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Faryel Beji: The Internet, ladies and gentlemen, honorable guests, I am very glad to give the address on behalf of the people present here and the (inaudible) the Minister of Information (inaudible) in particular, Dr. Vint Cerf, who is the chairman of ICANN, and I would like to welcome Paul Twomey, who is the President of ICANN. I would like to welcome the Chairman of GAC and so on and so forth.

This conference is taking place in the preparation stage for the World Summit, which will be held in the year 2005. And thanks to the position of Tunisia, several institutions and organizations have decided to set up to organize the meetings here in Tunisia in parallel with the ICANN conference, in particular, ISOC, GAC, the (inaudible) as well as the AFTLD and (inaudible), which have decided to hold a meeting along with ICANN. Allow me to speak in English before I give the floor to our honorable guests and then to His Excellency, the Minister of Communication.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a complete pleasure to welcome all of you at this ceremony. I welcome you on behalf of your local host, Tunisian Internet Agency and the company in charge of the ccTLD. I hope you are getting work done and at the same time having a nice day in our country. We have tried to provide all the facilities to ensure the success of the meeting. This morning, we have organized a welcoming ceremony. I thank the Minister for organizing this event. Indeed, the Tunisian government has always been a driving force to a better vision of the future. Also, it's an honor for our country to be chosen to host this event. Furthermore, I have been looking forward to having all of you attending this ICANN meeting, which I hope is of great interest to you.

Ladies and gentlemen, for quite a few years, Tunisia has been struggling at making the communication and information technology a building block in all of its development programs, whether economic or educational or social, as it may be (inaudible) by the many -- just to give you an example, Tunisia has devoted $1.7 billion to organize the sector and set up the appropriate environment for the development of the ACTLDs. It has been selected to host the World Summit for the Information Society, the first stage being scheduled in Geneva in 2003. Your choice to host the ICANN meeting and all the other activities which are taking place in parallel is no doubt an attribute to all that Tunisia has been doing and an incentive to pursue this in order to achieve our goals. The Internet is playing a key role in the world economy. We hope that this meeting will be successful and a step forward toward a better Internet that we achieve together.

Dear guests, I would like to thank you all for your attention and for participating in this meeting. We have an (inaudible) trying to provide all of the facilities for smoothness of this major event for Tunisia. You are our guests and I hope that you feel at home. And if there is anything you may need, do not hesitate to let us know. And I am trying to thank all of you for your consideration and wish you good continuation in both your work and your stay in Tunisia. Thank you very much for your attention. And now I have the pleasure to give the floor to the Professor Vint Cerf. He is the Chairman of ICANN. You have the floor, Professor.

(applause.)

Vint Cerf: Your Excellency Rabah, Minister of Communication and your Excellency Mhiri, Secretary of State, distinguished guests, and distinguished Members of the Board and of the participants in the ICANN meeting here in Tunisia, it is an honor and a pleasure to greet you this morning. I will be brief. You did not come here to listen to me. We have come here to listen to you.

Our task as we spread the Internet around the world and try to create the technology which makes it accessible to everyone requires that we understand the situations, the problems, the challenges, and the opportunities that every country and every citizen in those countries has to take advantage of information technology and the Internet. To do that, we rely upon you. We rely upon our honored guests this morning to help us appreciate how we can improve the way in which the Internet works so that it can be available and accessible to everyone.

I know that we've all been working very hard during the course of this week, and we still have two more days of effort ahead of us, and so I don't want to slow down the pace. I thank you all for your participation and your work. And I look forward to hearing what our guests have to say. I want to ask you to join me in thanking Professor Beji, who has made available all of these facilities to us and who has worked tirelessly this week and in the many weeks before to make our meeting successful. So, Professor Beji, thank you very much for all of your hard work.

(applause.)

And I will turn the lectern back over to you.

Faryel Beji: Thank you very much, Professor, for these nice words about our country and for this nice speech. And now I want to give the floor to Dr. Paul Twomey, President of ICANN, for his welcome speech. Dr. Twomey, please.

(applause.)

Paul Twomey: Your Excellency, honorable guests, ladies and gentlemen, your Excellency, I'd like to welcome you here to our meeting at ICANN here in Tunisia, and I'd like to reinforce the words of Vint Cerf, the thanks we have to the Tunisian Internet agency and Professor Beji for the marvelous assistance we have received.

Your Excellency, I would like to introduce you to ICANN and in 78 many respects, it reminds me of what you are trying to do here in Tunisia. ICANN is an international process, an international entity with an international board, with international participation focusing on a small but very important part of the technical administration of the Internet. If we all do our job well, 750 million people get to use the Internet well and easily. If we don't, they don't. And the way that we're organized reflects in many ways what you have been trying to achieve here in Tunisia.

ICANN is a public/private partnership, just as here in Tunisia you've recognized the need for the government to work with the private sector. ICANN brings a large body of technical people and other organizations linked to the technical community, just as you've played the important emphasis upon training, upon the technical skills in Tunisia. And ICANN also has strong links with the academic environment, just as you have had links with the academic environment and placed an emphasis on Internet at universities and at schools. ICANN is a multi-stakeholder environment. Why? Because these are the people who actually grow the Internet and build it. And I think in many respects, it reflects your own commitment, reflects your own vision of how things should work in Tunisia and broadly around the Mediterranean, the Maghreb, of how you actually pragmatically grow growth and grow the Internet and grow the advanced technologies. We look forward to working with you further, not just at this meeting, but in your very important role in hosting the next round of the World Summit for information society. And we look forward to being one of your partners. Welcome.

(applause.)

Faryel Beji: Thank you very much, Doctor, for your interesting speech. And now I would like to give the floor to Mr. Arial Francais, Resident Coordinator of the United Nations system in Tunisia. Mr. Francais, go ahead, please.

Arial Francais: Thank you.

Chairman of ICANN, Chair of the Tunisia Agency of the Internet, honorable board guests, ladies and gentlemen, I would like first of all to thank you very much and to welcome you to this ICANN Congress organized by ATI under the high patronage of the Minister of Technologies and Communication as well as Transportation. Thus, ladies and gentlemen, after Cairo, Africa is privileged with hosting such an important meeting of the ICANN already in 2002 in his message addressed to your assembly in Accra, the General Secretary of the United Nation, Kofi Annan, for intellectual property, and the ITU for the Implementation of Policies, the Policies of the Internet and the Community of the Users.

During the three latest days, the discussions under strategies for the promotion of the Internet have been undertaken within this very room. These proceedings, this analysis, will enable us to facilitate our thought and our ideas on the implementation of the original strategies of the development and the intensification of network that will provide the opportunity for the countries to share and to benefit from their respective expertise. Ladies and gentlemen, the revitalization is accompanied by -- it's through the Internet, the network of networks, that the flow of information transits, which will be the new vectors of development of -- and for this reason, the acceleration of the Internet in the southern countries of the world focuses nations and for you in particular a strategy priority.

To that effect, as a matter of fact, the UNDP is acting as a pioneer for the promotion of the information and the communication technologies through its initiatives and programs, be it national as well as at the (inaudible) level. It's policy vis-a-vis the development of the Internet is part and parcel of a wider framework dissemination of the information technologies to the benefit of development. And in order to reduce digital gap. Indeed, since 1994, UNDP was in the center of several programs relating to the implementation of networks, access to the Internet, management of domain names, as well as the involvement of experts from development from developing countries in meetings such as those of ICANN. Concretely, we have helped Afghanistan for the development of its domain .af and to finance the first African forum on the Internet governance.

The UNDP contributes largely and has several assets in its capacity of network for development. It has equally large expertise and experience in the field of communication. It has several programs of partnership which it implemented over and over during the related years. The Technologies of Information and Communication have been the principle vector which can enhance and encourage sustainable development and which can solve the two problems that countries are facing.

In the dozens of poor countries, UNDP sets up the necessary foundation for a better world where technology and information is an important role. It has increased and enhanced local economies (inaudible) to reach levels of development, especially with regard to education and health, with an added value for the developing countries, it is equally to reduce cost of services, including the administration services and make development easier. The technologies developing for communication could help developing countries to improve their situation, to reduce poverty, and to promote knowledge in a promising environment, this could happen easily.

Vertically speaking, this can take place through the setting up of production services, (inaudible) services, the Internet, processing of telephony on the Internet. This can happen through the use of modern technologies from the (inaudible) or e-government through electronic commerce or e-commerce as well as decision-making. We know equally that the improving of the access to this technology cannot take place in a vacuum. It requires a clear and promising environment, as (inaudible) by the UNDP has shown, that the constraints facing development in the developing countries have met the infrastructure of the hardware, which are certainly assets, but, rather, the level of education and the presence of men and women who are technically competent to sustain development of this technology. And within this context, the fundamental challenge is a coupled challenge, first of all, accelerating the acceptance and use of the information and communication technologies as factors of development. In addition to this, we have to find a new (inaudible) that can (inaudible) the developing countries to reach their development aim, in particular, the goals of the development of the millennium, which has been planned but (inaudible) in the millennium summit. The goals are the framework of a social contract to have more humane civilizations.

Ladies and gentlemen, your conference takes place in the framework of preparatory meetings in the World Summit for the Society of Information, whose second stage will take place in Tunisia in 2005, and for African countries in particular to voice their opinion, especially with regard to the digital divide. To that effect, the UNDP program acts with other specialized agencies of the UN and acts as a key partner with Tunisia for the preparation and organization of this important summit which will constitute, there is no doubt, a historical major event. Once again, may your proceedings be a success. And I thank you very much for your attention.

(applause.)

Faryel Beji: Thank you very much, for your speech. Now last, but not least, I am very honored to leave the floor to his Excellency, to Mr. Sadok Rabah, to his keynote speech. Your Excellency, you may start.

(applause.)

H.E. Mr. Sadok Rabah: In the name of the (inaudible) and the merciful, Mr. (inaudible), President of ICANN, Mr. Twomey and chairman of ICANN, -- Mrs. Beji, chair of ATI, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you very much for attending this conference, and I am very glad to preside over this meeting of ICANN from the 27th of October until the 23rd. And I would like you fully to take this opportunity to welcome these eminent personalities who have come from international organizations and who have come from several sister and friendly countries and who belong to the most eminent international and regional organizations specializing in the field of the Internet. I would like equally to extend my thanks to all the participants and those who contributed to the success of this important event, of which Tunisia is very proud to host.

(inaudible) Tunisia hosts for a whole week the ICANN congress, in addition to its hosting to several other events, original events, constitutes at the same time, a proof and an evidence of the efforts deployed by Tunisia under the ability of its president to promote the modern technology of the information and communication, be it at the national level, and in order equally to facilitate its position among the developing countries which are eager to have a very good investment of modern technologies to meet the challenges of sustainable development, on the other hand. Your congress as well as the parallel events, such as the meeting of ISOC and the meeting of the GAC, the meeting of the AINC, the meeting of AFTLD, as well as the meeting of MINC and IFC, constitute an opportunity to elaborate the visions and to set up the future policies for the promotion of the use of the Internet at the international level and to foretell the impacts of the various mutations, technologies mutations, that the world is witnessing at a quick speed and at a quick rate. This congress equally is very important since it is held at a time when the international efforts which aim at preparing the World Summit about the Information Society which will be held following the initiative of Tunisia made in 1998 and, Tunisia, as you know, will host the second stage in November 2005.

Ladies and gentlemen, Tunisia was among the countries that tried to set up the necessary strategies to keep pace of technological and technical development which the world is witnessing or which has witnessed during the latest years in the field of communication and information technologies. And Tunisia has succeeded to set up a national plan which takes into consideration the national and the international needs and which is based on particular programs which aim at ensuring that everybody, the whole society, benefits from the benefits provided by the digital technologies in general and the Internet in particular. The sector has been reorganized through the setting up of the Tunisian agency for the Internet, national bureau for telecommunication, and national board for communication and telecommunication, and national agency for frequencies, in addition to the national agencies for electronic authentication, in addition, of course, to the setting up of a center for the documentation, training in the technological field. Besides, a new code has been enacted, and new law enacted with regard to electronic trade or e-commerce as well as the payment or electronic payment through the Internet. And Tunisia was among the first countries to equip the several networks with the most sophisticated technologies to meet the aspirations of users which contributed to increasing the capacity of the link of the countries during the latest years and which makes Tunisia among the first developing countries in this field, and which enables equally to have better opportunities for the rest of the world.

With regard to the Internet (inaudible) connection, a national network has been set up, and it is in harmony with the requirements of equality and the flow of the information due to the development expected and the increase of the number of participants on the other hand. The number of the users of the Internet in Tunisia has increased and reached in a very short period of time more than 570,000 users against the setting up of the 12 service providers in the various regions of the country, five of which are from the private sector. And in addition to this policy of (inaudible) which encouraged the use of the Internet services, several projects aiming at assimilation of information culture and aiming at encouraging of the research and technological field and equally aiming at (inaudible) of the Internet services in the educational centers, universities, schools, national libraries, youth clubs, in addition to the consideration of the teaching of foreign languages and the information technology and education, which are aimed at the children.

In order to disseminate the use of the Internet, as well as the use of the surface strata, I'd like to remind you that we have a presidential program for the acquisition of what we call Family Computer, enabling Tunisian families to obtain a sophisticated computer at a price which does not exceed 1,000 Dinars. I'd like to remind you that we have an increasing number of Internet cyber cafes or centers, there's about 300 which are scattered all over the country and quarters and areas of Tunisia. And since Tunisia has challenged or has bet on using the perspectives used by the Internet to ensure that the employment sector will benefit from that service as well, we have set up a center called (inaudible) to work or (inaudible) center. We have equally created 12 technology (inaudible) in the -- five of which are in the technology sector as well. We have set up a new system to encourage people to innovate in the technological field. We have equally adopted several incentives to enhance investment in the burgeoning field and the Internet. In addition to that, we have adopted appropriate legislation in order to encourage this development.

Ladies and gentlemen, Tunisia, which under the presidency of our president has confirmed that it was firmly decided to benefit from the possibilities offered by new technologies, Tunisia, as you know, is a country grants due importance to international efforts which aim at enabling everybody to benefit from these new technologies. I'd like equally to remind you that the general assembly of the United Nations has ratified the initiative made by our president in calling for the setting up of an International Fund of Solidarity which enabled us to save huge amounts which will be consecrated to the development of modern technology in the developing countries.

In order to avoid digital gap, we equally give due importance to foreign investment and the development of a partnership between Tunisia and the diverse regional and international organizations. This can be done, or has been done, through the adoption of incentives and fiscal incentives which make it the most important and eminent companies in the field in Tunisia. And we deem that the holding of this conference of ICANN as well as the holding of other meetings which are held in a parallel way prove and reflect this importance granted by Tunisia to the Internet and to the field of technology. We would like to ensure you or would like to ensure equal access to everybody to the Internet.

Ladies and gentlemen, in conclusion, allow me to extend my thanks to anybody who contributed to ensuring the success of this event and thus encourage international partnership in the field of the information technology. I would like equally to extend my thanks to the eminent guests of Tunisia who have opted for Tunisia to host this important meeting of ICANN, and may your stay be nice in Tunisia, land of development and prosperity. Thanks very much for your attention.

(applause.)

Faryel Beji: And also for your support. Now his excellency would like to give the Internet and Information Technology award to professor Vint Cerf for his achievement and contribution to Internet throughout all his years. Professor, please.

(applause.)

Faryel Beji: Congratulations. Now, you may proceed with your scheduled meeting. Thanks very much for your assistance. Thanks.

(applause.)

Vint Cerf: We'll have a brief pause while the board will come up on stage.

(pause)

Vint Cerf: Ladies and gentlemen, we are just about ready to begin. We are ringing the bell in the lobby to bring any stragglers into the room. So, Paul, you should prepare yourself momentarily.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Vint Cerf. I'm Chairman of the Board of ICANN. It is my pleasure to add my welcome to others to this first public forum session here in Tunisia for our annual general meeting. I'd like to call upon the CEO of ICANN, Paul Twomey, to make his report to the assembled body. Paul.

Paul Twomey: Thank you, Vint, board, and members of the ICANN community. I'll make a brief report to you and then some further detailed parts of the report that I'd like to put on the record but perhaps not to speak to, which we'll share shortly.

I think following the opening introductions from our hosts, I might first focus on what I have discerned in many respects over the last six months since my appointment of expectations of the community and of expectations, in many respects, around the board and outside entities. And if you'd like a little bit, these are sorts of things that are sitting, from the president's perspective, as key things we need to be addressing.

One of the things over six months of extensive interaction with the community in a work sense plus a lot of consultation and discussion, and with a lot of discussion with yourselves, some of the parts of this vision that I think that are beginning to become clearer for us include a commitment to international outreach, a commitment to serving a truly globalized Internet. And I think on that particular point, we have seen some good progress today, but there is still much work to do.

ICANN presently has accredited, for the generic top-level domains, registrars in 26 countries. We have put in place accountability frameworks or agreements with ccTLDs, and they're in place with 15 cc managers. And importantly, in that area, we are further evolving and reviewing that process to focus very much upon the accountability part of those agreements for those frameworks.

The ccNSO membership discussions going reflect interest in more regions of the world, and I'm pleased to report that that seems to be in the final stage of completion. There are approved members, particularly prevalent in Africa, Latin America, Asia Pacific, covering a wide range of cc's. And this I find personally very interesting, because it is a combination of four-plus years of work and dialogue amongst the cc community that many of us witnessed as far back as Santiago or even Singapore. So this is a combination of a bottom-up progress in the community as to how to come together and have a forum and an international forum for what they consider to be the appropriate exercises of global policy where they think that that is relevant. And we are looking forward, I think, to welcoming the ccNSO elected board members, because those board seats are still empty, waiting for the elected board members.

A further aspect of the international outreach mandate or vision, if you like, has been increased cooperation with relevant intergovernmental organizations. And in the last months, ICANN has been involved in such cooperation and discussions with Sitel with the World Summit Information Society, especially in the (inaudible) committee meetings. Importantly with the (inaudible) communications meetings, bolt with ITUD and ITU-T, both areas where we're having some discussions, and in some further work in the Unit C task force. There's also, as one of our hosts or guests mentioned, a cooperation and interaction between ICANN and the UNDP, and he gave the instance of the assistance the UNDP gave in the transition for the .af.

I think a very important part of the international outreach obligation sitting upon this community is looking at introduction of internationalized domain names at the TLD level, and importantly, the work and ongoing challenges we have of ensuring the linkage between things that are locally significant and serve local communities and at the same time maintaining our commitment and our key stewardship for the integrity, the security, and the stability of a single Internet. And I think that's one of the areas of continuing focus for us.

We are moving forward on translation and developing and implementing an appropriate and effective strategy for multi-lingual communications. And this is a key task for us over the next 12 months from the staff level that have already started that process just in producing explanatory documentation around ICANN, and some of you will have seen in this meeting, we actually have documentation in English, French and Arabic available at this meeting. An important part of the international outreach also, as Roberto and others will readily recognize, is the ALAC and its continuing to conduct outreach to encourage the formation of a global at-large framework. That's something that we continue to need to progress and ensure effective completion. So there's a basic report on some of the aspects around the international outreach objective, I think, on that vision.

Other areas that are clearly within that framework, I think, are a commitment to innovation in the domain name system. That's something which is important, but at the same time, with a very clear understanding of our commitment to the integrity, the stability, and the security of the single Internet. And focus on that. And I think, also, one of the key areas, also, in that vision is keeping and building an integrated, cohesive, but in many respects independent community, and that the task that we have of ensuring that we work closely with other bodies, and we've had good discussions, for instance, with the Internet society in this meeting, other bodies like the IETF, others who we need to serve, how to keep an integrated and cohesive approach and at the same time respect each other's tasking and responsibilities.

Moving on from some idea of that vision to a little bit of how do we achieve it or accomplish it, perhaps the most important or significant accomplishment in the last several months has been the finalization of the memorandum of understanding with the United States department of commerce, which was completed in September. That, as many of you will appreciate, is the sixth memorandum of understanding. And for those of us involved at the very founding of ICANN will recall, the United States government has, in two administrations, been committed to the process of privatizing and moving out to an independent, international community-led public/private partnership that's evolved over the period of time to find what the right model is, to transfer to such an entity the functions that they were undertaking in the mid-nineties as a consequence of their efforts that helped build the Internet to start with.

The MOU envisioned by the parties is a three-year term and has a number of detailed issues in it. The details are in many respects are due diligence. So many of the things we have sitting under the MOU's responsibilities I would not perceive as proscriptions from the department of commerce on how it works but what are the due diligence steps on what we need to fulfill to ensure that that transfer can finally and fully take place. Part of that fitting within the MOU will be the development of a strategic plan, and I thought today, this morning I would share some of the headings that should probably sit in such a strategic plan.

Some of the headings I think should sit in are, firstly, how do we build a sustainable business that includes management controls on which we're doing quite a lot of focus? It includes building capable staff and I'm happy to report to you since I last addressed the meeting of the board in an open board meeting like this that we have gone some way toward appointment. I specifically address three appointments. The first is the Vice President for Business Operations, Mr. Kurt Pritz. the second one is the second Vice President, Vice President of Supporting Organizations, Mr. Paul Verhoef who is joining us and who will be based in Europe, and the appointment of the new General Counsel, Mr. John Jeffrey.

We continue to work on the establishment of a capable staff. Importantly, and I think this is important for the community, a staff focused around a business unit model focused around key accountabilities so that we spread the capability and the managerial strength; we don't focus it as it may have been in the past. I think, importantly, we need to have a way of measuring ourselves and making our performance more accountable, and we are working our way how to do that, particularly around performance of the IANA functions, to be able to share more on the statistics and process around those. And also, we're looking to do a review system-wide of efforts to automate our operational processes. This will take some time, but we think there's opportunity to automate much of what's presently being done by the staff.

I think the second part we need to ensure as we build a robust policy assistance group, not so the staff set policy at all, but rather the staff are in a good position to assist the community, the supporting organizations and committees, to actually help progress the tasking they have in the policy making format. An important part of what we need to do is ensure we have stable, adequate, and fair funding, and specifically, that that funding be sufficient to achieve the increasing demands upon us by the community, both in terms of intensity of the existing work, but importantly, also, the geographical spread of such work, which comes back to international outreach.

One of the aspects about that is that we envisage and we have spoken about the potentially opening of some small targeted offices over the next period of time in ICANN's regions, and as you will note the appointment of Mr. Verhoef has allowed the announcement that we intend to establish an office in Brussels. Such offices will be very focused. They'll be lean and mean, to use the phrase, and we'll target very much on cooperation with regional communities and regional organizations. We're not in the business of reinventing the wheel, but we do think there are opportunities there to work in collaboration with other parties.

Perhaps if I can move to questions of potential risks that I think we may be facing. Clearly, one of the risk areas that we need to keep focusing on as an organization is our need to reach community consensus on key issues. And on some of the issues that we have before us, for instance, on things like the WHOIS, WHOIS workshops, particularly on the WIPO II implementation issues, I think it's important that we keep this ICANN 2.0 model a pattern, which is that we bring the community together and various constituencies work together to find pragmatic solutions going forward. And so one of our key focuses remains, as staff, is the challenge back to the community about how not to operate in silos, but importantly, how to ensure that interaction is taking place across the constituencies to produce pragmatic actions going forward.

One of the other areas that we're clearly heavily involved in and have been participating strongly and see a vision of further participation is the World Summit for Participation Society. We've been working very closely with many of the member states of the UN system and have been in attendance of the preparatory committee meetings. But importantly, being in a position to share a vision of what the ICANN community can bring to that objective, and also a vision of what's important to ensure that the technical operations of the Internet continue to grow and to be done, managed, and administered in a sound and effective manner.

I thought perhaps for today's purposes I might leave the presentation to the board at that sort of level. What I do have is quite a degree of detailed reporting available on some functional areas, particularly on finance, technical operations, a number of other areas, staffing, the sort of report function. What we intend to do, rather than taking the time in the meeting now, is to actually post that and to post it for your comment later during the day. Thanks.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Paul.

I'd like to call on the chairman of the Governmental Advisory Committee, Sharil Tarmizi, to offer his traditional communique to the -- this is erby at orby, communication from the GAC.

Sharil Tarmizi: Merci beaucoup, Vint. Bonjour. I will be brief, as you have many times advised.

The Governmental Advisory Committee, of which I am chair, had its meeting here in Tunisia, and we had this meeting from the 26th to the 28th of October. The participating GAC members included representatives from 39 national governments, distinct economies as recognized in international fora, and multi-international governmental and treaty organizations. The GAC addressed several current policy issues affecting ICANN, longer term issues of concern to GAC members, and GAC's future structure and organization. GAC heard a report from the ICANN executive, particularly regarding the issues currently on ICANN's agenda, and changes in the management, staffing, and the creation of regional offices. ICANN presented a thorough review of ccTLD redelegation policies and operations. GAC welcomes ICANN's intention to further improve the performance of the IANA function and encourages the continued implementation of measures to increase efficiency in the IANA function in consultation with the stakeholders as appropriate.

On ccTLD policies, pending redelegations continue to be a concern to a number of GAC members. GAC encouraged ICANN to address the issue of delegation and redelegation in priority. GAC reviewed progress in creating the ccNSO, recalled its advice in Montreal, and encouraged continued work to ensure the fullest participation possible. GAC agreed to move forward with the updating of the GAC principles for the delegation and administration of country code top-level domains. In this regard, GAC stresses the importance of consultations with the ccTLD community and ICANN.

On the implementation of the WIPO II recommendations, GAC welcomed the creation of the joint working group with GAC and representatives of ICANN constituencies. GAC recalls that the mandate of the working group is limited to analyzing the practical and technical aspects of implementing the WIPO II recommendations. Recalling its advice on this issue in Montreal, GAC regrets that the working group has not presented an outline and timetable for its work to the GAC meeting at Carthage, and welcomes the request from the president of ICANN that the working group report to the board at the ICANN meeting in Rome.

On WHOIS data, GAC welcomed the WHOIS advisory committee and expressed strong interest in the outcome of the workshop. The GAC, WHOIS, and gTLD working groups met with the GNSO council and discussed, amongst other things, the GNSO policy development process, and WHOIS issues. The GAC reported on its efforts to compile information regarding public policy users of WHOIS data by GAC members through a questionnaire. The GNSO council expressed its interest in receiving the results of the GAC survey as well as its appreciation for the GAC initiative.

On IPv6, IPv6 is moving from research stage to real use. It was agreed to accelerate the activity of the GAC IPv6 working group to exchange information and experience and to gather information on the IPv6 status on various systems on the Internet, including the DNS root server system and ccTLD servers and to consider the further steps to be taken by GAC. GAC welcomed the initiative of the IPv6 workshop to encourage communication amongst interested parties on this matter.

New registry services, GAC is following the debate about DNS wildcards and received a briefing from the president, CEO of ICANN and the chair of the security and stability committee regarding its review of the Site Finder service. GAC recognizes that many interests in the community have raised concerns about competition, technical and user issues. GAC recognizes the ongoing review and evaluation, and notes that the ICANN president has asked the GNSO to formulate a proposal for timely, transparent, and predictable procedure for the introduction of new registry services. GAC will continue monitoring these processes, particularly where they relate to public policy issues.

On DNS security and root server, GAC takes note of the efforts to date in the employment of anycast mirror root servers as well as it recognizes the efforts undertaken by the root server operators to increase the security and stability of the root server system for the benefit of the whole Internet community. GAC encourages the root server operators to make more information available in order to increase awareness and understanding of these issues.

On outreach, GAC held a successful workshop dedicated to the Arab and African regions with active participation from 17 countries, including government, private sector, and civil society. Reinforcing communications among GAC members will continue to be encouraged on a regional basis in view of the useful results and following the Rio de Janeiro and Carthage presence, future workshops will be considered for future meetings. GAC also considered the question of its future organization and financing. GAC has agreed a procedure for updating the operating principles and for the election of vice chairs later this year. A working group will be set up to consider the structure, organization, and financing of the GAC.

Last, last two paragraphs, the government advisory committee would formally like to express its warm thanks to the government of Tunisia, Agency Tunisia Internet for hosting the meeting in Carthage. Participation from members in the African region was significantly greater. As to its next meeting, the next GAC face-to-face meeting will be in Rome, Italy during the 27th February to 2nd March period. Meanwhile, GAC will continue its work on-line and through the working groups and liaisons. Thank you very much for your attention.

Vint Cerf: Since I'm over here instead of over there, and you finished before I thought you would, I'll take the opportunity, first, to thank Sharil for his work on behalf of the GAC and on behalf of ICANN. And second, I wanted to make an observation about the GAC report.

I hope you noticed that it had more to do with the substance of getting the Internet to work and getting ICANN to function than it did to do with organizational structure and the examination of our navels. And for this, I am most grateful. So thank you, Sharil, for leading the GAC especially towards a more substantive agenda.

So it's my pleasure now to ask Suzanne Woolf to come up to the lectern and to give a report from the root server system advisory committee. Suzanne.

Suzanne Woolf: Thank you, Dr. Cerf. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I will also attempt to be brief.

The root server system advisory committee is one of the original advisory committees. It advises the board on issues pertaining to the review root name servers, and it usually meets at the IETF. It met most recently at the IETF meeting in July. Several important topics were discussed and are in progress in the committee.

Our previous report discussed anycast, stated that several of the roots had begun to deploy anycast. We are happy to report that those improvements in the service and security of the system have continued. several more operators have added anycast, and more will follow.

Varying technical and cost recovery models are in use. We have found anycast to be operationally stable, and an improvement to the system. We also have seen several of the TLDs using the similar technologies to what the roots are using. We believe it's an important improvement overall in the systems stability and security.

We have also been discussing the future of IPv6 in the DNS, and the addition of quad A addresses, IPv6 addresses to the root zone both for the root name servers and for TLDs. We are ready to move forward. We'll be advising IANA on which of the root name servers should have quad A's added first to root servers dot net for the root name servers. There are some technical issues around adding quad A's for TLDs in the root, and we are proceeding with some studies and to advise IANA and the community on guidelines on how to do that. There is an Internet draft in process in the IETF that is attempting to provide some of those guidelines authored by a couple of members of the root server advisory committee.

Other activities. The RSSAC was asked for input to IANA on renumbering of one of the root name servers. this is something that is done periodically for different servers at different intervals in order to improve network connectivity or some other aspect of the system. There were no technical issues raised and the renumbering will proceed in the next few months. The GAC named a liaison to RSSAC at the Rio meeting, and the Vienna meeting included, as invited guests, Dr. Twomey and Stephen Crocker on behalf of the security and stability committee for ICANN. So it's continuing outreach to ICANN and the community. The next meeting will be in Minneapolis with the November IETF. It's a couple of weeks away. For additional information about root server activities, please see these URL’s. There is an ICANN page for the committee as well. Thank you.

Vint Cerf: Suzanne, before you go away, I had one small question.

Suzanne Woolf: Sure.

Vint Cerf: There has been some discussion over the years about trying to improve the security of the root systems information by using digital signatures, the DNSSEC. Is that still under discussion within the RSSAC and other bodies that are interested in this area?

Suzanne Woolf: That is in fact under very active discussion. That's not yet a concern directly for the committee because it's not ready for deployment. We have primarily been waiting on the IETF standardization process and on implementation and test, because it's new technology that needs to be deployed very, very carefully in consultation with everyone affected. But the IETF is getting very close, the DNS working group in the IETF is very close to standardizing a specification that will probably be implementable and deployable. So there is actually progress there, but it's not ready yet.

Vint Cerf: Second question, if you don't mind. As I think about introduction of things like the quad A records for IPv6, that's a fairly significant introduction. Is there a kind of test environment that the RSSAC has available to it that allows it to try these out before we put things in the live network?

Suzanne Woolf: The RSSAC itself does not manage test beds or test environments, but several of the participants do, and we have input from a number of organizations that are running those kinds of tests. A couple of the regional registries and several of the root name server operators do participate in other experimental activities of that kind. So we have input from a variety of people who have been testing and analyzing.

Vint Cerf: Thank you.

Suzanne Woolf: Thank you.

Vint Cerf: Okay. I'd like to put my glasses on so I can see what I'm doing. I'd like to call on Steve Crocker to present the report of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. Steve.

Steve Crocker: Aha. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

As Vint said, my name is Steve Crocker. I chair the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. We have been a very quiet, inactive, small group that had nothing to do until a short while ago. A little humor is always helpful. We have a distinguished group of people on our committee drawn from all of the different quarters of the domain name system: registrars, registries, country code and generic top-level domains. This is a list of the committee members. This committee has been stable pretty much from its inception the early part of last year. As I said, the people on the committee are drawn from the different areas of activity. All of the people on the committee have regular assignments, regular jobs and do this work on a volunteer basis. There are no political or bureaucratic people on the committee. This gives us both a strength in having a good technical basis and access to actual data and potentially a weakness in the sense that we're primarily a technically focused committee and some of the policy issues are broader than fit cleanly within our own activity.

As I think probably most people are aware, our committee's activity in the last month or so has been dominated by an event that started in the middle of September when VeriSign introduced a change to the operation of the com and the net domains in which they redirected responses for unassigned domain names to instead of giving an error response, which they had been doing previously and had been for a long time, instead, generated a response that looked as if it was a regular host. And it was in fact one of their own. And on that host, if it was a web access, they provided the search service, what they called Site Finder. This generated a series of complaints and problem reports quite widespread, and it became evident that our committee would have to get deeply involved. We certainly were not alone.

There was activity in a number of different sectors. A week later, we issued a preliminary advisory. And then we set about to gather more information. And I should emphasize that we are still gathering information and still inviting input. We have set up a comment line. It's actually our regular ongoing comment line, but it's been actively used for this purpose. So I invite you all and to pass the word to any who you know that we are continuing to look for substantive, technical inputs. And it does not have to be biased in one direction or another. We're looking for thoughtful commentary, thoughtful analysis. The address is secsac-comment@icann.org.

We held two public meetings, on October 7th, and then again on October 15th. And in a moment I will show you the agendas for these meetings. And we have also posted all of the information from those meetings on a web site. We will turn our attention now to taking the information we've received and any new information that we receive and writing a report. And this report I will say a bit more about in just a minute.

Let me emphasize again that we are part of a larger process, that matters of security and stability have, of course, a very strong technical aspect to them, which is our strength. And then they also have policy issues and economic impacts that have to be taken up in a broader forum. So I've come to appreciate very much perhaps the least interesting word in our title, which is "advisory." It gives us the comfort that we can say whatever it is that we come to believe and that we think is relevant, and then we can depend upon and rely upon others to interpret and accept or not accept what it is that we have to say. We're not a decision-making body; we're not an enforcement body. And ICANN management has committed to a process for determining what to do on this matter after we issue our report.

There are also matters that are clearly outside of our domain. But there are, more interestingly, issues which fall neither squarely inside nor squarely outside of our domain. And on those issues, we will probably say something, but we will also acknowledge that there is judgment to be required as to whether other inputs should be taken or whether ours should be ignored. For example, there are some aspects of the competition among different parties which, to the extent that they don't affect security and stability directly, are outside of our domain. There are some aspects of competition that actually do have an impact on stability. And so these are where things will get more interesting, in a way.

So, to return to the particular events, as I think most people are aware, VeriSign used this redirection using what's called a wildcard feature in the specification of the protocol and redirected all uninstantiated names. That's basically names that did not previously exist. They redirected these names to their own servers. That caused some things to break.

For example, one of the easier to cite, not necessarily the most important, but one of the things that was pretty clear, is that some Spam-blocking programs would check to see if the mail that is coming in came from a domain that is not nonexistent. And all of a sudden, every domain looked as if it existed, and therefore that strategy became completely ineffective and that Spam-blocking approach broke. There were other more detailed kinds of things that stopped working. In some cases, some software would have a series of domain names to check, and it would find if one didn't exist, it would move on to the next one. Those strategies stopped working.

The general picture is that although the whole network obviously did not come to a grinding halt, there were some pieces that broke in various places. And then that raises sort of a lengthy discussion about whether that's important and what the rules of the game are and who should be allowed to make those decisions. And I don't think that that's going to have a simple, short answer. But it will require some discussion.

Another thing that happened right away, within roughly a day or so, a couple of days, is that some parties took actions to undo the effect of that change that VeriSign had instituted by putting in software patches to reinterpret the responses and turn them back into error codes, and that was a class of change that was made in the resolution software, bind being the most visible of those kinds of software, but software from other providers was also made available that changed the address back into an error code.

Also, some Internet service providers changed the routing inside of their systems to detect that address and route to some other place or to stop the access, essentially blocking that Site Finder access.

Let me go back to that a second. In the process of taking that defensive action, we have a pattern that fortunately did not appear to go much further, but it raises the specter of a change to one part of the system, a counteracting change in another part of the system, and a concern about whether that pattern would continue into a certain degree of escalation. That in and of itself raises a concern about stability, because, generally, one likes changes to be planned and tested and thought about and conferred upon for a considerable period of time. So the change in the process of instituting changes and the prospect of warring changes being introduced is unsettling, particularly to people with a technical training who worry about how the pieces come together in a stable way.

In gathering up the inputs, I think it's fair to group the kinds of concerns that have been expressed into perhaps three broad areas. There are certainly a number of concerns about the way in which the change was introduced, the abruptness, the lack of notice. In this particular case, there had been a substantial amount of internal testing and testing privately with others, but a rather clear lack of interaction in the public sense and testing in a visible way externally. Though, I think, will be relatively easier topics, not totally easy, perhaps, but, nonetheless, easier than some of the other things for us to speak to. And at the end of the day, one might come to a conclusion that except for that, there might not have been anything terribly wrong and one could go down that path, perhaps just at a different speed or in a different way. But there is, and so that's one broad area of concern, the abruptness.

But a different concern is, well, even with considerable visibility and careful introduction, is it the right thing? Is it an appropriate thing to do? Or does it have an inescapable impact on the stability or security aspects of the network? This is a more difficult area to talk about because there are differences of opinion and a substantial amount to say perhaps in both directions. We will have to write carefully on that and offer up some conclusions. But I think we will also offer up some areas that have to be thought about further. And it's unclear precisely where that goes.

On the one hand, it is perhaps easy to say why bother to add such a thing in the first place; why not just leave things as they were? That's certainly a path towards stability. And, in general, one might go even further and say let's not have wildcards at all in the system, particularly in public registries.

The other side of this is that there have been some registries, continue to be some small registries. Museum for one, and a handful of country codes, that have used the wildcard, and one can observe that the world has not come apart. And so that leads to a question, a very natural question, well, if it wasn't a problem before, what creates a problem now? Is it clearly just one of size? And if so, then that's a somewhat difficult area to get into. It's not necessarily inappropriate to make a distinction based on size, but it's obviously better if one can have a clean cut set of rules.

I share all of this with you not so much from a conclusion point of view I want to emphasize, but just to illustrate some of the complexities that arise in this matter. And then the third basket of concerns, if you will, is things that are generally outside of our concern. As I said, competition. There are also some contractual issues. We're not directly involved in creating or enforcing or administering the contracts. Those concerns belong elsewhere.

The initial advisory that we released on September 22nd actually had three recommendations in it, only one of which was addressed to VeriSign. And to VeriSign, we simply said, "please roll back the situation to where it was before and provide time for everyone to think hard about this." We also suggested to the technical community, that is, the IETF, the IAB, and the operators of the networks and the DNS systems, that there may be ambiguity in the specifications or in the best practices and that it would be useful to visit this area and provide clarification. And equally, we suggested to ICANN itself that the process for reviewing such changes might stand some extra visibility and some clarification. I suspect that when we finish writing, we will have more to say basically along each of these lines.

The public meeting that we held on October 7th started with a presentation from VeriSign and then a number of presentations from experts in different areas who brought actual reports, reports of the actual damage that they were seeing, or some of the larger issues, particularly the longer-term effects on the architecture and how one interprets protocols and where the points for innovation versus conservative action are required. We then followed approximately a week later with a much lengthier presentation from VeriSign of the data that they had accumulated prior to releasing the change and some of the data that they had accumulated afterwards. And we also had some additional inputs measuring the responses from the ISPS and the effect on the global name registry. The complete transcripts of both sessions are available on the web site, as well as the slides from each of the presentations.

I apologize. I have not written the name of our web site on here. But it is secsac.icann.org.

And within that page are pointers to each of these elements that I have discussed. I think I've mentioned most of the issues that I think that we're going to write about. And just run quickly through a few. The abruptness and whether or not this was the right thing to do I have mentioned. The systemic stability is the question of change and counter change and whether or not that pattern in itself leads to instabilities.

There's also a question of confidence at several levels. Do the players who want to introduce change or who are operating portions of the system have confidence in the rules of the game? And do the users and the public at large have confidence in the overall system? I've mentioned technical clarity, process clarity.

The displaced costs issue is, if a change is made in one place and it causes others to have to make compensating changes, is there an appropriate way to tie those together so that the costs of doing that can be rationalized or apportioned in an appropriate way or those kinds of decisions can be made? We're not blessed with economists on our committee, so I think we would stop short of any quantitative estimate of that. But to sketch that issue is, I think, appropriate. And that will be part of what we will hand over for others.

I have mentioned innovation at the core versus the edge. And also questions of how the architecture of the whole system evolves.

Another question that has been pointed to is, to what extent does the standard as documented in an RFC represent the totality of the specification or what's appropriate to do? Should one be able to do everything that is there under all circumstances or is there a context in which they are interpreted?

I've also mentioned that some domains already use wildcards. What is the status of that?

And then, finally, are there distinctions that are appropriate to make based upon the size of a registry and its impact?

I think that's it. We will finish, as I said, our work over the next month or so I can't be quite precise, because as a volunteer effort, it's a question of marshalling other people's attention. And then release that report in a fairly visible and public way for ICANN, but also for the community at large to absorb and comment on and take further action from there.

Thank you. Again, let me call for inputs to secsac-comment@icann.org. And I'll be happy to answer questions now.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Steve. I do have one question for clarification. Will the committee be looking at the use of the wildcards in general? In other words, not simply looking at this one instance of it but a more general question of what are the other side effects. You mentioned the other technical communities like the IAB and the IETF have been asked to comment. I hope that this will be looked at in general as opposed to just this one case.

Steve Crocker: Yes, we absolutely will be looking at it in general. And let me say, just to foreshadow a bit more, I think the question you're asking is, are we looking at it narrowly with respect to the com and net domains versus other domains, both prospective ones and existing ones? And the answer is "yes" to all of that.

But let me take that one step further. The wildcard itself is to a certain extent, an internal device for how you implement a broad set of responses or response to a broad set of queries. And if one looks only at the wire line protocol, what is sent and what is received and what the response to that is, in some sense, it doesn't matter what is actually in the zone. It only matters what comes back on the wire line. There could be other kinds of synthesis that are not exactly matched up with wildcards. And I think that it's appropriate to look sort of more broadly at that issue.

There are two general questions. One is, what are expectations in this area. And the other is, what is the impact of change even if one could argue that the current state is not necessarily the optimum one or is somewhat broken, there is, as an organism, one lives in a certain context, a certain ecology. And there's an accommodation that may have grown up that may be at slightly different from what the specs say. And that leads to difficult questions, do you try to align practice with the specs? Do you try to align the specs with the practice? Or do you actually have to live with a certain degree of discrepancy all throughout the system because that's the way it all gets along with each other? These are not quite trivial questions, actually.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Steve.

Steve Crocker: Thank you.

Vint Cerf: I'd like to now ask Vittorio Bertola if he would come to give the At-Large Advisory Committee report.

Vittorio Bertola: Let's see whether it shows up. Okay. So I'm going to run very quickly through my slides so that I can have more time later to grab the microphone during the open forum.

And the activity of the committee since Montreal has been mostly divided into two main lines of activity. One is related to the organization of the at-large. So these are called regional at-large structures, organizations and structures. And the other one is related to the actual substantive issues.

So about the organizing part. What has happened is that the committee has prepared the criteria to accredit the user organizations that will want to get involved with ICANN. And these criteria have been approved by the board in June. We have prepared the application forms in some different languages, and we have started to receive applications. I mean, we have just started, so until this moment, we have eight applications. But I think that our main task in the next month will be getting more and more of them.

So you can see here a quick list of those who have already applied. We have now an approval process for applications, and so we are starting to examine the first ones. And we think we can actually approve some of them in the next weeks. This activity has been followed by other activities in terms of outreach and organization. So we have tried to participate in events all around the world to explain to the people what ICANN and what the at-large mechanism is all about. We have a huge mailing list of individuals.

And we could get a grant by infoDev to bring some African Internet community members here, so actually let them talk among themselves about the African organization and attend the meetings and get acquainted with ICANN. And here in Carthage, we have organized a number of workshops related to the different regions. But, of course, this is going to be really one of our main activities for the next months. So this is something we are going to continue to do. And in the meanwhile, we have been asked to appoint people in different places.

So we have Roberto Gaetano, who is our board liaison. And we have appointed people in different task forces. So I just wanted to give you a quick report about how things are going about at-large organizing in different areas of the world.

So starting from Africa, we have had, as I told, a good workshop here. We have been successfully bringing people here and successfully having a discussion on how to establish a roadmap for information on an African at-large organization. So this is sort of a tentative road map for that formation. And, of course, it's going to take at least a year from now. But at least we have a plan. Of course, the process is going to be more or less the same in all of the different regions.

So first you have to get the organizations to apply to get involved in this mechanism. And then you have to accredit them. And then you have to put them together and discuss how they are going to work together at the regional level. So, of course, this is still a three-step process that needs to happen. And this is why it's going to take many more months.

In Asia Pacific, there have been activities in different countries. Especially in the Far East. But as you may have seen, we have also started to receive application from the Middle East and other parts of Asia. And I think in Asia we have more or less the same roadmap. So we expect it to take, let's say, a year from now to get to the end of the process.

While in Europe, I guess that's perhaps the region where things have been going more quickly. So we have now started to get applications. We aim to get more of them by the end of the year. And if we succeed in getting a good number of applications and a good amount of diversity among these applications, we actually plan to launch the European organization in Rome. This is a very ambitious objective. So if we do not succeed with that, we think we can do it by Kuala Lumpur. We are aiming at doing it by the first half of 2004. I will not be talking in detail about our policy activities. But I just wanted to give you a hint about what we have been doing in that field.

So, of course, one of the main issues of the last couple of months has been the wildcard services and Site Finder. And on this, we have been releasing a first statement just the day after the service came in place, so September 16th. Basically, we've asked to suspend it. We have solicited, and, actually, we got a good number of comments from the community. And we then released a second statement where, basically, our main concern is whether these kind of services should be developed at the core or the network or at the edge of the network. And we have co-sponsored Monday's workshop here in Carthage.

In terms of new gTLDs, we have released a document, so it is sort of a long document, but I really encourage everyone to read it. And the basic points mostly are that we really want ICANN to get a process in place to accurate new TLDs on a regular basis and we think that should mostly be made by a no-harm principle, so just limit itself to a very basic set of requirements. And it's not ICANN's job to decide whether business models or strings are used or not or whatever. We think it's just ICANN's job to check e-mail requirements and then let people proceed on the market.

And finally, WHOIS activities. So we've been participating in the WHOIS steering group, and we've been raising a number of issues. The GNSO council has approved, basically. So yesterday, the GNSO council created three task forces, of which one we think is really important for the committee. So we just released a new statement. You can find it on our web site. Well, I mean, our main point is still about preserving the privacy of the registrants. And of course we support having a cross-constituency group at the top level of ICANN and we are really looking forward to participating to it.

And finally, a side activity has been individual participation in the World Summit Information Society. We think this is going to be a real issue for the ICANN community and it's going to be very important for the community to get information about that. And this is why we've been trying to participate, and we have been organizing a workshop here to bring this information to the ICANN community and to discuss how the ICANN community should interact with the works of the summit.

So I guess this is all. We want to thank you for your attention and thank the local organizers, too.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Vittorio. I just want to observe that the work that you've described is of considerable substance, and it is a great pleasure to see that the at-large elements of the ICANN community are beginning to make their views known and having distinct impact. I can tell you it's been a great pleasure to have your representative, Roberto, helping us on the board. So I look forward to further progress. It looks exciting and by Rome, I'm sure you'll have more good things to tell us. Thank you very much.

Vittorio Bertola: Thank you.

Vint Cerf: I'd like to ask Jonathan Cohen now to come to give the World Intellectual Property Organization II Advisory Group report.

Jonathan Cohen: Good morning. I'm at that awful age where I have to keep my glasses on to see anybody and take them off to read.

This will be the first report of the committee formed to consider the implementation of the recommendations called WIPO II, and this will be a report to the president whose committee is to the board and also perhaps the GAC, perhaps unfortunately after the GAC made its report. The committee is working towards providing a report to the ICANN president, Paul Twomey, with recommendations before the end of Rome. That's a challenging timetable, but we will certainly do our best to meet it.

There are 15 members of the committee made up of GAC and various constituency representatives. Unfortunately, at this meeting, only five members attended the initial meeting with two substitutes who asked to attend on behalf of the formal representatives. But nonetheless, what I've done is set up a very tight telephone conference schedule projected with a fairly significant workload required for the group for each meeting, and I will try my best to be a strict ringmaster. Right now we're at the document sharing phase. I've created a book that I have here in front of me which is fairly thick, which is tabbed and index with all of the important material that has heretofore been produced on this subject; in particular, comments of any of the constituents and other organizations around the world on these subjects. And Diane Schroeder has promised to make copies of this and get them to members of committee within a couple of weeks of this meeting. And I have requested that by the next meeting by telephone conference that each person will have read it and done their homework. Our WIPO Rep on the committee, Mr. Christian B., has also agreed to provide useful additional information which should help the committee to get right up to speed. We're going to have five meetings, one every three weeks, commencing on Tuesday, November 25th. There is the possibility of a meeting being required before Rome, but I think what we will probably do is make an assessment of where we are sometime in mid or late January, and then we'll discuss with Paul Twomey what is appropriate having regard to the budget, et cetera.

The meeting issue area topics have been defined as exclusionary lists, amending the UDRP, independent UDRP, sunset provisions, and a treaty. These will each be looked at under a number of headings which we have defined as appropriate for discussing them, and also we remember that the rules of engagement in ICANN's resolution require careful review of the practical and technical aspects of implementing the recommendations; namely, protection of IGO's and acronyms and country names and your committee will do the best it can to do its work by Rome. If I may before leaving, I'd like to also express my personal thanks to Madam Beji and I think they've done that committee proud and I'm glad to see so many people came and ignored the kind of scare tactics that often associate with some locales. Thank you.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Jonathan. The work that this committee is doing simply underscores the fact that we exist in a much larger universe of issues that somehow have to be addressed, and I appreciate your leadership of that committee.

Jonathan Cohen: My pleasure.

Vint Cerf: We are running late. Thank you very much, Jonathan.

We're running later than we had intended, and I know many of you would like to take a break. What I would like to do before we do that is to ask whether our host for the upcoming meeting in Rome is available. Then let me invite Dr. Giovanni Seppia, at the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, to excite you about going to Rome, after which we will take a break and then we will have public comments. So I hope you will forgive me for permuting the order, but it turns out that Giovanni needs to catch an airplane and many of you probably want to either get some coffee or get rid of some before we start asking questions.

Giovanni.

Giovanni Seppia: Okay. Thanks, Mr. President, and thanks to the Tunisia authorities for the excellent hospitality we have received during these days. On behalf of the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica National Research Council, registry of ccTLD and the company registered, I'm very pleased to be today to present to you ICANN Rome 2004 which will take place from the 2nd until the 6th of March, 2004.

As hosts, we'll do our best to provide all of the participants with the highest level of hospitality and to give them a warm welcome. Since every year millions of tourists come to visit Rome, we strongly suggest you book your hotel as soon as possible. We have already distributed some brochures with a list of selected hotels that will guarantee you a special rate if you book before December 31st. Also, since many of you may need a visa to get to Italy, we strongly recommend you check the www.icann-rome.it web site visa section regarding all the requirements you need to get a visa to Italy. There's an e-mail address in case you need help with the documentation, and we are already in touch with ICANN in order to provide you with all the documentation in order to obtain the visa in time. For certain information, I invite you to visit the web site, icann-rome.it, which will be online starting mid-November, and I do thank you for your attention and please be our guests in Rome. Thank you.

(applause.)

Vint Cerf: Well, I think that you will find a good many people looking forward to visiting Rome, which from this location is not really very far away. Now, considering that we are in Carthage, I'm wondering how many people will plan to take elephants with them when we come to visit Rome?

Thank you very much.

Giovanni Seppia: Thanks.

Vint Cerf: I hope you have a safe journey home.

We will take a 15-minute break and we will convene at approximately 11:26.

(break)

Vint Cerf: Okay. Board members, we have a quorum. I believe that Paul Twomey may be delayed a bit, but I think we will begin.

We have, as usual, sources of questions coming from the floor and also from the net. So I have some of those questions before me already, so I'm going to start with one from the network.

We actually had several questions from Richard Henderson. There were about a half dozen of them. Some of his questions were similar to questions raised by others, so I'm going to respond to one ever Mr. Henderson's first.

He writes, "The NTEPPTF Report, which is what Stuart Lynn called the Unpronounceable Acronym Committee Report was adopted by the board and called for the publication of the registry data required under Appendix U of the ICANN registry agreements. Specifically, the registry evaluation reports. A year ago, after repeated requests, ICANN said we are now addressing this issue. A year later these reports have still not been publish. Why not? And is Paul Twomey going to reply to my question about this, which I sent five months ago?”

The answer is that although Paul isn't here to respond, I'll do so on his behalf. The new TLD proof of concept reports have been posted on the ICANN web site for at least six months. We're sorry if Mr. Henderson hasn't been able to locate them. You can find them on the index page for each registry agreement. So if you go to www.icann.org/tld/agreements/info/poc-afilias-082702.pdf, you will find that report for Afilias.

One of the things we have underway is a reorganization of the ICANN web site to make reports like this easier to find. ICANN's web master, Terri Irving, is here in Carthage with a booth and to obtain FAQ with the beta version. And Terri Irving will be making a report today on the redesign of the site. So I hope Mr. Henderson will be able to find those reports.

I'll open the floor now, and I'll call on Wolfgang first to make his questions or comments.

Wolfgang Kleiuwachte: Thank you very much. My name is Wolfgang Kleiuwachte. I'm from the University of (inaudible). I want to make one comment to the report of the At-Large Advisory Committee and one comment to the Governmental Advisory Committee.

The comment on the At-Large Advisory Committee is the following. While I would join Vint Cerf's admiration for the hard work the At-Large Advisory Committee has done so far, I would also recommend to be very realistic and to evaluate the progress and very, let's say, little bit critical way. I was involved eight months in the process to put forward the establishment of a European regional at-large organization, what we call the Milan process because we had a final meeting two weeks ago in Milan in Italy. And the experience from this report is that the interest of the individual Internet users in the organizations was low.

To be frank, the whole mechanism at the moment looks like a Potomkiin Village, and only two of the applications we had so far before this meeting here in Europe came from the two organizations where the two members of the At-Large Advisory Committees are members from ISOC Italy and from Germany. This is Thomas Roessler and Vittorio Bertola's organizations.

So I think we have to look very careful that the at-large process has a very difficult time before, and some, let's say, much more than only a wait-and-see position is needed. The meeting we had in Milan had some models how At-Large Regional Organizations could be built and Vittorio has announced a roadmap that could lead to progress in Roma. But a crucial issue was discovered and this was funding for such a process, and while I think everybody recognized that this is mainly the task of the institutions and individuals involved in the regions, I think it's also ICANN's responsibility not only to encourage this process but also to enable this process.

At the moment, it looks like an empty box which has to be filled, and you have to have some more incentives and more deeper, broader support for this. If this box remains empty, there is a risk that this whole idea will not fly, and some governments and (inaudible) process could claim they are the best representatives of individual Internet users and this could produce some other discussions which probably would not help, moving forward, ICANN 2.0 as it could be.

This was the comment and let me ask one very brief question to the chairman of the Governmental Advisory Committee. It was a very instructive and nice communique but I missed one paragraph to the World Summit which is a governmental affair. Did the Governmental Advisory Committee discuss the World Summit? And if yes, what was the discussion?

Thank you.

Vint Cerf: Lyman.

Lyman Chapin: If I could ask you to come back to the microphone, I actually have a question I'd like to ask, clarification of the comment part of your remarks.

I'm curious to know; I understand the situation that the box appears to be empty, and I'm very concerned about that also. I'd be interested to know what you imagine that ICANN could do. You mentioned that ICANN should not only encourage but also enable that process. And I'd be very interested to know if you have any thoughts as to what you think ICANN might, in fact, constructively do to try to deal with that problem.

Wolfgang Kleiuwachte: To be very frank, what we discussed in Milan very openly is it's a question about funding. And it means, you know, what could be very helpful is the way already Paul Twomey has indicated here, to have small regional office which could get other task to stimulate debate, consultation, dialogue within the regions and to convince existing institutions and users to join. And so the way it could be, you know, for a certain time period, until the end of the memorandum of understanding, to have a special budget in the ICANN budget and to help to build up a small core team in the regions which could be used as a springboard for development of a community in the region which could, after the memorandum of understanding lift us out any support.

Lyman Chapin: do you think --

>>>: Microphone. Microphone.

>>>: It's not working.

Lyman Chapin: You are convinced, though that the level of individual interest would be there if some means were found to actually fund these kinds of organizations. What I'm getting at is some people have said that one of the potential problems is that individual Internet users are in fact not all that interested in participating and that (inaudible) are in some sense lecturing individual users and telling them that they should be interested but they aren't, in fact interested. So I'm curious to know if you believe that there is, in fact, sufficient interest and if funding and other structures were provided to encourage that interest it would grow and develop into something more vital than the empty box you referred to earlier.

Wolfgang Kleiuwachte: Yeah. Hello? Yeah.

With all the experience I had in this eight months in the Milan process, my impression is there's a potential interest. You know, if you go back to 2000, after the announcement of the elections we had 50,000 people in Europe who joined as a member so there was potential interest because it was very easy. Now it's much more complicated to understand the process. That means that people do not link at this very moment their potential interest with this structure.

I think the WHOIS discussion, or IP version 6 and all these issues are relevant for individual Internet users, and they have a position. But they do, at this moment, not understand how this work to join the At-Large Structure and the At-Large Structure has to work with other At-Large Structures to form a Regional At-Large Organization, and this Regional At-Large Organization delegates two persons to an At-Large Advisory Committee which has one nonvoting liaison to support. And you need time to explain this and people will understand that being involved in a bottom-up policy development process is sometimes more important than to have a voting seat in the board. And to explain this, you need some let's say, you know, regular stuff that makes outreach in the region because it cannot be done from Marina Del Rey.

So that's why I believe in a certain period, two or three years, you need to kick start the process and you need people in a region, and as far as Europe is concerned, I'm happy it is diverse for Internet users and they have not to go to Marina Del Rey to get some information.

Vint Cerf: Roberto.

Roberto Gaetano: Sorry, I'm not familiar with that thing.

Well, first of all, I would like to make one thing clear. Since the meeting in Yokohama the previous GAC president, Paul Twomey, who happens now to be the CEO of ICANN, has made clear that there is the need for wide involvement of the user community in the ICANN process. Otherwise, that role would have been fulfilled in a different way, probably by government. That was echoed also by the European Commission. So in my opinion, the question is not the "if," but is the "how," and I would like now to stop the discussions about the if and concentrating on the how.

Now, this process is probably very difficult and long because it is. Actually, let me say one thing. There have been attempts to involve users since the beginning, since the foundation of the DNSO, since even the phase preceding the foundation of ICANN. If, to involve the end users of the Internet would have been an easy process, we would have had a constituency for individual users or for registrants for the wide Internet community already in the former DNSO, since long. If this didn't happen, it's not because of bad will, it happened because it's difficult. It's much more difficult to representative of the user community than business, because business can see how they can have a return on investment in participating in ICANN whereas individual users is a little bit more difficult. And also, we're talking about participation that doesn't come for free, neither in terms of time nor in terms of resources. So it's obviously more difficult.

We concentrated on having abandoned the idea of contacting individual users because we saw this as impractical and more difficult, and we tried it a different way. We contact people who are representative of the user community. We are going on. This process is long, as I said. Europe, that Wolfgang has referred to, has a very aggressive schedule because we plan to use the unique opportunity to have a meeting in Rome to bring the wide user community or the organizations that can be representative of users to come to ICANN and to see what ICANN is and to participate in the process. I have been involved in calling organizations that might have an interest, and obviously the first question that they ask me is why. And so we need to have a corporate answer to this question. And that is what the board, the new board is discussing, is deciding the strategy. And we are going to have an answer, and the only reason why I'm here, I can tell you honestly, is to have this process ongoing because my only interest is to have a higher involvement of the user community.

We will see in one year from now if we are going to be able to have this participation or not. It's a little bit too early, in my opinion, to shoot the ALAC and say it's late, it failed, or, I mean, we need a little bit, give us a little bit more time. I'm sure from my short experience in the board that the board is sensible to this problem. We know that we have to find alternative and innovative way to get the funding, to get the resources. But let's suspend the judgment about the progress until at least Rome. If we can bring a substantial number of user representative organizations in the meeting in Rome, the ALAC Europe would appear as goes forward.

Thank you.

Vint Cerf: Thank you, Roberto.

Sharil, did you want to respond on the other question?

Sharil Tarmizi: Yes, thank you, Vint.

I must admit the time has elapsed for quite sometime that I almost forgot the question. Governments have very short memory but I wrote that down so it's okay.

The question, if I recall correctly, was whether we had discussed issues in relation to WSIS. As you mentioned, this is a large part of what governments do as part of the WSIS process. The response is that we had various discussions surrounding various things, some of which did touch on the WSIS, but if I may, Wolfgang, just as how the Internet is a distributed network, governments are far even more distributed in their own local context. We continue to encourage outreach both to our colleagues in other parts of government to improve understanding but whether this was specifically an issue in the GAC, the answer is no. Thank you.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Sharil.

Izumi, would you like to take the microphone?

Izumi Aizu: Thank you very much, Vint. I'd like to, first of all, support what Wolfgang and Roberto said about ICANN at-large. I'm pleased to see that the ICANN board and staff are starting to take the WSIS process into consideration. Since I think I was the only one at Montreal's public forum to raise this as a very important issue. And after Montreal in June, I attended two preparatory meetings of WSIS, one in Geneva and one in Paris and I saw all the negotiation with working group of governments under the name of NGO and I saw some of the ICANN representatives involved. But I think the issue now of the International Management of the Internet or the Internet Governance, whichever you call, entered into the very mainstream of the international politics. Perhaps we sort of crossed the point of the no return. Big countries full of representatives arguing about what to do with domain name management or the ccTLD issues, and sometimes they may not have full understanding of these technical areas.

But I heard from what camp that the technical peoples, the problem for them is the technical people don't seem to understand the politics; that there's a need to educate both technical people for politics and political or government people about the technology and technical matters. And I urge you don't sort of underestimate the impact of this WSIS process. And we, the At-Large Advisory Committee worked very hard to organize the workshop yesterday and I'm pleased to say we had a very fruitful discussion. If not, the conclusion is single but as diverse as some governments.

I think one of the biggest reasons why some governments are calling for ITU or International Intergovernmental Organizations to take care the policy aspects of the management of the Internet, it clearly says the technical side can be still handled by the private (inaudible) organizations such as ICANN. But if ICANN tries to remain in a narrow technical coordination area, they are left a vast domain of the public policy matters.

I also would like to point out that some of the technical areas, not technology areas but technical areas of choosing new domain names and stuff like that involves the public policy matters. So if we are going to say stick with the narrow technical mission, where these public policy matters should go. Is it ICANN’s job or not. I understand it's not ICANN's main business at all, but the fact is there's no single other international body, be it public or private, exclusively working on these domains. So there's sort of a void. There's a need for more external coordination if ICANN wants to remain in the original domain.

As a member of the ALAC and advocate of the at-large membership for direct user participation to ICANN's decision-making processes, I also like to point out that these governments are saying that while ICANN can continue to take care of the tale tasks, they want to take part of the policy arenas. And with the lack of a strong participation of the end users through the current or improved At-Large mechanisms, these governments will increase their voices as Roberto said, to deny the existing ICANN framework and bring it to the ITU or any other relevant forum.

I understand that most of us don't really like the idea, but we lack the objective analysis of the pros and cons of the different approaches that we should really work hard to come up with that. I'm sure the December summit will not reach any specific agreement amongst the governments as to the Internet governance or the management matters. But the process will continue until at least 2005 to the very same place in Tunisia, immediately after Geneva. And I would like to urge all the ICANN community, not only the board or staff, but ccTLDs or other business, to work together to address this very serious complicated issues. Thank you very much.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Izumi.

I'd like to get a sense for how many other people are queued up to speak. Thomas, I see you're here. But who else? That's it. Please?

Thomas Roessler: Good morning. My name is Thomas Roessler. I'm the ALAC's liaison to the GNSO council.

So when the work for Roberto is just beginning today, I had my hard day yesterday sitting in for 4 hours in an interesting and really hard GNSO council session. And that session once more demonstrated an important aspect of the ALAC's work. In order to get our ICANN side output transmitted, we need to attend meetings. A liaison cannot participate effectively over telephone. It's just not possible. If there is a physical meeting going on, people are sitting and discussing, drafting on the fly.

This brings me relatively directly to another funding issue that we have. This issue is that the At-Large Advisory Committee is currently encumbered with an extremely inflexible budget structure in which travel funds are allocated by the ICANN body which appointed the current members of the At-Large Advisory Committee. There are sufficient funds for those appointed by the nominating committee. There are nearly no funds for those appointed by the board. And the committee has no possibility to reallocate funds according to its working needs. This worked out somehow for this particular meeting, in particular, since at this meeting, two people are able to attend on the budget for one person. But for future meetings and for future budgets, I would request that the board reconsiders this funding structure and gives the ALAC the flexibility to use the money allocated in the most effective way so we can actually -- well, so we can bring those people to meetings who need to attend, who need to interact with the ICANN community. That's my request. Thank you.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Thomas. I have a fist full of questions here and a deep concern about the pace of the meeting. So what I'm going to propose to do is to read a couple of these, if you will allow me to do so. And then go on with the rest of the agenda. And I will try to slide some of these questions in as time permits.

This one is from Brett Fausett. And he asked that we read this in its entirety. He says it's less than 2 minutes long, so please time me.

"Three annual meetings ago, NextDNS incorporated, in partnership with Signoff Corporation, watched as its proposal for a personal name space, .iii, remained in the board's shopping basket as the new TLD applications were pared down from 47 to 20 to 10 and, penultimately, to 8 with 8 TLD applications remaining, the NextDNS proposal for .iii remained in the basket. Based on a misconception about the application, however, the iii TLD was dropped from the final list. A timely reconsideration request seeking to correct that misconception was denied and a timely request for independent review has never been acted upon and remains pending. Nevertheless, NextDNS was assured its application had not been denied, only tabled for another day, and that the .iii proposal would be revisited as soon as the test bed was complete. We still don't know when, if ever, that day will come.

While reasonable people can disagree about the need for new TLDs, no one should doubt that the prospective registries and sponsoring organizations waiting to enter the closed registry market have been treated shabbily by ICANN these last three years. That needs to change. NextDNS and all the other prospective registries and sponsors need clear guidelines about whether, when, and against what criteria their applications will be reviewed. The board can start that process tomorrow and bring welcome clarity and certainty to the companies and organizations that have acted with patient good faith in these last three years.”

I think that Mr. Fausett has made some good points and that we will hear from Paul that an effort to get the TLD process onto a continuous basis will begin soon, to get analyzed and to put a process in place that lets us deal with these problems more expeditiously.

So I'm going to stop with the questions. And I'll keep the rest until I can fit them in. And now ask that we move on to the supporting organization reports. If Hartmut Glaser is in the room, the ASO report is next.

Hartmut Glaser: My name is Hartmut Glaser. I am the co-chair for the address council of the ASO. And I am from the LACNIC area. And we just celebrate our first anniversary. One year ago, LACNIC was accepted, in Shanghai. And after one year, we are now a full partner of the address support organization. And I will give a very brief report about the last activities.

I was thinking before I bring my report if celebration in LACNIC area or Brazil will be only a small word about the history, mention that we are one year old, or if we bring the Samba School to Tunisia to remember the Rio meeting. But it was too expensive to bring all the Samba Group to Tunisia.

So I will be going forward with my report. The AC members, 2003, from each region, are on this slide. For the ARIN, we have Marc Mcfadden, the Chair, Eric Decker, and Kim Hubbard. For the APNIC, we have Seung-Min Lee, Takashi Arano, Kenny Huang, for RIPE, Sabine Jaume, Hans Petter Holen, Willfried -- and.

Some of our project that we completed in the last few months are related to the election process for the ICANN board director. We decided to approve that we introduce a call for nomination 90 days plus two weeks prior to general assembly. Nominations closed two weeks prior to general assembly. The nomination may be made by anyone. Nominees will be reviewed for eligibility by the ASO address council. Public comment period begins at end of this 90 days and lasts for one month. And after the comment period ends, the ASO address council will select the ICANN board member. So this is the process that we approved and will be used for our next election process as the ASO.

We also changed the teleconference schedule from each month to every other month. The problem is that over 20 people worldwide sometimes cannot be on the conference call, because we have from America, Europe, to Asia the sometime zone difference, it's very difficult to put together over 20 people.

Ongoing projects. We are investigating options for electronic voting. And the last project that is under discussion and probably will be discussed in more detail with the ICANN board later, our last October 15th meeting, we discussed the NRO draft. Probably most of you know that the RIRs put together this document. And we, as address council, discussed this document in details. And some of our members raised some problems and questions. You see the four points on the slide. And we hope that this process will be discussed in details and that the final memorandum between ASO, the RIRs, and the NRO will succeed very soon.

I think that the chairman and the CEO of ICANN received information about the creation of the NRO. But this draft will not be discussed at this meeting as we are not ready to go in details because of the time. I think those are the important points. Thank you for this opportunity. I am happy to answer some questions, if needed.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Hartmut.

I don't have questions, but I do want to encourage you and the other RIRs to move as quickly as you can to finalize the draft on the NRO, because I think we would all like to conclude the necessary set of agreements so we can begin working together. Thank you very much.

I'd like to call on Bruce Tonkin now to give the GNSO report. Bruce is somewhere off in the distance there and assembling himself. Please don't trip on any wires, Bruce.

Bruce Tonkin: Okay. Thank you, Vint. I always use these public forums to gain inspiration to prepare my presentation.

Just revisiting the purpose of the GNSO, the GNSO is responsible for developing and recommending to the ICANN board substantive policies related to generic Top-Level Domains. And these domains currently consist of com, net, org, biz, info, aero, coop, museum, pro, and name. As of today, we have six constituencies on the GNSO council, two from the supply area, registries and registrars; and four from the user area, which is business users, intellectual property users, noncommercial constituency, and Internet service provider constituencies. We presently have three representatives per constituency. This has allowed us to have quite broad geographic representation. We have people on the council that live in countries such as the united kingdom, United States, New Zealand, Sweden, Argentina, Korea, Germany, Australia, France, Israel, Spain, Brazil.

So we've been able to achieve fairly broad geographic representation. This has allowed us to get fairly broad outreach to different regions of the world and also a commitment from organizations in those regions for paying the expenses of their members to attend these meetings on the basis that there's real value in being on the council.

We also have a large work program of important issues. And being able to have three representatives per constituency allows us to help manage that work program. We note that the current bylaws will result in a drop in participation and representation down to two per constituency at the end of this annual meeting. The council therefore requests that the board revise the current transition article of the bylaws to allow three representatives per constituency until the end of the annual meeting in 2004. And then during next year, review the performance of the council and reconsider the decision as to whether to go from 3 to 2 at that time.

The current list of GNSO activities, and this is roughly in ranked order, we've had a request from the president of ICANN to develop a policy around the procedures for the introduction of new registry services, and we will be attempting to complete that work by January next year. We also have a large number of issues surrounding WHOIS. We're looking at new gTLDs for next year, considering perhaps improved mechanisms for contract enforcement of the contracts between ICANN and registries and the contract between ICANN and registrars. And, finally, look at fine-tuning the UDRP policy. So one of the key challenges for the GNSO is to try and prioritize these areas, because we can't do them all at one time.

In the area of WHOIS, we have three task forces that were approved in our meeting yesterday. We have a task force that's narrowly focused on the issue of automated electronic processes, often referred to as data mining, for retrieving contact information from the publicly available WHOIS services. We're also considering the issues of how registrants are currently informed about why the data is being collected and how the data is made available to others. And that will then lead on to a review of whether all the data being collected now is necessary and consider potentially revising the amount of data that's made available via the public WHOIS services.

Finally, we're seeking to take further steps to improve accuracy. The tasks for the task force looking at data mining, collecting information on the current, I guess, requests that we receive from different types of users and looking at volumes of queries, what sorts of data that they require. Review some technical approaches that are available to prevent data mining. Try to identify a best practice solution in this area that registries and registrars can use. And feed these requirements through to the IETF for a new standard protocol for accessing this information. The task force looking at data collection and display is first considering information on how registrants are informed about the data, why it's being collected, what happens to it after it's collected at the time of registration, and attempt to identify a best practice in that area. Then move on to conduct an analysis of the purposes for the data being collected today and determine what is necessary to be collected. And this is a very difficult balance between those that seek good contactability and those that seek a level of privacy. We will then determine what's necessary to be displayed publicly and review mechanisms to preserve privacy.

The third area under WHOIS is accuracy. We're seeking to collect information on current techniques used to verify data at the time of collection. Seek information on what techniques have been used by other on-line service providers and see where those techniques may be applicable to the domain name industry. Ultimately, again, seeking to create a best practices document in this area, and particularly move on to look at what we can do to prevent the provision of deliberate false information.

The third major topic area of the meeting yesterday was around the interim round of sponsored TLDs. Many members of the council, in fact, the whole council, became quite concerned in a report on the recent board meeting, which I believe was held on the 13th of October, that seemed to imply that the board may not go ahead with the interim round for sponsored TLDs in preference of preparing for the new strategy in relation to introducing new TLDs. There were strong concerns that there had been, I guess, an understanding of the existing process during 2003 where, at various stages, the board had put out RFPs for comment, a number of organizations had been preparing in good faith to put in proposals for their sponsored TLDs. And the belief, I think, on the council was that the council had strongly supported the initial idea of going ahead with a limited round as being a way that ICANN can make positive progress in this area. And we've been very concerned that this round may be put off or changed in favor of a longer-term process for new TLDs into the future.

So I guess we would seek clarification on what the board's views are on this topic. And we would view that if the board chose not to go ahead with a limited round, we view this as a major change in this area and we would request the board seek advice from the community of the GNSO and, ultimately, through the GNSO council. So that's all the GNSO council covered in its meeting yesterday.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Bruce. That input is extremely useful to us, particularly your last point on the matter of the interim STLD, a subject which is of considerable interest to all of us. Thank you very much for that report.

I think we can now call on Chris Disspain to give the report from the ccNSO launching group.

Chris Disspain: Thank you, Vint. Good afternoon. My name is Chris Disspain, and I am the ccNSO launching group spokesperson. I am delighted to present the report of the ccNSO launching group.

The ccNSO bylaws were adopted at the ICANN meeting in Montreal. The ccNSO is the policy development body for a narrow range of global ccTLD issues within the ICANN structure. It is responsible for developing and recommending to the board global policies relating to country code top-level domains, nurturing consensus across the ccNSO community, including the name-related activities of ccTLDs, and coordinating with other ICANN supporting organizations, committees, and constituencies under ICANN. The ccNSO might also engage in other activities authorized by its members, including developing voluntary best practices for ccTLD managers, assisting in skills building within the global community of ccTLD managers, and enhancing operational and technical cooperation.

In Montreal, the board requested the nine ccTLD members of the ccNSO assistance group to call for an additional six members to join with them to form a launching group for the ccNSO. The launching group is authorized to solicit additional ccTLD managers to join the ccNSO and to establish a schedule and procedures for the selection of the initial ccNSO council.

On the 7th of July, 2003, a call was made for expressions of interest in joining the launching group, and following the response to that call, the launching group was constituted with the following members: Bart Boswinkel, Peter Dengate Thrush, Chris Disspain, Demi Getschko, (listing names) Alf Hansen, (listing names) Jeff Neuman, .U.S. -- Pierre Ouedraogo, Oscar Robles.

The first meeting of the launching group was held on the 13th of August, 2003, and there have been a total of eight meetings to date. Minutes of the meetings are posted on the ccNSO web pages, ccnso.icann.org. The launching group has published brief paper on the ccNSO together with an application form for membership. To date, the launching group has received 48 applications for membership, some of which are duplicates. We have approved 30 applications. Of these, 10 are from the African region, 9 from the Latin American region, 5 from the Asia-pacific region, 3 from the north American region, and one from the European region.

There are currently two new applications on which we are awaiting more information, and there are a number of pending applications that we have not approved for a variety of reasons. In these cases, we have written to the applicants explaining the difficulties with the application and suggested that they reapply. We have written to every ccTLD manager informing them about the ccNSO and encouraging them to consider joining. A members' e-mail list has also now been established.

On the 28th of October, 2003, in Carthage, the launching group hosted the first ccNSO members meeting. This meeting began the process of discussing the election that will need to be held for members of the ccNSO council. Input was received from those present, and a paper on possible election processes and methods will shortly be published and sent to members for further debate and consideration. The meeting also considered some possible clarifications to the bylaws to ensure that they accurately reflect the agreements and understandings reached in Montreal. This matter is still being discussed by the ccNSO members and the ccTLD community generally, and suggestions will be provided to the ICANN board as soon as possible. And that will close the report.

Vint Cerf: Thank you very much, Chris. I want to underscore the importance of the work that you and the others have been doing. There's nothing more valuable to us than having an organized way in which to get the country code TLD input into the ICANN process. I've been, quite frankly, amazed and pleased at the progress between Montreal and now, to see applications coming in and to see the members' group forming and beginning to work on the whole process of representation. It's very encouraging. I don't think that I could underscore any more strongly how important this is to complete the process. I look very much forward to seeing the ccNSO in operation, as I'm sure you do as well. Paul.

Paul Twomey: Thank you, Vint. I wonder if I could reinforce your points and go further and say certainly the staff are very much looking forward to the progress further fulfilling, because there's a range of issues in which we're very much looking forward to ccNSO feedback. I can see such things as the WHOIS issues, the WIPO II discussion is potentially an area. Certainly the issues that we've seen in terms of the TLD discussions, certainly a lot of the IANA discussions we're having. So there's a range of things there where presently we get feedback from other constituencies, but where