a point of order, we have absolutely no procedures in our rules currently for liaisons. Cheryl: Yes, I know. Alan: For officers, the rules explicitly do not require a second… Cheryl: A seconding 1:07:33, yes. Alan: …although it’s a nice touch to say you want to support someone. Cheryl: It is a nice touch… Alan: But just for the record, it’s not required in any case. Cheryl: Yes. And thank you. The IDN Policy for those who were not in the room earlier, can I come back, because I want to speak to that? Which leads me to move down to the ALAC appointment to the dotMobi Policy Advisory Board. We have another requirement for an election there. We have John Levine, the current serving appointment liaison. He is a self-nomination. And perhaps because Alan knew the rules so well, it might be why in the absence of seconding, he was pointing that out before I got to it. But the second one is Andres. He was nominated by Carlos and indeed he has accepted. Now let me come back first before we establish exactly when and how we’re running these elections to the IDN Policy. The… Siva, who is a very active member of APRALO, of the Chennai chapter, which has only just been… Do you have a problem, Alan? Alan: inaudible 1:08:49 Cheryl: Thank you. Don’t look at the screen. You can always look at me. The nomination went by Hong, and as I said to the meeting earlier where I know not everyone was present, I’m of the opinion that overturning or questioning Hong’s view on who is appropriate as her liaison as IDN Policy liaison is like saying to the brain surgeon, “You don’t know what you’re doing, sir.” She is… I don’t think could possibly we could question that her advice on who should replace her is the best person for the job. That said, she is not an ALAC member per se and the question was raised to the list that she was in a position to make that nomination. In an effort to make that nomination bona fide, I did send to the list in due time before the close of nominations my pro forma as Chair nomination without any question of my personal support, but simply to make it bona fide, with or without prejudice, nomination. But unfortunately, I’m here, not at home, and it went through gmail so it got bounced back and did not go to the list in time. So we do not have a proper dual constituted nomination for IDN, which leaves that position blank, which means we can appoint, which is what I am proposing this room does now. So it is not so much a formal nomination, because we know that whatever we do, there will be someone on the At-Large list or maybe more than one of them that unless we do it by our existing Rules of Procedure, I’m going to be talking to the Ombudsman again. So I am now proposing, and I am proposing, that an appointment be made of Siva based on Hong’s expert advice that he act for the following 12-month term until the next election as IDN Policy liaison. Do I have a seconder? Thank you, Robert. Go ahead. Izumi: Have we got the acceptance or some kind of application 1:11:15 from him already? Cheryl: Yes. Yes. Izumi: Oh good. Cheryl: Yes, he accepted to Hong, and that was also noted in my pro forma, though I should have made that clear. So he is more than willing to serve and more than capable to serve in this capacity. I will now call for anyone who wishes to speak on this matter. pause I will now call for anyone who wishes to vote against this. pause Anyone who wishes to have their name recorded as an abstention? pause If not, so carried, and we will transmit our congratulations to Siva. And thank you, Hong. I have done it in the APRALO meeting this morning, but I am going to put you through the embarrassment once more. It is astonishing for me, to have in the very short time I’ve worked so closely with Hong, to see the almost inhuman amount of work she puts in to making sure IDN outreach policy, the amount of comments that go in, the outreach she does, the meetings she attends. It is nothing short of phenomenal. If this was a full-time staff person working on this topic, we would be saying, “You deserve a bonus.” And as I did this morning in the APRALO meeting, I can think of no finer… because my words fail me to thank her for the assistance she’s given to me as Chair in this matter, that nothing short of a simple standing ovation will do. applause Hong: Oh, I want to thank all the colleagues, the Chair, every one of you. I’ve been working for ALAC since 2004, so it’s just 1:13:03 really so many years. ALAC has become my home and you are all my family. And I’ve never been so happy with working with you on these IDN issues. I still will be around, so if there’s anything I can do on this IDN policy, I’ll be more than happy to help as a volunteer. Thank you. Cheryl: And I’ll hasten to add, she’s also definitely offered to help mentor Siva in any way he needs. He has been approached by Hong directly and of course anything he needs to be brought up to speed with, she remains from an APRALO perspective quite passionate about this as well. And you’ll be meeting each other at the IGF I hope. Okay. Now we have an election for three positions that needs to run. This can be run in any number of ways, but it needs to be run soon. Those of us around this table need to know who will be voting. And who votes on these elections – that is the election for the liaison to go to ccNSO, to go to SSAC, and to dotMobi – will be… Yes, you have a point of order, Evan? Evan: Yeah. Yes. During the time that you went on the mailing list and opened up the nominations, I made a proposal, and although the wording and the exact lingo may not be correct, I do believe that ALAC needs some kind of representative to work with the PSC. And although Nick did make the correct point that the person chosen by ALAC to the PSC has indicated an interest to work with us, I think we need to have somebody who is actively monitoring what they’re doing, actively making sure that that conduit is alive and up and well and not waiting for them to make the first move. And in the interests of being prepared to put my money where my mouth is, I put myself forward for that position. Whether that is a liaison or the name takes some other kind of form or whatever, I still believe some kind of role like that is required. Cheryl: Evan, I think… Can we come back to that under “any other business”? It would be another name until we change the RoPs because “liaison” has particular requirements to it. I think to have someone who has the watching brief and conversation with Pierre in a continual way is absolutely perfect. What we have to be very, very clear about is that there’s only one way to be involved at the PSC per se, and that is by the invitation of the President and CEO. So I support what you’re saying as long as we make sure the wording doesn’t look to the rest of the world like we’re appointing to the… Evan: I’ll leave the process and mechanics to you. I hope… I think it’s clear to you… Cheryl: It is. 1:16:02 Evan: …what I’m intending. Cheryl: Absolutely. Evan: Not we propose somebody else to their committee, but just a watchdog to it. Cheryl: There’s really a watching bit but also a conversation to be had, so that he is obviously not going to be making our meetings but you can give feedback on what’s going on. Yes, Alan, go ahead. Alan: Having been present during a slightly conflict-ridden discussion yesterday between the Board and the GAC, I would suggest we not use words like “watchdog,” which does not connote the right kind of collegial respect. No matter how you personally feel, those are the wrong words. Cheryl: Okay. Evan: I gladly submit to not knowing the… to still not knowing all of the proper ICANN vocabulary. Alan: It’s not ICANN vocabulary. We’re talking about… Cheryl: It’s trust-… Okay, back on topic and… Alan: …civil relationships. Cheryl: …the topic at the moment happens to be… Hong has noted there is a minor procedural issue on ccNSO liaison nomination. Adam was nominated by Jacqueline who is also a non-member. Because Alan also pointed out, Hong, that we don’t actually have a formal requirement to go through this, I’m losing zero sleep over that, so we’re just going to gloss over it like I never read your note. Okay. So we now need to have an election for three positions. We would like to ensure that those around this table know who of those around this table will be voting in this election. And the people who will be voting in this election are the ones who will be serving as ALAC members from the end of this meeting. So Adam, it is you that votes. It is not Izumi. It is not Annette. Alright? It is Patrick. Male: inaudible 1:18:01? Sébastien: Patrick is already a member. It’s me. Cheryl: Yes, it is you. Sébastien: It’s me. Cheryl: Well, you’re already… Yeah. Sébastien: Yeah, yeah, but it’s me. I will… Male: inaudible Cheryl: Uh, n-… Sébastien: overtalking …he was elected two months ago. Cheryl: Yes, I understand that, but he’s a replacement. If… Izumi: Point of order. Cheryl: We can have this conversation in a moment, and if you’re going to make points of order, you can be assured that I have gone by the absolute letter of the Rules of Procedure and exactly who was going to be voting and when was in the call for nominations in the first place. And it is very definite that it is not the outgoing ALAC that votes, it is the incoming ALAC that votes, which is why I’m having this conversation now. Robert: Can we hear the point of order, please? Cheryl: Certainly. I can channel Izumi, because I know what his concern was, but he can certainly… Please, take some time, and some little time to make your point of order, which I’ve already answered. Izumi: Well, you have already answered to the question of my point of order before I’m making the point of order, so how can I say it? So it’s very clear in the Rules of Procedure that the outgoing guys are not qualified to. Nor the incoming guys, or the incoming guys will, right? Cheryl: The incoming. Izumi: Okay. Cheryl: Okay. The reason I’m raising this now is if we’re going to do this by some form of BigPulse or whatever, I didn’t want people going, “I didn’t get my credentials,” okay? So the next question is when are we having this election? The “when” probably relates to the “how.” We can put names on pieces of paper and we can say before breakfast tomorrow, someone will have collected the anonymous pieces of paper, or we can set it up as BigPulse, and I’m perfectly happy to go with whatever way that the staff are able to get us up and running as fast as possible. Nick: Just as a point of information, some of the candidates are well known and some of the candidates are not so well known to the electors, some of whom are new. And is it useful to give people some time to look at biographical information, which I have for all but I think Rudi – I don’t know that I have a current bio for you – so that we could post links to the bios to everyone? And I don’t kno-… I mean, it’s up to you. Of course, you might wish to… Cheryl: You’re one step ahead. inaudible 1:20:40 to get to the how, which is can you do BigPulse for us or not? Yes or no? Nick: We can certainly do that. Cheryl: Then we come to the when, and the when should be after everybody has an opportunity to get to know. So we’ll let that question run. Nick: The other question is you might wish for us to provide Patrick’s CV to Steve in respect of Alan’s point about the SSAC and its willingness to receive new people. Cheryl: In the matter of the SSAC, which is an extraordinarily rare thing because it does have criteria that you need to meet and we know Robert meets it, I think that would be more than suitable. Steve, when I spoke to him about this, was happy to go with whatever mechanism we came up with and he is certainly comfortable to have whatever outcome occurs. So I would like to suggest if we can set up the BigPulse as soon as possible, that we give a period of time for everyone to apart from anything else, you know, go and have a conversation with these people, get the measure of them yourself, and look at the biographical information. The disadvantage of that will be to Rudi because Rudi is leaving today. Is that correct Rudi? What time are you leaving, so people can jump on you before you go? Rudi: Well, I will be at the pyramids, so if someone wants to ask me questions, I will be available till midnight. I’m leaving at 10 tomorrow morning, so… Cheryl: And I really would encourage people to take the time to find out exactly, you know, what skill set. Based on these high-level things that we discussed this morning, we should be keeping those in mind. How are the people we’re about to elect going to act as a conduit for us? How are they going to showcase us? How are they going to bring the necessary knowledge of topic and all of those things that we discussed? Yes, really, you wish to say something? Go ahead. Rudi: Yeah, I want to respond to the comment made by Alan. I know that if you want to be a liaison, you are not a Board member of the ALAC, that you’re not covered. Today and this week I’m here present on my own expenses even as a member of the EURALO board. So it’s not a question of money for me, it’s a question of trying to be available from Europe for some positions in the ALAC and the ICANN structure. Cheryl: I think it is worthy of reminding everybody that we have no guaranteed funding for liaisons as liaisons, but we can move people who are ALAC members. So we can… Say again? Male: For this year. Cheryl: For this year, exactly. Yes, we have no guarantee of funding at all beyond that. Now, we then need to look at what time we will be… You wanted…? Male: inaudible 1:23:35 Cheryl: Sorry. Okay. We want to look at what time, but I do know Sébastien is there. This is to the… Okay, go ahead. Sébastien: Yeah, we talk about the people who doesn’t know the others, but there are new members who are not here and we have to take care of them too. And I think we may be… it may be better if we start any election after the end of this annual meeting because like that, we are sure that everybody seated in our new ALAC membership organization, and that means that my… And then I would like to have a very… as its name of people, that’s a secure vote. It’s… How do you say in English? Female: Confidential. Sébastien: Confidential. It’s… As it’s going for name. And what I suggest is that it’s done few days, but when I say “few,” it’s very few days after the end of this meeting. Knowing that people need to be back home, that means that it’s leave 1:25:01, for example, the three first days of next week or from the end of this meeting to five days or something like that. Cheryl: That was exactly the point I was coming to, so, you know, I was going to say what he was going to say. Go ahead, Alan. Alan: Having been on the other side, there is a very great value to being named prior to the end of this meeting so you can at least meet the Chair, talk to a few people in the group, and start participating actively immediately instead of waiting till the next meeting till you even know what they look like. Cheryl: Vanda. Vanda: Just a suggestion for the candidates. They could make some, you know, small promotion and said what does the intention they have, what is expecting, we can expect for them, and a short profile, like “I’m an expert on this, on that,” or something, it’s much more easy, and circulate among us. It’s allow us to vote with a bit more confidence. Cheryl: Yeah. And just on that, Alan, we actually have unique situations with each of the different sections in as much as the SSAC, we need that material to pass on to Steve to see whether, you know, even if we do put Patrick forward, he’s happy to take him. And I think the bio stuff is one thing but it comes to the technical that you have. I know, for example, because I’ve had this conversation with Steve, that he’s worked with you in the ISOC world, but he only knows you from the ISOC world so if there’s anything he needs to know about you that would relate to the SSAC world, you need to provide us with that so we can provide it to him. I do understand the advantages of – thank you, Carlos – of having this put to bed before we leave, but I think it’s somewhat unique right now where we have people who should be here and who are not here because of when their regional election occurred. This won’t happen again. Go ahead, but I do have Carlos next. Nick: Yeah. Rule 9.4.3 provides, amongst other things… well, most of what it provides is that for this election we are discussing, “…the date and time of the vote shall be within the first 48 hours after the closure of the Annual General Meeting; thus the electorate will include the delegates whose term starts at the closure of that Annual General Meeting and will not include the ALAC members whose terms ends at the closure of that AGM.” So in fact the vote has to start at some point after this meeting finishes. Cheryl: That’s absolutely correct, and in fact I think I quoted that in the call for nominations. Carlos. Carlos: Yeah. When I nominated Andres Piazza for dotMobi position, I thought in his particular skills, but first of all I want to say that I have not against John Levine, who is a well-known man and hard worker. But in the case of Andres Piazza, he’s well known in LACRALO, he’s a hard worker, known by every people in LACRALO and NARALO, North American RALO. He manages and know three languages and he promises for the future send 1:29:05 briefings or reports about his work. And I sent a few days ago his bio and I re-sent now a few minutes ago. He’s a lawyer, he’s a hard worker, manages three languages, he’s a nice guy. What more? Cheryl: I don’t remember agreeing on a “nice” criteria, but anyway… “Nice” was not part of the overarching criteria. laughter Just while we are on dotMobi and we know when we’re going to be starting our election and how we’re going to be starting our election, Carlos, could you please contact him and say… some bio material or information, anything he wishes to make available to us to put up as the election begins should go to staff@atlarge, because it’s very important that everyone has an opportunity, and obviously, you know, he can e-mail us individually and he can send information about himself as well. Because I have met with Christina and discussed the fact that we’ll have an election for the position that goes to her Policy Advisory Board. She has empowered me to give you all the following information. She knows it is on the transcript, she knows it is on the record, and she is happy for me to share the following: The Policy Advisory Board of dotMobi have already identified that they are underrepresented in the Latin American and Caribbean area. At the same time… I’m just imparting information. What you do with that information I do not mind, neither does she. At the same time, she wishes in no way to say that should John be returned, that he is going to be anything other than the excellent representative on our behalf that he has been up until now. We have two pieces of information – glowing report and a recognized matter. Anyone want to say anything about that? Okay. Coming back to the ccNSO and SSAC position, I would like to, providing they are willing, ask the people who are putting their names up… oh, sorry, have accepted to be considered for election if they would like to make a short statement to those of us who are here, recognizing that at least the voter from Asia Pacific is not here but that APRALO – Hong and myself and Thu Hue – will in fact be briefing him… laughter about your presentation. So if any of you wish to make a statement and say, “The reason you should vote for me is…” we’ll open the floor now after Nick waves his finger at me. Nick: We’ll be happy to excerpt this section of the recording and make it available for later review, especially by those who are not present. Cheryl: Well, that sounds absolutely perfect. I like technology when it works in our favour. Okay. Yes, Alan? Alan: One quick point with regard to Carlos’s nomination. I’m assuming dotMobi works in English at their meetings, so it would be… Vanda: Andres’… Cheryl: His English is… overtalking 1:32:59 Vanda: His English. Alan: Pardon me? Vanda: Andres has… Nick: Very good English. Vanda: …very good Portuguese, English… Alan: I wasn’t questioning that. I was simply saying that it would be useful in the bio to, in addition to mentioning he speaks three languages, saying English is one of them and he is fluent for the people for who are actually going to have to vote. Cheryl: And in fact I raised that particular question, as I also raised the question of neither of those potential liaisons are members of the ALAC, and therefore funding for them will in no way, shape, or form be provided to go to Ireland twice a year from us. dotMobi pay for everything. It’s a no-brainer as far as that’s concerned, nor is there any problem with language. In fact, she indicated that as they become more global, they will have to probably take a leaf out of our book anyway, but certainly thank you for… Male: inaudible 1:33:55 Cheryl: Yeah, the document will be important. Okay. So do you want to do this in order of ccNSO and then SSAC, as she has written from the top? So if we can just roll up a little bit. That will mean that there is two people who are in the room who are able to give us – what do you want? – 3 minutes tops. Anywhere between 30 second and 3 minutes, plus other people will come and pigeonhole you between now and midnight? Adam, you’ve got your light on, so off you go. Adam: Why am I interested in the ccNSO? One reason is because it overlaps with the work that I’m doing anyway on ccTLD governance, which means that I can spend time on it without having to worry myself too much about… it’s its justification internally that makes me satisfied that I can do the work happily, and if you want to look at a webpage, there’s a very limited amount of explanation at cdg08.org which is… it has very minimal description about a project we’re doing on governance issues for ccTLDs. A specific issue that goes back to the days when there was a DNSO, before the GNSO, the old Domain Name Supporting Organization, when the ccTLDs were involved, were a constituency of that group in ICANN before they separated off as the ccNSO, the non-commercial constituency, the sort of user voice as it was then, did have an influence on ccTLD policy at the global level, so there was input from a sort of at-large non-commercial constituency as it were to ccTLD issues. There’s no such requirement in the ccNSO and I think that the ALAC can provide that sort of interest of… well, it obviously does provide that interest of that non-commercial and at-large voice into ccTLD policy. I’m also interested in the concept of the… I think it’s usually called the local internet community, which should be represented in ccTLD matters such redelegations and so on, and that very often appears as business interests and so on. Although – Cheryl’s left the room – in Australia it’s very well defined as ISOC Australia, but in other communities there is no real definition of what the local internet community is and I think someone should start thinking about what those, what that actually means and discussing with ccTLDs in the ccNSO about how they represent local interests within their ccTLD operations. Vanda: Okay. cuts out …Rudi. Rudi: Well, when I was thinking about being a candidate for the ccNSO, it is also related to the discussions we had yesterday about this pan 1:37:03. We know that there is quite a lot going on on the side of the ccTLDs in regards protection of privacy information at one side, but at the other side we have to look also if there is information which we need to know in order to be able to validate if someone owning a domain name, a ccTLD domain name is the one we are recognizing as being a legal person. That’s a first point. The second point is that during the debates we have with the new gTLDs, and I assisted a few other meetings, it seems that there is a kind of clash coming up between the ccTLDs and the gTLDs as they see each other as competitors. And I think that in regards the internet user, it is important that there is a reflection coming from the floor, from the ground, in order to avoid that… discussions such as we have already seen in the past meetings could be avoided by having a better relationship between ccTLDs and gTLDs coming from the community itself, and that’s where I want to bring in my knowledge of what happens at ccTLD levels and what happens at the side of the gTLDs. That’s I think another view we can have on what is the relationship between ALAC and ccNSO. I know that’s probably another point of view as you’re expecting, but I think that’s something I could bring in as I have quite a lot of experience regarding what the ccTLD is doing in some countries. Vanda: Beau. Beau: I wanted to just say that the candidate who would get my vote on this would be the one who most clearly addresses the issue of security issues among ccTLDs. I know that it’s a political issue or a political correctness issue in some ways, but it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is in this area where the most domain name abuse takes place – .hk, .cn. I heard distinctively from Rudi his outlook on that, which I welcome but I would like to hear a little bit more detail from Adam as to whether he sees this a problem and… Adam: HK is fixed for information, so don’t worry about that one, but yeah, that’s what the project I’m doing is about. It’s about the robustness and governance of ccTLDs, particularly Asia Pacific region and the small island developing states, which just happens to be the subset that we’re looking at. And yes, that’s the area of interest I bring to it. That’s what the project background I have that would allow me the extra time or feeling of extra time to this project. Vanda: cuts out …any other questions? pause I guess our candidates… cuts out pause Cheryl: All four? Or just Adam and Rudi, or all four? Vanda: No, just Adam and Rudi. Cheryl: Just Adam and Rudi. Vanda: And Beau asking for more information, and Adam provided information. Cheryl: Excellent. And I walked in at a perfect time because what I wanted to get back for was to say at this point in these presentations that I’ll say something that any of the chairs have said to me to say to the possibilities 1:41:03, and that is whomever gets the guernsey in the ccNSO needs to realize from the Chair of the ccNSO’s point of view that you will not be proactively drawn into conversations. They are not going to stop in their business and go, “And what does the ALAC think?” You have to be of the nature – which of course Jacqueline was – to input and to be an active participant, that they will be churning through their business and that whoever goes needs not to be a wallflower, which I doubt is likely with the candidates we have, but I said I would say that and I’ve said it now. Vanda: Okay. Cheryl: laughter Which brings us to SSAC possible candidates, recognize that there is a vetting process at the SSAC end. Perhaps Robert, because we know you so well and you’ve been the… you are the incumbent, I might call to Patrick first and see whether he’d like to do no more than three minutes. Thank you very much. Patrick: Well, as had been repeated several times today, this liaison with SSAC has to be someone with a technical background, and well, as it happens I do fit the bill. Well, not only is it part of my full-time day job, but also I’ve been quite active in promoting DNSSEC and IPv6 in the ISOC context. And to be able to do that, you have to actually eat your own dog food, which means that you need to run effectively a DNSSEC server, that you need to run an IPv6-enabled web service, etc., which I do. I’ll have to add that I’ve been participating, although quite modestly I do admit, to the development of a new DNSSEC-enabled resolver called “Unbound” – you might have heard about it – and I’ve been contributing several patches among others to make the software available in future Linux distributions for example. I’ll have to add that it seems that the SSAC has some meetings in conjunction with IETF meetings and, well, the good news is that if you would select me, I would be able to attend the SSAC meetings within the IETF context at least twice a year. Well, this is what I can give. Now I’m open to questions. I think I’ve well understood what is expected and the general job description, what is expected from liaisons. And one of my goals, it is to actually try to channel information both ways and try to make sometimes very technical subjects treated by SSAC in maybe a more… in another language which might be accessible to more people. Thank you. Cheryl: Any question specifically for Patrick on this? If not, then the floor is yours, Robert. Robert: Thank you very much. I would be honoured to get, if you would be able to support me, to return as SSAC liaison. Some of you may be familiar with my bio, but I’ll just go through just some highlights and then give you maybe a couple of reasons why I think I’m the better choice for SSAC liaison. Since 2001, I’ve been involved in the creation of a small NGO that continues to the this day, Privaterra – which is based in Canada, which is the ALS that is accredited – that works with NGOs around the world, providing them training in regards to accessing security risk, particularly of using technology, and enabling them on security measures and technology that they can put in place to secure and protect their communications. It is this understanding of both the user perspective as well as the technical issues that I think that I’ve been able to contribute effectively to SSAC, but also bring the user perspective. Technical issues are complex and being able to explain those to users and the perspective of what the challenges are to users to the SSAC is something that I’ve tried to do over the last year that I’ve been at SSAC. As well, what I’ve tried to do at SSAC is if there’s technical experts that may not be familiar to SSAC when they’re undergoing a review of a particular topic, to bring them to the attention… of SSAC, and so they can participate in discussions. Most recently, on the last SSAC call, there was a review of the Georgia-Russia cyberwar and there were two experts from the OpenNet Initiative that I put in touch with SSAC so they could hear the user perspective on that attack. I’m also involved in a variety of other initiatives, particularly Diplo Foundation’s Internet Capacity Building Program, where I’m one of the experts in the security course there. I’m known to the SSAC community and most of the meetings take place online. Yes, some of them coincide with ICANN and other meetings, but not all members of SSAC can participate in the meetings, so most of the participation is a monthly one-hour teleconference. I’m also based half of my time in Toronto and in DC, where Steve Crocker and others from the SSAC are based as well too, so I can very quickly meet with them, and in fact I’m planning a series in-person meetings over the coming months with them. It is unfortunate that I have to compete with a fellow colleague for this position and I hope that, though only one of us can win, that we can both work together to bring more user voices to SSAC and other security issues that come up at ICANN. So again, I hope that I can count on your support, and thank you very much. Cheryl: Is there any questions for Robert? Annette, no? Okay. In the absence of any questions, and following on perfectly, Robert, from what you just said, I was going to ask – obviously we will have to transmit it to the two dotMobi potentials, and in fact it’s not as relevant to the dotMobi, I suppose – but when we have talent that offers itself for leadership roles and only one can get the guernsey, I would like to think that if we had other similarly-topic'ed leadership roles such as chairing a working group on the relevant topic that is similar to or close to what you have offered yourselves to be a liaison for, that we might perhaps prevail upon the person who does not get the highest number of votes that we could offer you a leadership or chair position within a working group. I’m not going to ask you to answer that now, because obviously that’s putting you on the spot and without notice, but if it is the belief and feeling of the meeting that that is an appropriate offer for me to make, then please make it known. pause And none of you believe that that’s an appropriate offer to make? Okay. Fine, at least the two potential liaisons on two of… laughter on one of the chairs do. Come on. Robert: I mean, I would be delighted with any assistance. Topics come up from time to time, the issue of the registrar kind of survey and other issues as well too, that would be useful. And also we had discussed with Steve the issue of kind of one-pagers and things like that, but also just ongoing correspondence. You know, if Patrick can make some of the IETF meetings that I can’t, I mean, I could definitely talk to Steve and see if somehow, you know, you could be party to some of the discussions. You know, what… So yes, to answer your question without getting into too many details, I am open to any modalities that might exist to engage, you know, other colleagues. Cheryl: Patrick. Patrick: Well, I think indeed that it’s a good idea, and we talked about that earlier this week, that we should indeed revive our working groups which haven’t always worked as bad 1:50:41 as they could. So indeed, I think this is a good suggestion. Yes, thank you. Cheryl: Seeing as I’m hearing from the potential candidates, I’m going to ask both Adam and Rudi to respond to the question, not in your own personal capacity but are you of like mind with what is being said, that getting a job regardless of the outcome is perhaps on offer? We’re not going to expect you to say, “Yes, I will” if you can’t, but you be willing to accept another leadership role on a similar theme? Adam? Adam: Well, I thought we sort of had an expectation we’d be volunteering for workshops as they came up, so I don’t want to commit to doing something when I may not have an expertise on it. But if there’s something that I can do, I’ll do it. But no, so I don’t particularly want you to be telling me to join workshops or even inviting me to. I’m expecting that at some point I will do so because that’s what I’m here to do. It’s not necessary, actually. Cheryl: Rudi? Rudi: Well, I can only join what Adam is saying. It is in fact so that we… being part of the ALAC, it’s not only because we’re on a mission on some kind of special activity being the liaison that we are excluded for all other things. I will commit myself up to midnight any day. laughter Cheryl: And after midnight, you do your own work. It’s genuinely scary. There is someone I can find online just about any time I am. Okay. Thank you for all of that, and just to make clear, what I was suggesting was if a position in resuscitating our standing working groups… We have a few standing working groups. For example, Beau has previously been chairing the RAA working group. He may wish to continue doing that or he may find his new world is a little bit busier. So it was that type of thing I was suggesting. Thank you all very much for your candid comments. We will ensure that those… and it is only one person who can vote who is not here, is that not the case, Nick? It’s only Vivek who’s not here? Nick: inaudible 1:52:45 Cheryl: Correct. APRALO will take the APRALO electorate in hand and we will ensure that he has listened to the mp3s and has looked at the bio materials. So rest assured, you will all be properly considered, and good luck in the election. I think it’s an amazing – to use the term in racing – an amazing field and it doesn’t matter what the outcomes are, we’re going to be well served. Thank you very much for offering yourselves. I’ve… have a great temptation, despite the fact that the next item on the agenda fits immediately… the next two items on the agenda – it should be one bullet point and it’s two, but anyway – fit immediately into pressing work that I have to do. I’ll move that, with your permission, so that we can move in the time we have to a very short discussion on how we’re going to approach the gTLD Application Guidebook, the public comment on the RAA amendment, and then come back to the reporting back from the particular working groups and the ICANN Board review. I do want to leave particularly important time at the end of this meeting – those of you who are looking at Skype will know what that’s all about, and I’ll explain it more later. So let’s move straight the new gTLD Application Guidebook. There’s already been a discussion online through a few of us. I know some people have said, “I’d be interested in divvying it up, and should it be divvied up, I’d like these bits.” Go ahead, Nick. And then I suggest go ahead, Beau. Nick: I just wanted to make sure that everyone has a copy of the complete set of documents that are published on the web. If you don’t, I do have some more copies of this book available here. Cheryl: The blue book. If you haven’t got one, Nick will give you one. Beau, seeing as you’ve said what bits you want online – I see Adam needs one – you may as well quickly grab them while they’re up for grabs. laughter Beau: Yeah, I can limit mine to the part about… the first part. I mean, in that e-mail that I sent around to everybody, I just sort of said, “Here’s some interesting things for the ALAC in general,” so the stuff that I’d like to pay most attention to is stuff that pertains to safety, stability, and security in the first… I believe it’s the first section. I’ve leave the morality and public order stuff to other people who are more charged up about that than I am. Cheryl: Alan. Alan: I have two comments – one specific to I might be interested in doing and the other in general. I think we want to make sure that we’re not putting effort into commenting on it, on parts of it just because we feel we have to, but they should be things we really feel are relevant to the community we’re serving. That’s sort of in line with the statement I made to the Board yesterday of “Let’s put our resources where they’re really needed, not feel obliged to comment on everything just because it’s on the table.” In terms of my personal interest, I would be delighted to take responsibility for the pricing issues. Cheryl: I think we’ll probably find a natural fit for just about any divvying up that needs to be done, because it started on the list and you’ve heard the interest that Alan has. Unless someone else wants to desperately make a declaration now, can I suggest that in list traffic between now and later today or tomorrow, Vanda can be in charge of assuring that all bits have got somebody looking at it and this will be agenda item for our November meeting. Thank you very much. This brings us to the very important matter following on from yesterday’s excellent briefing, and I wanted to turn to two speakers. The first of all… The first one will be Beau, because I’d like you to just review for the record, because not everybody who is here today was there yesterday perhaps, what this is all about, why we think it’s a good idea to do so. And then Rudi, because you read out something from some list somewhere to me while I was panicking, looking for a phone this morning, and it had to do with this line, can you find out whatever reference it was if you want to bring that forward? Go ahead, Beau. Beau: Sorry, I’m a bit dense this morning. Can I ask for clarification? Cheryl: Certainly. We are now looking at the proposed RAA amendments directly from yesterday’s activities, so that people know what on earth we’re asking for. I thought a short “This is what was said and done, and this is why we’re doing this or that,” and you’d be the best person for that job. I see you, Robert. Beau: Well, I think we put together… I think our statement was good, the ALAC statement that went in that was circulated and voted upon through BigPulse. I think some of the issues that were zeroed in on were, as I mentioned earlier in the meeting this morning, I think it’s even more important now than we thought it was then, is DNSSEC, and I think today when we talk to the registrars, we need to again make the point that I think that… or that we think, if we do think, that that’s an important component of what people want to begin to see as a safety, stability, and security issue. There were… Basically to go back a little bit in history to when the ALAC first commented on the RAA almost a year ago or more, staff went through a number of the comments and then segregated them into a very unpopular document called I think “Section F,” something like that. So a large portion of what went into the new ALAC statement on the RAA constituted going back over what had been ruled out and put into Section F and re-evaluating it and re- kind of… some of the stuff that was in there was out of date, so we wanted to update that and make it more relevant, and in addition, add things that had been brought up mostly in the NARALO about the… What was Danny Younger’s…? You remember Danny Younger’s memo on…? That was the big one. It was on not the add grace period but the… Evan: Oh. Uh, well, he was big on the RAA and also… Beau: Well, yeah. Evan: …but mainly on the expiry of… Beau: Oh right. Yeah, warehousing. Sorry. Warehousing of domain names and the expiry provisions. So we got that in there. And subsequently I have heard that we may have a bit of a difficult conversation about that statement today with the registrar community, but I think it’s actually okay to have that conversation and I think it’s okay for it to be difficult because, at least from a North American perspective and also when we looked at some of the public comments and some of the public comment files, it seemed that there was a relatively overwhelming support for provisions that were not in the RAA, that the RAA was thought to be weak even with the proposed amendments. So that’s kind of an update on that. I mean, I think it would be helpful for all of us before we have the registrar meeting to look at the ALAC statement that was actually made on the new RAA amendments because I think you’ll find that it’s one of the stronger documents that the ALAC has ever signed off on and voted on, which is great. I think it was necessary in this case. So I hope that gives a little bit of background. Cheryl: Thank you very much. And Rudi, thank you for putting to the Skype chat the form, because as I said, I was somewhat distracted when you were reading that out to me this morning and I really needed something concrete I could look at. Wendy has raised the question, and Wendy, obviously you can speak to it, but there’s one point I need to make before we move on. We have about 10 minutes of meeting left and we have a couple of “Any other business” pieces to go on with. Go ahead, Wendy. Wendy: I’m simply asking, there seems to be an organized campaign, because the same comment came in from several different addresses, and I’m just wondering what the source is, independent of its substance. Cheryl: Robert, have you got a…? Robert: There was a presentation yesterday, which I’m not sure if you were here for, that I think Beau kind of commented on. I think this was the second part to the RAA amendment, which I thought was also going to be mentioned, that was raised yesterday, you know, that ALAC could support this as well too because the RAA is still open and that we wanted to add this as well because it would be seen as a way to reduce and kind of span 2:02:25 in other issues. I’ll defer to Beau. Cheryl: Very quickly, Beau. Beau: Yeah, very quickly, I don’t think the two are related. A whole flood of RAA working group stuff came into the list starting yesterday and it had been a pretty dead list prior to that. So I know that our guest speaker yesterday does have some connections to the community that’s very interested in this, but I think if we focus on what, you know, Carlton wanted to state and add to the RAA, as Robert just sort of alluded to, which is some sort of provision that talks about how registrars are not required to provide in essence basic information that qualifies them as an actual business – name, address, phone number – whereas registrants are, I think we wanted to get that into the proposal as a new RAA amendment. Cheryl: Thank you very much. We do have a little bit of time on this, which is only a little bit of time, so may I propose that this is another matter that we conclude online but before we leave Cairo? Do I have that agreement? You’ve had the opportunity to discuss whether or not we’re going to… You’re frowning at me, Alan. Alan: No, I’m not inaudible 2:03:34. Cheryl: Do I need to talk about this any more? Yes? No? Make it no. Fine. Anything that needs to be completed can be done online before we leave. That now leaves us without the pieces of reporting back. And I need to make room for any other business, and the most important thing that I want to address, although it’s not our last opportunity I would have thought to see them, which is our leaving members, and we still need to be out of here as close to 1 o’clock as possible. I’m going to hold all the reporting back, because I’m going to make a proposal on reporting back, or I can make that proposal now and then move to any other business. Which do you want me to do? Make the proposal now on reporting back? Because it was my intention to ensure that any working group activity that has gone on intersessionally and any working group activity that’s been from an ad hoc working group convened here at the Cairo meeting, and there’s been quite a number of them, is properly incorporated into the reporting of the Chair of the ALAC to the ICANN Board in the public meeting tomorrow, I have to have that in writing. In fact, I’m already late. I was wishing to, as I have done previously, to incorporate the words of the people who were reporting from these working groups and subcommittees. If it is your desire, and because we are here all day, I’ll accept these written in paper or preferably to the list, and I will undertake to incorporate them into the final report which will be transmitted tonight, put up on whatever web space is relevant, and I will have a very short, probably a single slide, but more likely than not seeing as we were supposed to have slides in excess of 24 hours in advance it will be me just standing there and talking for two minutes, if we get that far. Is that something you are all in agreement with? pause Yes? No? Vanda: I guess we should… overtalking 2:05:50 Cheryl: Well, then I will be accepting reports from all the working groups, standing working groups, ad hoc working groups which are names in the agenda, and we also want to hear back from the breakout groups that worked together on the Sunday on the policy advice development process, the participation and accountability, and the outreach activities for incorporation into our meeting report. I will also accept reports from the Regional At-Large Organizations, and if there is any extraordinarily important piece of news that you’d like me to include, I will do that also. I will close off time for that probably midnight tonight, if that works for you. If not, so be it. Vanda: 5 o’clock. Cheryl: “5 o’clock” says Vanda. We can move it back to 5? I would be delighted to move it back to 5. See how we go by 5. That would be great. Now, two very important pieces of any other business which I am going to direct to Alan, because they have to do with the reporting of the metrics and the part that we forgot to actually write on the agenda. Reserve grace period. Alan: inaudible 2:07:08 Cheryl: You had… You specifically asked me to make a space… Alan: Oh, oh, oh. Cheryl: …for you to… I did as was asked. No, that’s right. Yes? Alan: Yeah. Cheryl: Yeah. pause Alan: Okay. I’ll do that one fast. It’s very quick. If you remember, we initiated the policy development process on domain tasting, which became a formal consensus policy. It will be implemented. It has been implemented already by one registry and I believe the deadline for the rest of them is something like next March, which will include of course .com and .net, where the largest amount of tasting has been going on. In parallel with this and perhaps driven by what we did, the Board decided that the 20 cent fee per domain that is levied on registrars, there would only be allowed a small number – actually the same percentage as in the policy – of refunds for AGP deletes. That was implemented effective July 1st, beginning of the budget year, and the first month’s statistics were released a few days ago. The sum total is that for .com, which is the largest domain, the number of AGP deletes in June was about 17 million, slightly up from May. The number of AGP deletes in July was 2.5 million, of which 40% are one registry… one registrar, I’m sorry, who obviously either didn’t realize what was going on and has a large bill or more likely has a business model where 20 cents per domain was quite reasonable. $6 per domain probably won’t be, so… But if you ignore that one registrar who seems to either be or have a different business model, we don’t know which… Beau: Which one? Alan: …it’s down to 1.5, which is 10% of what it was the previous month. And there’s probably some transition numbers in there – that is the first few days of the month, there’s always some carry-over. So I think we’ve done good. That’s number one. Number two is we’ve been working on a request for an issues report on what happens to domains after expiry. There’s pieces of paper like this, but you should have it in your e-mail inbox also. Someone pointed out yesterday that we probably need a more eloquent title than that and something like… something with the word “transparency” in it is probably more appropriate. That came from a registrar, by the way, and someone who does business in this area. So I would move that the ALAC… The ALAC at its last teleconference approved in concept that we’re going to do this and said that will be ratified at this meeting. I would like to move that the ALAC approve the request for an issues report, essentially the document that has been distributed by e-mail and paper with some final editing, and that be submitted within the next short while. Cheryl: Call for a seconder for that motion. pause I see Robert. Any discussion? Yes, go ahead, Beau. Beau: Who was the registrar? Alan: I’ll talk to you privately if you’d like, but I’m not making the announcement. Cheryl: Perhaps you two could discuss that before you meet with the registrars shortly. Putting that to the vote, I will ask for anyone who wishes to have their name recorded against that motion. I will ask for anyone who wishes to have an abstention recorded against their name for this motion. In the absence of anybody indicating those two categories, that is an unanimous support for the motion. Well done, Alan. Well done, ALAC. Alan: Thank you. One more following comment, I believe we have the active support of every constituency within the GNSO other than the Registrar Constituency, and there’s a moderate chance we will have a statement of support from the Registrar Constituency. Cheryl: Is the behind-the-scenes work… Alan: I’m not going to ask them at this meeting, however. Cheryl: But the behind-the-scenes work that’s gone on in this is really quite extraordinary and it’s a credit to all those involved. We are four minutes from the hour. I have another piece of any other business from Adam. If you’d like to introduce that, I really would like to move on. Adam: Yeah, it’s… Well, very quickly, I’d like us to move a lot of our work or at least a portion of our work back to mailing lists. Certainly the work where it benefits from one-to-many discussion. There is a lot of stuff that is refer to wiki, refer to this, refer to that, and I find it much, much easier to get announcements, discussions of topics, announcements, changes to agendas, all kinds of things sent to me in e-mail simply because if I’m offline, I can’t go back to it on the wiki. I can if it’s stored on my computer. There’s a lot of stuff, whether it’s a change of a meeting data, which happened in the APRALO when people didn’t know because there wasn’t clear instruction about the change of a meeting date. I think we have to think of… I would like us very much to go back… Well, I don’t know if it’s “going back to,” but to go to more work in e-mail and less… Wikis are great for working on documents. I don’t think they’re great for informing people of events and so on. Cheryl: Your comments on a much-discussed point are so noted. And when we review our working practices at any point in the future, they will come up for discussion again. Which leads me to one of the more pleasurable parts of what I need to do, and that is thank the outgoing members of the At-Large Advisory Committee for the enormous amount of work that they have done over in some cases before the inception of this beast. Those of you who have been looking at the chat space will know that staff had done as specially requested and had secured some very special gifts on behalf of all of us to those who are leaving us today officially, but of course they’re not going to leave really because we can’t let talent disappear. They’re just moving their position to another place within the world of at-large. And as Nick has also answered to the chat space, that and one or two items… or they and one or two other items were procured illegally from this hotel last evening. So we have found ourselves robbed of the carefully prepared presentation, and I can’t begin to tell you how sad I am because what you will be getting – and you will be getting something because we’re going to do this – won’t be right now, nor will it be what was planned for in the first place. But I would like to call for anyone right now who wants to say something appropriate to these extraordinary people and offer each of them a few moments in reply. And at the end of this, be aware you’re all getting another standing ovation because it’s incredible work you’ve all done. Anybody who wishes to make a personal comment on this work? Yes, go ahead, Robert. Robert: I’d like to… Two colleagues that are leaving, I’ve known both in the ICANN context and the context of the World Summit on the Information Society and Internet Governance now for… it’s probably some six, seven years if not more. They’re colleagues that have inspired me with the work they do, the way they engage people, and most importantly the way they share their knowledge and experience of both the topics but also the nuanced political discussions that take place behind the scenes. That sometimes is something that we don’t really get to talk about but is very important for us to advance our work. They’re both friends that I hope that I’ll still be able to stay in touch with. And I personally just wish to thank Annette for her warmth and for always having… bugging me to learn some better German, and I hope I’ll be able to do so. But also to introduce me to wonderful set of other friends that I’ve been able to meet from Germany as well, and it is through her that I learnt of the warmth and the great hospitality of her fellow colleagues from Germany, something that I will always remember, and I hope I can stay in touch with them. So there have been great friends and I hope that… I know personally I’ll stay in touch with them and I think that Annette though her struggles and perseverance to set up the regional structures, make it possible to be all here today. So my point of view, I thank you and I thank you, Izumi, as well for all your hard work all these many years. Cheryl: Vanda, go ahead. Vanda: Well, being so long here, you know, Annette and Izumi, it’s well recognized. And the first we met, it was back in the GAC group and when the GAC was completely separate for the whole world 2:17:01, and these two are, but anyway, they believe not. And they believe they are improving and in some way they are. But it was very pleasing for us to… for me especially that as a Latin I need to connect, I like to talk with the people. And Annette and even Izumi was always open to talk wherever we are having to do and invite us for many, many issues, many meetings, and everything that is going on, we could learn a little bit from that close room 2:17:48, it was through Annette and sometimes listen in the queue besides Marilyn, Izumi was the one that was always there so we could learn a lot of things from them. And I hope you continue to keep in touch with us and don’t forget to show up all the time, and once in Brazil, please, call me. Cheryl: Please, go ahead, Beau. Beau: Thank you to both of you. I have… Just briefly, especially wanted to thank Izumi for functioning as a sort of a Zen master for me when I have had frustrations and needed wisdom and guidance, especially when I first started doing this. So I hope to… I think mentoring is very important in this environment, and I hope to, you know, hopefully sometime pass on that kind of stuff to someone else who needs it, and I will do so in his honour. Thank you. Cheryl: I will note that of course – yes, I see you, José – that whilst we are focussing on Izumi and Annette, we also had something in gift-wise organized for the liaisons, Jacqueline and Hong. We’ve spoken of Hong. Jacqueline is not in the room. But I would desperately like to know that if we are all going to the Pyramids tonight, and I believe we are, we’re not going to get a full group photo now because people have got to disappear, but I think to get a full group photo with our outgoing members and the rest of us would be an honour and an important piece of history. So with your permission, can we round everybody up at perhaps a fixed time? I’ll leave that to staff to organize to smile at the camera. José, and then I’m sure there’s a very important right of reply from both of them. José: I think that everything has been said, but I just wanted to thank Izumi especially, who really helped me a lot when I was new and didn’t know anything about ALAC. Especially we talked a lot in the Lisbon meeting and it was really, really helpful for me, and I wanted to thank you. Cheryl: Carlton, you wanted a quick word? Carlton: I don’t know if I have standing, but I wanted to say thanks to Annette and Izumi. Since I started in the At-Large, they have welcomed me and they have shared generously. And Izumi has always been that calm voice who’s always trying to find the middle ground. It is a good trait, a good tack to have in a consensus-building environment. Annette, passionate for what she believes, and that is something that I share. And it was a pleasure working with both of you and hopefully you don’t disappear but you remain around someplace. Thank you. Cheryl: Annette, as former Chair, would you like to go first and make any comments you wish to for us? pause Annette: Well, this is very kind of you. I’m moved. And I want to thank you all for the nice companionship here, for the work, for the passion, for the discussions, for the exchange, for all that. Umm… pause It is always like that when you are working and really spending a lot of time for such a long period of time. It is like… now you feel like you have to leave your baby and it has to walk on its own – which is not really true, we are still there and we are actually part of that. And we are both a member of ALSes, I’m still on the EURALO Board, so we are there. But it is… you just mentioned it before, the setting up these RALOs was really hard and of course, you know, I feel afraid that this fragile structure which has started, that it’s really going to last. And there are two things I would like to say. The one thing is we were talking about outreach work a lot, and outreach… Actually I’m really happy that as a result of a very personal outreach work, Hawa and Sébastien are right here. So this is nice, it’s good, it’s good to see, but I think talking about outreach, I would say now that we do have this structure which is there to ensure that ICANN really focuses on users’ interests, we should also make sure that we do make outreach through other ICANN constituencies because I don’t think that ALAC is something separate from ICANN. It is just there to ensure, to have a structure in place, but it’s not the only place where users are represented or where interests of users can be represented. So I think it is extremely important now that we have this structure in place to really make another step, and maybe this might be a place at the user summit to really work on working together with the ICANN community and especially the constituencies. And I want to thank some people who are not here. That is actually the introduction I got by those who were here in the ALAC when I came. And there are a lot of people not here anymore and I want to thank them all. And there are two people, three people… How many? Three people, that’s it. Three people here who were there before, and that’s Hong, Izumi, and Wendy, and I want to thank the three of you. Thanks. Izumi: Okay. It’s been a real pleasure. We all remember the rough times. Although some of you may not know, Annette and I are the two incumbents in a way from the previous model of ALAC. One of the reasons why I sort of despite my kind of long service decided to stay for a while, for one year I thought, was that since many new members were coming, that we at least wanted to share some of the corporate memory not to repeat the mistakes we made, and happily you guys didn’t make that much repetition of the mistakes, but seemingly some progress. But still the challenge to me is a lot ahead. Building a new one like, you know, well, making… well, producing a baby is one thing, but bringing a baby in the maturity of an adult where the parents’ responsibilities are sort of relieved is another thing that usually takes 18 to 20 years, right? So I was actually very much wondering whether I should continue to be part of ICANN. I started since 1998-ish, and if you do something 10 years then… you know what I mean. Of course, so much pleasure and so much learning all the time for me, all the challenges. As I said in an APRALO meeting, I really like to see something new, challenging, unknown, and I’m proud that I’ve done some of them at ICANN. Like, you know, identifying the WSIS – it’s the ALAC who organized the first workshop on the WSIS in the ICANN community where only 20 people came in. There’s a lot 2:25:26… “They don’t care.” I worked Y2K and I started sort of, of the IPv6 thing. So I’m glad that, Alan, we worked on the domain tasting thing as well. But with Hong with IDN, I didn’t really bother much about IDN because you are the expert, so we should do overlapping too much but I really appreciated that. Vittorio, you are there, you are the first Chair of ALAC starting 2003. But I’m also a believer of the rotation or evolution that incumbents should go away and bring in the new blood and new ideas and have sort of a healthy growth. I really learned a lot from the member new members, like Hue 2:27:12 or, you know, Sébastien, or… who’s gone, Veronica, or, you know, I can’t name that many. Or our amigos from Latin America, or our, you know, English-speaking friend from Caribbean, Jacqueline, whose English I couldn’t really understand often. And French, yes. Merci beaucoup! I cannot say… Supran, Supran 2:27:36 and there’s not much other people. But these diversities of, you know, all the different values created a lot of clashes. Like this is one of the calmest, very quiet ALAC meetings I would say. I saw tears and bursts and crash and personal angries. And sometimes, yes, I tried to be a middleman, sometimes I was part of the play or game. But overall I really enjoyed. And I hope we can stay in touch in some way or other. And this is my 31st ICANN meeting, so I hope you guys will do something similar, laughter in the years to come, for another 5-10 years. I really thank you. And I was a boy scout and the one word is “Be always prepared.” So Nick, if you lose something, you better prepared. So instead I have some gifts for you guys. I’m not… How many of us? It’s only 20, so the new incoming guys, like Adam whom I’ve known since 1990, you’re not qualified. laughter Izumi: Okay. Cheryl: Perhaps while they’re being… Izumi: Just a small token… Cheryl: Perhaps while they’re being passed around is an absolutely appropriate time for us to all put our hands together and thank them from the bottom of our hearts. applause Cheryl: There will be much stories and memories shared around the Pyramids tonight I must say. A minor housekeeping matter and a point of rather importance, because I’m now fashionably late for an hour meeting, which started at 1, which means I will not be able to return to chair and be involved in the ALAC-Registrar Constituency meeting which I must say I most humbly apologize for. It has been my intention to squeeze it all in. The meeting is back here in this room at 2:30. We have obviously vice chairs, but in these meetings with the interest we’ve always used Beau as the lead. So Beau, if you’re comfortable to manage that meeting, we’ll be handing the reins over to you. You’re comfortable with managing that meeting? Beau: Oh, very much so. laughter Cheryl: Somehow I’m not surprised. Following on from… Following on from that very important meeting which finishes at 3:30, we have to magically move as quickly as we possibly can out through the doors and up to Abdeen, which I believe is up one floor, is that correct? Anyway, make sure someone lets us know where we’ve got to go for the workshop on the At-Large review. And enjoy your much deserved break, and I’m sorry I have to dash out the door, but back here at 2:30. Male: inaudible 2:30:58 Cheryl: No, after the 2:30 one that finishes at 3:30, at the exact same time as it finishes, 3:30, the workshop on the At-Large review, which clearly we all need to be at, runs in Abdeen. End of Audio