ICANN Public Forum President's Report and Comments Monday 11 February 2008 New Delhi, India >>PAUL TWOMEY: Good morning, everybody. Sorry for the slight delay. Obviously, we've been trying to sort out some technology here. Can I repeat what Steve just said. If there's anybody here who would like to have access to translation in several languages, there is -- there are translators and earphones, headphones available at the back. French, Chinese, and Spanish. Well, good morning. Welcome for the president's report for this meeting. And I'll remind people that the rationale for having this report at the beginning of the meeting is to basically make certain you don't get bored to death hearing me saying the same things each day for five days in different constituency meetings things. We'll try and do a summary just for this meeting. This time it's going to be a Kieren and Paul show, because Kieren and I have been talking about how we want to try to give you more sense of where you can track yourselves, where the different issues are going to be discussed during this meeting. So Kieren and I are going to interact. And he'll probably do as much talking, if not more, than I should -- and that's a good thing -- just to explain to you as we go through where in the public participation sites and where on the Web sites you can in-kind material and where you can interact specifically, because you may find yourself in meetings this week where it would be useful that you may want to online participate in another meeting during that time. You may want to make notes during that session that you're involved in. This is important for about the 900 people who are attending the meeting in Delhi. It's probably more important for people who are attending the meeting virtually. And it will help to show them exactly how to interact using the new tools. ICANN has made a lot of investment into new tools and new ways of participation. We want to make certain people understand how they work and how to make the best advantage of them. So let's go to the next page. There is quite a comprehensive agenda for this meeting. And let me go through it in some detail. The strategic plan, obviously, the strategic plan and operating plan and budget discussion. There's policy development activities. There has been some new ccTLD accountability frameworks signed recently, just to quickly remind people of. Big topics for this week, obviously, are Internationalized Domain Names and new gTLDs. We have recently been doing testing and exercising on the registry failover plan. I want to direct to you some information about that. Obviously, the Joint Project Agreement midterm review is a significant issue. We will have more information about that this afternoon. Related to that is the frameworks and principles for accountability and transparency. You'll see there's actually a copy of that on everybody's seat. The regional fellowship program, global outreach with some intergovernmental organizations. Talk about the IANA function. Very importantly, we have a "F" root server agreement, which is a milestone of accountability framework between ourselves and the root server operator. Want to talk a bit more about IPv4 depletion and IPv6 implementation. Moving now to the strategic plan, the plan was approved by the board in December 2007, following our usual process of six months of consultation with the community, the executive, the board. And there was a series of objectives identified by the community. Implement IDNs and new gTLDs. Enhance security and stability of the Internet's unique identifiers. Monitor the depletion of V4 address space, and provide leadership towards V6 adoption. Maintain and advance confidence in the gTLD marketplace. And then strive for excellence in cooperations, strengthen the multistakeholder model by managing increasing demands and changing needs, strengthen accountability and governance, and ensure financial stability and responsibility. Now, Kieren, you might want to talk more about where people can find this. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Sure. Well, -- can you hear me? >> No. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Is the mike live? Good, thank you. With some of these, Paul, I've put up live links. I've just put up a copy of the document. It was translated into five different languages as well. It's on the other screen, on your right-hand side, Paul. And so when we go through and we hit the IDNs and the meetings that are happening at this meeting, I've got live links and we can click through to the meeting site. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Okay. Obviously, icann.org/strategicplan, and it's in multiple -- I think it's five languages. So I would recommend to people to -- you know, if you need reminding of the strategic plan, please go there. As the -- per the request of the community, we are in, 1st of February, working here on devoted operational plan and budget. And there will be a session on that at the 13th of February at 4:30 p.m. in the Durbar Hall or Durbar Hall, sorry. There is a proposal on the table to eliminate the practice of domain tasting by charging the annual ICANN fee on registrar domain registrations. That proposal has been -- people have discussed the proposal. It's on the table. And this is part of the budget process for fiscal year coming through to 1st of July, 2008. The key point here is that the community's asked in the operational planning process if we can put the -- basically, some idea of the funding forward, and also if we can put a three-year -- more of a long-term proposal about what the funding may look like going forward. Doug and Kevin and Kurt and others in the board finance committee have done an enormous job on this. And this is the beginning of a consultation which will take five months, through to the end of June, and in Paris. And we are looking very much for feedback from all members of the community. And it is a financial model. I want to make it very clear, what's being put forward now is operational plan proposals and a financial -- and a financial model, a way of thinking about the way the finances would work for this period. So I exhort people to attend this session. And, Kieren, do you have more information for us? >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Sure. So what we have here, there's an issue with the wireless connection at the moment. But what we have here is the Delhi participation site, which is at del.icann.org. On that site, we have a separate Web page for each meeting. And on each meeting, we have an introduction about what the meeting is, why it's important, who should attend. We have lists of the -- we have the agenda that's up there, a list of the panelists that are there, and as and when we get the presentations, they will also be on that meeting page. If you register with the site, which is very easy -- you simply give your e-mail address and then confirm that's an e-mail address -- then you will be able to get into chat rooms. And we'll be monitoring the chat rooms in each meeting. So if people have questions either in the meeting or virtually during that meeting, then we will be able to raise them during the physical meeting itself. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Just to confirm, to get to the public participation site, you can either go from the front page to the ICANN Web site, there is a -- a link in the top right-hand corner which says "public participation," or you can go through the Delhi button -- Delhi meeting button on the left-hand side, which would also take to you the public participation site. Will you need to register. The reason for this is, obviously, we need to deal with spam and problems on the site. It's pretty simple. You just put in your e-mail address, you'll get sent back an e-mail straightaway on how to register. And then please use that. I would exhort everybody in the meeting, please, to register so that you can access this site and actually see the materials and the conversations that are taking place. Policy development activities at this meeting. And there's a -- on the other side there, you can see the full meeting agenda up with the links from each page. Policy development activities being discussed this week are very significant. The GNSO, the ccNSO, and the GAC are having -- talking about a series of related questions, which I think is very healthy, because it shows the interrelationships between the interests in those different -- in those different bodies, particularly on studies on WHOIS, domain tasting, the new gTLD environment, fast-track modalities potentially for IDN TLDs, inter-registry transfer policy, contractual conditions, also some discussions of ICANN regions, and GNSO improvements is another agenda item that's come through. And I've already gone through some of the other policy issues that are in front of us, including the Joint Program Agreement midterm review. Again, if you go to -- I think this is the page now, is it, Kieren? This is del.icann.org/days. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Yes, this is just a screen grab of the schedule running down. If you go to the site and click on schedule, for schedule, it will list every single meeting or meetings according to day. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Can I remind you, for those who have been using the site, if you -- if you want to see what was posted from yesterday or if you want the transcript of the GNSO Council meeting from Saturday, you go to the -- what's -- the button which says "full schedule." Otherwise, the other button will just be today's schedule. If you feel suddenly you can't find something from yesterday, go to "full schedule," click that, and you will get this screen, which will take to you the materials for each meeting. Just to report on ccTLD accountability frameworks. These continue to prove to be, I think, a popular part of the -- of the CC community engagement with ICANN and a sense of accountability. We have so far in December in 2007/2008 agreed at a further 12 accountability frameworks for exchanges of letters with large and small country code operators. More than 60% of the registrants in country codes are now covered by, if you like, the country codes representing more than 60% of registrants in country codes now have such agreements with ICANN. Internationalized domain names is a main topic. And the timeline clearly is that in the December 2006, we completed laboratory testing of Punycode strings. The IETF continues to lead efforts to finalize the IDNA protocols. In October 2007, we inserted IDNs into the root zone, for example, test in 11 languages. And the Wiki page facilitation, evaluation feedback, I'll give you some information on this shortly. We have two workshops this week. There's a fast-track process for introducing limited IDN ccTLDs this afternoon, 3:00 to 6:00 in the Durbar Hall, and then there will be a workshop specifically on IDNs in Indian languages and scripts on Wednesday, between 11:00 and 1:00 in the Agra room. Again, Kieren, you have some links there that you're just showing. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: I'm showing them, Paul. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Kieren's just showing them. Okay. So I think we're making the point. We really do want you to use this public participation site, 'cause it'll give you more information about each of these main sessions that are on. And because -- one of the reasons we're so keen on this is because what we're seeing increasingly over the last several years is the communities increasingly coming together across constituencies and across organizations to deal about specific issues. Our meetings still tend to be a little silo-ish in the sense that the GAC has its meetings, the GNSO has its meetings. So we're very keen to have people be able to have access, if you're in one meeting, you can actually see what's going on in another meeting, participate online in that meeting in the site at least. And we think that's important. Just in terms of the feedback we've received so far on the IDN Wikis, there's been 500,000 page requests since October 2007 of people accessing the Wiki and being able to tell us what their experience has been in accessing the test strings. And I think the percentage numbers are very interesting. 38% of the requests we've received are in Chinese or are in the Chinese strings. Some 14% were Arabic, some 13% for Cyrillic. And then the rest of the scripts and languages have gotten somewhere between 2 and 4%. I think that does say something at the moment about popular interest certainly very strong in the Chinese, Arabic, and Cyrillic communities. I don't want to underestimate at all the interest in, say, the Indian languages, but I think at the moment, the testing has been quite interesting. And, again, you can find information on this at IDN.icann.org. Am I okay? The new gTLD and IDN TLD implementation. The ccNSO, the GNSO, and the GAC have been working to complete two years of defining guidelines and recommendations for new TLDs and IDN TLDs. Obviously, the recommendations on policy have come up through the GNSO to the board for consideration. The policy recommendations are before the ICANN board for approval, and the goal is to have IDN TLD presence available in 2008. The focus, the ccNSO focus, has been on some concept of fast track in place of regions that have a strong need for IDN TLDs. And I've already shown you in the previous slide where you can see where that strong need is being exhibited, in the Chinese languages, the Arabic languages, the Cyrillic. Let's be quite clear here: The idea of fast track is not that that's a limitation on access to IDN or IDN ccTLDs. It is more about a concession before the full implementation. So there is going to be a long-term policy put in place. But considering that policy initiative could take 18 months or two years, the fast track is a discussion. Obviously, there is a first way of making a first concessionary introduction for the areas where there is that strongest demand. The IDNC Working Group workshop is taking place the 11th of February. Again, you can see on the screen here the links. You can find more information specifically on that workshop in terms of new gTLD implementation. I have to tell you that this is probably the area that has got the most absorption of ICANN staff at the moment. The board has asked the ICANN staff to go away and come back with an analysis and plan for implementation of the proposed GNSO policy. This, folks, is really, really, really hard. I've got to tell you, it is really hard. Some of the issues are relatively straightforward; some of the issues are not. And we have been spending a lot of resources external and internal to look at some of this analysis. One of the things we are doing is, we have a lot of independent advice on this process, including risk mapping and operational impact analysis. We've started this group since -- actually, it says January here, but we started the work, I think, in November or October. And there is at the moment some interest about auction design experts being sought for three possible areas which are outlined. I don't want to give you the wrong impression from the slide. That's just one of the many sources of expertise that we're presently looking for. But we are working through quite a range of issues. They will be discussed further this week. Also there is the contractual conditions for existing gTLDs, which has been part of the -- I think this slide is a little confused, really. This is actually recommendations for Registrar Accreditation Agreements. So I think there will be further discussion around that in the Durbar Hall on 14th of February. I managed to get my own slides confused there. The registry failover plan. I think the key point here is to tell people that, A, there's been a plan put in place and, B, the plan has been tested. And that's one of our themes for this year around all things that relate to security aspects for the DNS, is that planning is one thing and exercises are something completely different. Actually testing and exercising actually tells you many things about whether your plan is right or not or related issues that you need to think through. And so we are updating the plan after the test on the 13th of February, and we'll be producing an accompanying best-practice document. One of the things that's quite interesting in these exercises, I'm going to point to this because it's also something that we have asked to work on with some of the CC managers as well on issues of security and exercises around security of DNS infrastructure. A lot are not technical. What they are is business and accountability and communication issues. And that's the sort of things, again, I think we found specifically in this test, that what came out was the need to define ICANN, more clearly identify what to do in a potential failure and protect interests. So a lot of the exercises -- this, as I said, is going to be a theme for ICANN discussion a lot around security issues with our community, is this word "exercises." And the exercises are really pointing out a lot of the human aspects as opposed to some of the necessary technical aspects. The Joint Project Agreement midterm review, I'll talk briefly to this now. There is a session this afternoon specifically with more detail on this. The JPA and predecessors have made ICANN a stable organization. At our Los Angeles meeting, you'll recall John Kneuer, the Secretary of Commerce, announced midterm review had taken place. He talked about this is in terms of a joint process between the Department of Commerce and ICANN. He asked the ICANN board specifically to do its own evaluation of its own resolution that was appropriate. And the board believes ICANN met its obligations and responsibilities under the JPA and that is probably now that we actually start looking about completion of that. We have actually produced an index of our agreements -- it's 41 pages long. Full submission to the Department of Commerce is 1,900 pages long -- of all the -- everything related to the various action under that JPA. We think concluding the JPA is the next step in transition and coordination of the DNS to the private sector, which is the stated policy of the U.S. government. There will be a session immediately after this forum. We'll talk about this in more detail and also talk and share with you what we're hearing in our consultations. We've been doing extensive consultations as part of this partnership with the community here and with others, and we are here to hear more of your perception, part of what we want to do coming this week and through Friday, this is what we're hearing from the community, what things are sort of coming forward. This afternoon is very important on that topic, and look for more feedback throughout the week. I should point out, there is a public consultation notice inquiry from the U.S. Department of Commerce which concludes on the 15th of February, which is this Friday. And you can find ways of accessing that in various ways on that Web site. Very importantly, part of the whole work under the Joint Project Agreement after our whole discussion in September of 2006 was as the community said, we really want to have better clarity about, understanding about the transparency issues in ICANN and accountability in ICANN. And the ICANN board and staff and community are going to take a 13-month consultation process, quite extensive consultation process, and on issues relating to accountability and transparency. Sitting on the seats in front of you is a 38-page summation of ICANN's Accountability and Transparency Framework. Please pick it up ... now. If you've got one near you, open it up. Because there's no point in all of us having done this work if we don't pay attention to what we've actually said. There's several key parts, I think, in this document that's worth pointing out. You will see in the front of the document that one of the interesting aspects about ICANN is that it has basically got to balance three forms of accountability. It has to balance accountability, if you're an organization of public trust, operating a public trust function for coordinating a global technical function. Secondly, it has a series of quite strict, quite open legal accountabilities that have had to undertake. And third is a series of accountabilities that is built for itself about accountabilities as participatory organization and how your accountability is to the participatory community. Those are a concern with each other. They actually clash with each other. To give you the -- sort of one example, the legal obligation of care or duty of loyalty for a board member, for instance, which is a requirement under the law may conflict with general sense that you should have full disclosure of all information in every possible circumstance, which, for instance, you may want to have under one of the provisions of the accountability for a participatory organization and at various stages to set off balances behind that. So the document in front of you summarizes all of the information the community has had put into this, summarizes those three basic forms of accountability and how they operate. I particularly want to thank the Canadian government and the GAC, who gave us a lot of advice in their last meeting about the sort of frameworks around thinking about this. There are some new things that quite clearly in that -- you'll see that the translation policy looks at that specifically in reference to languages. Translation. Specifically material in here, in that document, about behavior. I'd like everybody to read that as well, because that's come through as also what standards of behavior do we owe each other as we operate in a multi-ethnic and multistakeholder international organization. I think that's a very important document. There were two other issues, two other areas that arose in the consultation that did not develop consensus but which the board did think was sufficiently interesting and worthy of really further examination for the board to propose, that they be transmitted to the board review which we'll be undertaking this year. They are caught in a document called the next steps document. I'm not certain it's been distributed to you. But those two areas were specifically related to a mechanism for the community to be able to ask the board to reconsider a decision, not on any other basis, just "We want you to reconsider that decision you have made." And also potentially the mechanism whereby, in extreme circumstances of unethical behavior, for instance, that the board -- that the community could move to spell the board and reconstitute it. But nevertheless, the next step is saying sufficiently interesting propositions should be reviewed in the context of the board review. That's why I want to draw your attention to those pieces of work. I think we've talked about this public accountability. One other thing in terms of public accountability which we have launched recently and I'll draw your attention to is the dashboard. It's also, again, a link on the front page. And that dashboard gives you realtime information on a number of areas of the moment, focuses a lot both on finance, but also on IANA performance. But you can go at any one time, click on the dashboard, and see the same management data that I receive on a daily basis. And on some aspects of what we do we look to expand that over time as we look to get other areas as we sort of expand our dashboard functionality. Again, this is another way we want to make completely transparent to the community about operational performance inside the organization. The legal and corporate accountability I've talked a bit about. I also talked about accountability to the community. As I said, I really would like you to look at that document on your seats, take it away with you, live that document, because it's very important in the way in which we work as a community. There are many initiatives around transparency, Web site improvements and communications, and I just have a long list of them there. But, again, I would remind people about that. One of the things I think that we're finding increasingly popular, I would exhort people to take advantage of, is signing up for the electronic newsletters, the electronic magazine and electronic alerts. Kieren, you might want to tell people how to do that, if you would. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: I was bringing up the next steps document there. >>PAUL TWOMEY: There's the next steps document, yes. >>KIEREN McCARTHY: Linked on the front page. It's actually very easy. I do wish people would sign up to these news alerts and these monthly magazines. The news alerts -- effectively, every time there is an announcement which covers almost all ICANN's work, we put out a news alert which you can click through. That's so you can find out exactly what's going on. The monthly magazine is something that I produce once a month which informs you about what ICANN is doing as an organization. We cover three policy parts each time, and then we cover what's been going on on the blog. And the public participation page covers what's being discussed in the board meeting, what will happen in the next board meeting. We do an interview with one of the main figures in the community. So they get to talk about pretty much what they want. So, pretty much, it's an idea that is what has happened to ICANN that month. To get to it, you go to what is -- on the front page, it says, "subscribe," "news," and "news alerts." There's one page, and you type in your e-mail address, you're subscribed. >>PAUL TWOMEY: I'd ask you to look at that front page of the ICANN Web site. There's several buttons where you can click on and subscribe to things, but, specifically, there's alerts. I think they're very valuable, because we're conscious -- you may be aware of this. The ICANN Web site has as much information as an average television Web site in the United States. There's a huge amount of information on that Web site that has been developed by our community over the last ten years. While we can go to certain degrees of making it simpler and easier to access, what have you, the realities are, even you have other things to do in your life than spend every day looking at the ICANN Web site. So the alert process and the magazine process is a way to try to give you a heads up when something comes through that might be of interest to you in particular. So again, as well as trying to do a lot of work on transparency on the Web site and communications, we are also trying to do a lot more to be get you to be able to sort of pull the information you need. Regional fellowship program has been a program put in in this year's budget, in a trial stage. It provides financial grants to individuals from developing economies to help them participate in our meetings. Let me remind you what the priorities are. They are low, middle income and upper income economies. Governments, ccTLDs and nonprofit sector not associated with ALAC to participate, and the reap for that is ALAC has its own funding. Participants from meeting region, participants from adjacent regions and then overseas participants. That he the priority, sort of geographic priorities. There have been 256 applications submitted since the program started this financial year. There are 89 received for this Delhi meeting. There were 20 fellowships awarded for this meeting: Ten from Asia-Pacific, four from West Asia/Arabic countries and three from African countries. And 11 are attending an ICANN meeting for the first time. So we are monitoring this program very closely. We are monitoring the performance of the evaluation process very closely but I have to say at the moment it is looking like it is proving to be quite successful. Global outreach continues. And I will just report to you there has been a series of nonbinding partnership relationships with private intergovernmental organizations to aid in outreach to governments and local Internet communities. In particular, these are memoradums of understanding which basically say we shall work together towards common objectives. They are not binding things that make us do anything in relation to those organizations. They don't make us members of those organizations. But the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Authority, the U.N. Economic and Social Commission of West Asia, the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization, the African Telecommunications Organization, and CITEL, the Inter-American Telecommunications Commission of the Organization of American States. And we are proceeding with two Memorandums of Understanding, I think this has already been approved, with the Institute of Information Security Issues at the Moscow State University and the Russian Association of Networks and Services. So this is part of our program of building linkages with other organizations where we have aligned interests. It is not us moving beyond scope. We are very careful not to go outside the scope of this organization or its mandate, but there are ways in which we can cooperate with other people because we are firm believers that we should not be duplicating functions done by others but one plus one can equal three, and that's the rationale. IANA operations continue to move quite smoothly. You can get more detail on the IANA operations on the dashboard. So if you want more accurate, more up-to-date data -- this is up-to-date data, but if you want to keep record of this at the time the dashboard gives access to this, and you will see the yellow line here is the outstanding root zone change requests. The purple one I think is closed and the black one means open. The trouble with these charts is I am colorblind so I have to try to guess what these colors are. But you see there's a sort of a steady state here. We are getting -- we got quite a peak in the middle of the year of applications. And to give you an example what can cause a peak here, if we receive a request from someone who wishes to shift a particular secondary server, and they want to shift from that secondary server to this secondary server but there are ten country codes presently sitting on this server, that's ten sort of requests that we have received and we have to go out to each ten CCs and make sure we agree with it before we make a shift from one server to another. So sometimes you can get various reasons for the peaking here. And that's a recording of the processing time. And the meantime for closing tickets has recently gone up. One of the reasons that has gone up is a combination of really two things. One is we have received a number of redelegation requests where we have asked those communities, "Do you have consensus in your community?" That's tended to produce a very long process domestically, which has either then resulted in redelegation or resulted in people wanting to keep the present arrangement. We keep the ticket open throughout that process. Then at some stage, we have to close it. So I can tell you that's one of the reasons the average meantime has gone up. The second reason is a little bit like I said before about certain requests we get for secondary servers where we have got to go out and approach every CC to make certain that they wish to be involved. In other words, some of the requests we are getting are more complex than some of the requests we have had in the past. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Paul, five minutes. >>PAUL TWOMEY: Five minutes. We are finishing now. The last two things to talk about are the F-root server agreement. This is a very important initiative. My thanks specifically go to Suzanne Woolf who has played a major role in this and to other members of the RSSAC community. This is a mutual responsibilities agreement between ICANN and ISC, the Internet Systems Consortium, that operates the F-root server signed in January 2008, and it aligns with several of our responsibilities. The root server system overall has 13 root server operators -- has 12 operators and 13 root servers. That's right. And answers well over 100,000 queries per second. You can find more information in the announcements page. And I think Kieren is referring to it on the Web site. V6 completion and v6 implementation, just remind people there are two memoradums of understanding between the Number Resource Organization and the Address Supporting Organization and ICANN relating to global Internet number resource policies for the remaining IPv4 address space. And that was agreed in November 2007. And the same thing for autonomous number systems, and you can find references to those on the Web site. And I think as was already said by the chairman in the opening session this morning, this issue of education around the uptake of IPv6 is a high priority for ICANN. So, Chairman, I will complete the submission there. There's a lot of material underway. And just to make the final point, it's all available on the Web site. We want you to participate as much as possible. Thank you.