ICANN Public Forum, Part 1

 Monday 29 October 2007

 ICANN Meeting - Los Angeles

 

 >>VINT CERF:   Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.  We're reconvening 
now for the first of the open sessions at our meeting here.

 I'm sorry, we used up some of the 15 minutes we saved earlier trying 
to get a few technical problems ironed out.

 This morning's open session is actually quite brief.  We have only the 
president's report, and then an opportunity for people to ask 
questions.

 I will point out to you that this is an attempt to restructure the way 
in which we conduct these meetings so as to reduce the amount of time 
that you have to spend sitting, listening to reports that you could 
just as well have read, and, rather, to give much more time to open 
dialogue and exchange among the participants and operations of the 
various meetings, committees, and the like.

 So let me ask Paul whether you are prepared to deliver your report for 
the 30th meeting.

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   Yes.

 Thank you, Vint.  I think the answer is, if I'm not, bad luck.  Time 
to be so.

 As you said, Vint, this new format we now have for the way in which 
the meetings are conducted has as part of its structure splitting what 
we had as a public session into two parts.  The first part is -- now is 
basically a full review from the president of a whole range of issues 
that will be taking place this week, and issues before us, which will 
allow that to be incorporated into many of the episodes throughout the 
week.

 It also means that, frankly, as the president, I have to stop -- I 
don't have to keep repeating the same speech to each group that I go 
to.  We will make this once and hopefully won't have to keep repeating 
it to different constituencies.

 Let me take some time and go through what is actually a very busy 
agenda for this meeting and of reporting.

 And to give you some sense, I want to talk a little bit about the 
strategic plan and operating plan budget cycle, talk about the policy 
development activities, talk about the new ccTLD accountability 
frameworks, where we are on that, talk to the registrar accreditation 
agreement amendments, Internationalized Domain Names, new gTLDs, 
accountability and transparency initiatives, the regional fellowship 
program, the operational review panel, Nominating Committee, 
improvements in the IANA function, I'll make some comments on security 
and stability, particularly, I think, from the strategic plan context, 
and also something on the IGF.  So as you can see, it's a very full 
agenda of issues in front of the committee at this stage.

 We have a process in place for planning in ICANN which consists of 
strategic planning, which takes place in the six-month cycle from the 
1st of June until the end of December, followed up by operational 
planning and budgeting.  This cycle has now been in place for four 
years.  We continue to tweak it and amend it as is considered valuable.  
One of the pieces of feedback that was received at the end of last 
year's strategic plan by members of the community -- from the members 
of the community was that they would like to see the strategic plan 
move a little more into some specifics of what were the main practical 
priorities for the community.

 And you can see the public comment period, which started on 19th of 
October, and you can see there's a link up behind me in a wonderful 
pale blue on top of a pale blue, which is not wonderful, but, 
nevertheless there's a link there calling for the public comment 
period.  So far, in the consultation process and in the draft that's 
presently being discussed at this meeting, there are a number of 
objectives identified by the community.

 First, as I've mentioned already in the opening speech, probably most 
importantly, implementing Internationalized Domain Names and new 
generic top-level domains.  Secondly, continue to improve core 
operations.  Thirdly, strengthening ICANN's multistakeholder model to 
manage increasing demands and changing needs.  Enhancing security and 
stability in the Internet's unique identifiers.  And strengthening 
accountability and governance.

 I would just make the observation, Chairman, that item 3 is an 
interesting one in the sense that we are finding both in terms of our 
online mechanisms for communicating and in the sorts of interaction 
both constituencies and I think, importantly, staff have had in the 
last 12 months, that there is a whole range of participants or people 
who are interested in ICANN who are not, if you like, the traditional 
ICANN community.  And that we are seeing a much broader range of people 
from governments, large corporations, financial services sector, in 
particular, I think they're probably sort of the main areas, as well 
as, you know, at-large consumer type of groups as well.  But there's 
been a significant increase in these people who are interested in ICANN 
who are following what is going on in ICANN in great detail but who are 
not necessarily attending meetings, who are not necessarily 
participating in supporting organizations, the constituencies.

 Clearly, one of the issues in front of us in this, I think, strategic 
planning period is how do we engage those people more and how do we 
bring them into the constituency model.  But I think also there's a 
question of actually listening to them and hearing what they're saying.  
One of the things that certainly that community has been saying, as 
well as the ICANN community, but one of the things that that group of 
people have been telling us is that security and stability of the 
Internet and the domain name system has been a key point of their 
concerns.

 >>VINT CERF:   Just a small reminder.

 You need to slow down so that our scribes can keep up with you.  Thank 
you.

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   Thank you.

 The operating plan will be updated and revised based on community 
feedback.  It won't be in the San Juan meeting; it'll be in the meeting 
at New Delhi in February.  So there's obviously an error on the slide.

 Sorry, it will be done -- feedback will be done after this meeting.

 So we will -- the operating -- the strategic plan will go to the board 
for finalization at the board meeting in December.  When we come into 
the new part of the year, Doug Brent's commitment has been to amend the 
present process of operating planning so that the operating plan will 
also incorporate budgeting, at least at high level, so we will be 
actually able to give the main operating plan items, including their 
budget numbers, to allow community feedback and sense of 
prioritization, what the activity is and how much it costs.  And that 
will be an amendment to the present process that's been underway, which 
has been to tend to produce the operating plan and then the budget, 
that will try to merge the two together and try to have that first 
draft for the community, as I said, end of February.

 Some of the policy development activities in front of the community -- 
well, as I said, there's new ccTLD accountability frameworks.  And I 
think I'll talk about that shortly.

 The GNSO has a range of work that's been underway, supported by staff.  
One is on WHOIS and data escrow.  Clearly, there's work being discussed 
also about domain name tasting, which is another big interest also from 
the ALAC.  New generic top-level domains, as I mentioned.  The transfer 
policy review, which is presently up for consultation.  The contractual 
conditions discussions taking place in, again, supporting of the new 
generic top-level domains, the contractual conditions for those 
contracts.  And then the whole new issue of IDNs, which is incredibly 
important.

 In the ccNSO, one of the big discussions is about ICANN regions.  And 
we expect to hear at this meeting recommendations from the ccNSO on 
potential amendments to the regional definitions as it relates to the 
Country Code Names Supporting Organization only.

 And, obviously, the other issue that they are in big discussion with 
the GAC and others is about this issue of internationalized domain 
names as they apply to CCTLDs, what has been referred to as iccTLDs, or 
internationalized ccTLDs.  The gTLD registry fell failover plan, a key 
part of ICANN's responsibilities, has been posted on the 20th of 
October.  And that is now available for public report and public 
consultation.  It will not be adopted at this meeting, but we would 
recommend that the community members who have a concern about those 
issues have a look at that report.

 Obviously, one of the big items that continues to be in front of the 
community both in messaging and in sort of engaging particularly the 
ISPs and other levels, is the whole issue of transition from an IPv4 
network to an IPv6 network, and, in particular, the concerns around 
IPv4 depletion and ensuring that people do make the move towards 
incorporating IPv6 into their customer needs in the networks.

 The -- if you want more information about all the discussions taking 
place this week, you can go to LosAngeles2007.ICANN.org.  And I will 
remind everybody that we have the public participation site which you 
can get to off the ICANN site.  The public participation site is 
essentially a Web presence for each of the meetings where you can 
participate and share notes about what's happening in each of the 
submeetings taking place this week, even if you're not there.  So if 
you're sitting in one meeting but you want to track what's happening in 
another meeting, I recommend you go to the public participation site, 
where you'll be able to track various meetings taking place in 
realtime.  And that's true for people who are here.  It's particularly 
true for people who are in the -- online and who are looking at the 
video streaming, that they can do that in the public participation 
site.

 So a reminder, that's at ICANN.org, and there is a link at the top of 
the page to public participation site.

 It's 19 months now since ICANN posted its accountability framework 
template documents for country code top-level domains.  And during the 
2007, we've signed accountability frameworks or exchanged letters with 
a number of ccTLDs.  And you will see them there.  .NL, .FJ, Puerto 
Rico, El Salvador, Mongolia, Brazil, Senegal, Armenia, Russian 
Federation, Cote d'Ivoire, and Libya.  Discussions are ongoing with a 
number of other ccTLDs.  I am scheduled to sign three or four of these 
agreements this week.  Chairman, the process of accountability 
frameworks continues to accelerate, and I think in terms of the number 
of -- number of Internet -- number of ccTLD domain registrants, we now 
have these sorts of frameworks in place with over 60% of the world's 
ccTLD registrants, if you see them as a cascading effort through the 
ccTLD.

 A major item of discussion that emerged after the RegisterFly issue 
earlier this year was the need potentially to make some amendments to 
the registrar accreditation agreement to ensure better protection for 
registrants in similar type circumstances.

 It is not the only response to the RegisterFly situation.  And I would 
make the point that the registrar constituency has been very aware of 
that good service is the way in which you hook up to your customers.  
So we do not see the interests of registrars and the issues of 
registrants necessarily being at variance here at all.  And I think we 
have seen the participation of the registrar constituency, and I 
particularly would like to thank Jon Nevett for his work in this as the 
leader of that constituency in terms of working with the ICANN staff 
and then coming to the board and to the community more generally about 
potential amendments to the registrar accreditation agreement.

 There are six amendments presently being proposed.  One of them, 
eliminating the practice of obtaining ICANN accreditation by purchase.

 This is the mechanism that has taken place where people that don't get 
accredited by an accredited registrar become the registrar.  We're 
looking at eliminating that practice.  That's that everybody who is a 
registrar has to go through the accreditation process.

 Improve contractual compliance enforcement tools.

 Potential group liability of registrars owned by a single entity.  So 
that there is -- ensure that there's a sort of understanding of the 
practicalities around a group of registrars rather than just the 
specifics of one to another.

 There's amendments around private registrations and registrations of 
data escrow requirements.  There's been a lot of detail work on that.  
The management of reseller relationships has been also a key thing.  
Registrars who have many resellers, how those relationships operate and 
importantly, what do the resellers actually communicate to the 
registrants and the relationship between the registrants and the 
clarity for the registrants of their rights, if you like, is a key 
piece of this work.

 Also looking at the issue of skills testing or certification of 
registrar personnel.  And I think that -- I personally think that's a 
very important issue.  I'm reminded that Microsoft won't let people 
sell their software unless you've done a Microsoft accreditation.  
Similarly, we -- understanding what are the rules that apply to a 
registrar and how the accreditation process works is important, we 
think, for ongoing stability.

 This will be discussed in public fora and at a workshop here at the 
meeting, and the summary of the public comments have been posted on the 
23rd of October, and I point you out to that link to those public 
comments.

 Internationalized Domain Names has been a major issue we've been 
discussing for a long time at ICANN.  There's been some major 
milestones.

 In December 2006, we had the successful laboratory testing of Punycode 
strings, representing top-level domains inserted into the root zone.

 The IETF has led efforts to finalize the IDNA protocols.  And in 
October 2007, IANA -- ICANN, through IANA, inserted IDNs into the root 
zone for evaluation of example.test in 11 languages, Arabic, Persian, 
Chinese, simplified and traditional, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, 
Yiddish, Japanese, and Tamil.  They're obviously the languages.  They 
use scripts.  The scripts are not the same as the languages.  I wish to 
make that point quite clear.  There is a WIKI page that has been 
established to facilitate evaluation and feedback.  As I mentioned this 
morning, people here who wish to avail themselves of that test can do 
so on machines in the reception area of the hotel, lobby area of the 
hotel this week.

 And the feedback is actually very interesting at the moment.  We are 
expecting deployment in context with the new gTLD process and the work 
being done on internationalized ccTLDs potentially, deployment to take 
place sometime in 2008.  I would expect, in practical terms, in the 
second half of 2008, not the first half.

 We suggest you actually look at this evaluation of the test.  There is 
actually on the particular site, there is a little video or YouTube 
explanation.  And then there is -- where we have a lot of people in 
those languages actually repeating the call sign, if you like, we're 
using around this initiative, which is, "My name.  My language.  My 
Internet."

 Then the WIKI pages are available at the same time.

 And I really need to work on changing the colors of the links and the 
background of the slides, because I don't know about you, but I can't 
read that link.  But there is a link there.  We'll get that amended 
before this presentation is posted.

 In terms of -- I have mentioned this before, that both the GNSO and 
the ccNSO and GAC have been working on the policy that would relate to 
new gTLDs.  And the ccNSO and the GAC have been working potentially on 
way that is how to deal with the policy of looking at ccTLDs within -- 
looking at IDNs within the ccTLD context.  

 There is some discussion taking place this week of potentially having 
a faster way to put in place, for some ccTLDs, potentially, an 
Internationalized Domain Name ccTLD.  But Chairman, we expect to hear 
more this week from the chair of the ccNSO and potentially the chair of 
the GAC, depending upon how they organize their discussions on this 
particular set of issues.

 The GNSO constituencies have developed 19 policy recommendations, and 
those recommendations can be found again in this completely illegible 
string, unless you can read that better than I can.

 But they are available on the Web site.

 These associated principles and guidelines will guide ICANN into 
implementing these policies.

 I am not going to talk to this in great detail.  I am going to ask as 
many of you as possible to please attend this afternoon, the session 
between 1:00 and 6:00, Los Angeles time.  If you are online or watching 
this by streaming, I would ask you to participate online as much as you 
can.

 But the session this afternoon is going to be a presentation by the 
Generic Names Supporting Organization of nearly two and a half years of 
work.

 And very importantly, of a lot of the detail of the questions and the 
policy discussions that have taken place within that work.

 The reason I exhort you to attend is that when all of you read those 
19 principles, policy principles, you will undoubtedly say, "But what 
about this?"  And what about that and they haven't thought about this 
and they haven't thought about that.

 I can report to you that it is very, very likely that in the last two 
and a half years of discussions they have thought about this and they 
have thought about that, they have discussed this and they have 
discussed that -- I am looking at poor Bruce Tonkin here who has been 
heavily involved with that process.

 I think that we owe the hard work of that community, the hard work of 
those constituencies and that Supporting Organization to come and hear 
them present to us, hear them tell us about those discussions they have 
had, ask them whether they have considered these questions.  Because 
it's been a lot of thinking and discussion and consensus building 
taking place to end up with these 19 policy proposals and I think we 
all ought to hear that discussion.  And participate in it, but we 
really ought to be listening to that work that's been done.

 Let me move on now to accountability and transparency initiatives.

 And I think the main Mexico here is that there has been in the last 18 
months or less a lot of work that has been done by the ICANN community, 
particularly by the ICANN board and staff in this particular area.

 There is a lot more done than you realize, would be my basic message.  
There's been a lot done in this area of improving transparency and 
accountability.

 One has been making the strategic planning operating plan process I 
think more transparent and amending it in a way the community has asked 
us to do.

 I think we have also done quite a deal on streamlining but making very 
transparent the budgeting plan and the processing.

 I think a very important move, and one that I have heard much positive 
feedback from the community, has been an amendment to the way in which 
the board reports its decision-making, both in terms of expansion of 
what's included within the board minutes and then the speed in which 
they are posted.

 So the board minutes are now posted within 72 hours to the community.

 We have established an ICANN blog which has been a very useful 
mechanism for further -- for like less formal ways of communicating to 
the community about key issues.

 For instance, during the RegisterFly initiative it was very busy.  It 
was a key way in which to communicate what was going on.  And I think 
that's been very important to open up greater transparency about the 
thinking of even day-to-day operations as we have dealt with particular 
issues.

 The public participation site I have mentioned.  We have now moved to 
newsletters and magazines and I would recommend all of you who have not 
yet signed up for the ICANN monthly magazine to please do so.  Kieren 
McCarthy, who might be in the room, is the man to see or to explain how 
to get linked up to the site.  But what has been fascinating about that 
particular newsletter and magazine initiative, as I said before, are 
the people who are taking it up who are not people who are normally 
recognized as being attendees of ICANN meetings.  And it is a good 
example, I think, of the wide range of people in the broader community 
who actually do follow ICANN issues.

 The One World Trust review was an important part of this process of 
evaluating how transparent was ICANN.  They actually did report back 
that ICANN was a very transparent organization but made a series of 
recommendations that we have pretty much followed up and implemented on 
each of them, Chairman.

 To quote Paul Levins line, a key part of the initiatives around 
transparency has been that ICANN has been a transparent organization, 
but sometimes in the past it's been transparent the same way an 
insurance premium is transparent.

 All the information is there.  It's just very hard to understand 
what's in it.

 So we have been working very hard to try to make the information about 
what ICANN a doing more accessible.

 I would make an observation, people may not realize, the ICANN Web 
site carries about as much content as a medium-sized television 
network's Web site in the United States.

 It's about the same size as an affiliate's network, an affiliate's Web 
site.

 And we have done some comparisons.  So there is enormous amount of 
content on the ICANN Web site.  Making that accessible and making it 
easier for people to use has been a key priority.

 This is a very important next initiative that we really would like the 
community to pay attention to and to give us their feedback.

 As has been promised in a series of public consultations, we have 
revised and posted again for public comments ICANN's accountability and 
transparency framework.

 And that outlines ICANN's general and financial accountabilities, 
dispute resolution commitments, a very important set of information 
disclosure commitments.  And, Chairman, I would really like to 
encourage the community to look at this and look at the commitments 
ICANN is making about information disclosure.  Also commitments around 
consultation, commitments around translation.  And we have seen this 
meeting utilizing translation.  And importantly, and a very key piece 
of feedback we have received from the community, proposing sets of 
standards of behavior for people who are participating in the ICANN 
process.

 Not just the ICANN board or the ICANN staff, but the ICANN community.

 A set of standards of behavior as to how we operate together.

 So this is a very important summation of the accountability and 
transparency statements and initiatives for ICANN.  I exhort you to 
have a look at that.  I exhort you to read it.  I exhort you to give us 
feedback whether you think it's sufficient or not.

 I exhort you to think about it very carefully, particularly on the 
accountability ones because it's the first time, I think, that it's 
been put down all in one place, all of the legal and bylaws and other 
forms and voting structure types of accountabilities that apply to the 
ICANN board and ICANN as an organization.

 And it's actually very easy to read through and just see how detailed 
those accountability requirements are.

 The regional fellowship program continues.  This is the second meeting 
where it's been implemented.

 And just to remind people it I provides financial grants to 
individuals from developing economies to facilitate participation in 
ICANN's meetings.

 The priority is given to low, lower-middle and upper-middle income 
economies.  And that includes -- people who participate are either 
people from governments, Country Code Top Level Domains or the 
nonprofit sector not associated with the ALAC, because the ALAC has its 
own funding mechanism for participation.

 The participants are from ICANN region in which the meeting is taking 
place and participants from adjacent regions and overseas participants.  
So you can see there are a set of priorities, and there is an 
independent group who actually makes the decision on the applications.  
This is not done by staff, for instance.

 There has been 167 applications submitted to date, 58 fellowship 
awards have been made, 34 attended the San Juan meeting, 24 attending 
here in Los Angeles, and we have nine already nominated to attend in 
the New Delhi meeting.

 There are 22 countries represented among those 24 people participating 
here in Los Angeles.  And 8 are attending an ICANN meeting for the 
first time.

 So we continue to think -- we're still looking at this this year.  
This is a trial program for this year to evaluate, but I think so far, 
Chairman, it looks so far like it's been reasonably successful.

 Just an interesting other point that the board has reviewed recently, 
but I would like to share with the community.

 The board has been, in its oversight functions, one of the things it's 
requested is an ongoing process for review of the operations of the 
operational view of ICANN.  So if you think you have financial audits 
which are a natural part -- which we have independent financial audits, 
they have also set up a process for ongoing sort of independent 
operational reviews to look for opportunities for continuous 
improvement in the way the operations works inside ICANN, particularly 
in staff functions.

 And the panel which has been established was chartered in May 2007 to 
align the performance, particularly with the strategic plan.

 This panel presently consists of myself and Doug Brent.  As president, 
this is a very important part, very close to my heart, a very important 
part of what I think I need to do to help lead at the staff function.  
But a key person who has participated in this is also Hagen Hultzsch, 
who this year has had a number of roles this year, including with the 
NomCom.  But Hagen, for those of you who know, is a former board 
member, and a former board member of both Deutsche Telekom and 
Volkswagen and is a very experienced businessman and has very much 
helped the staff over a four-day process so far this year in helping us 
to evaluate what activities are taking place, what processes we have in 
place, and, importantly, pushing people to understand what their 
mission is.  Specifically, that we are there not to work for a 100 
person or 86 person organization, not to work for a 21-person board, 
not even to work for several thousand people who come for an ICANN.  
But to remember that our function is there to support a community of 
10,000, who then themselves support 1.2 billion users of the Internet.

 To really get the staff to understand that, and to also understand the 
importance of pushing for quality improvement as a continuous process 
within the way in which we operate.

 So I want people -- we won't go into detail.  It's not appropriate 
that I sit here and give you the full evaluation of the 151 business 
initiatives we are presently undertaking but I did want people to have 
a sense that there is a commitment to continuous improvement inside the 
staff functions.  We have a process for independently sort of 
evaluating and pushing that.  And that's a key part of what the board 
considers to be important for its oversight of good management within 
the organization.

 I should just make the point also that when Hagen does this work, he 
does it for us free, for gratis.  He has never asked for remuneration 
for that.  It's part of his ongoing commitment to this vision he has 
about helping ICANN.

 Since we are talking about Hagen, just as a reminder as Vint has 
already pointed out he is now the new chair this year, also, of the 
Nominating Committee.  The result of the NomCom committee review are 
now available.  Of course people can look at that.  That's just been 
posted.

 Chairman, let me move now quickly to the IANA, which we normally 
report on.

 And I wonder if I can share with you an interesting phenomenon, 
particularly on root zone change requests that we're now seeing.

 What we are seeing is an increasing number of, how to put it, bundled 
requests, issues that are bundled together.  So, for instance, the 
introduction of 11 new entries into the root zone in 11 scripts, as an 
example.

 An issue of, for instance, groups of glue records requests to be 
changed where they are in a group of 11 or 18 that have to be all 
changed at once and require a lot of consultation with the various, 
often, CCs that are associated with them.  Or redelegation requests 
which have actually been exceptionally complicated, and we have had 
several of those recently.

 The consequence of which has been in the root zone management that the 
number of requests has certainly gone up and that the settling of those 
requests has tended to become lumpy.  And as you see from this chart, 
if you follow the yellow line, that is the open tickets for TLD 
requests, and you can see that it grew over time, and then we have had, 
recently,  in the October, suddenly a lot of requests dealt with, and 
the red line shows a lot of tickets closed.

 That's been a reflection of this lumpiness.  So we had whole groups of 
requests that went through in groups.

 So that's just an interesting observation, I think, about some of the 
changes we are seeing in the root zone environment.

 The second Internet Governance Forum will take place in Rio de Janeiro 
in November, and it has set down its four key themes:  Critical 
Internet resources and Internet infrastructure, access and capacity 
available to developing countries, ICANN's limited defined and global 
role in the Internet -- oopsy-daisy.  This is a change here.  These are 
the points we wanted to make.  There are several other topics that are 
the -- that are actually the themes.

 One of the -- The community well knows that throughout the world 
summit for information society and this whole sort of role in the U.N. 
of Internet governance, there have been people, greater times and 
lesser times, arguing about the role of ICANN and the role of this 
community vis-a-vis others who may actually operate these roles.

 Unlike in Athens, critical Internet resources and Internet 
infrastructure has come up as an agenda item.  A key theme for this 
coming meeting.

 We are very proud to go to the ICANN meeting as -- to the IGF meeting 
as ICANN.  But also as part of a very broad Internet community.  
Regional Internet Registries and NRO, ISOC, country code operations and 
others who will be there.  I think all of us have a very proud story to 
tell.

 I think we have got a very good story to tell about the way in which 
we presently are stewards of this function.  I think we have a very 
proud story to tell about the role we have played in building 
multistakeholder approaches.  Indeed, I think the whole issue -- if I 
remember the WSIS, in the first two years, I think Theresa and I were 
the only people saying multistakeholder.  By the end of the four-year 
process everybody was saying multistakeholder.  In some respects that 
became one of the successful themes that came out of the WSIS process.  
So IGF, in some respects, is a new multistakeholder body, but I would 
say it's actually taken its lead from this community.

 It will probably go in different directions but it has taken it's 
lead, at least, from this community.  It will probably go in different 
directions, but it's taken its lead, at least, from this community.

 I think also, however, we should be quite clear, the critical Internet 
resources does not just mean I.P. addresses and domain names.

 It means a wide range of issues, and we expect there should be a wide 
range discussion about what is the present status of critical Internet 
resources.

 And we think that ICANN's limited and defined and global role is 
recognized through this process, but we will be reinforcing that that 
is a narrow role and there are many other people who have tasks to do 
and responsibilities in this arena.

 ICANN board members and staff will be attending to participate in 
various sessions.

 And I know that others of you, various affiliations, will be in 
attendance.  And as I said, I think we should stand proud, we should 
stand tall, we should say what we have done, not with any sort of 
hubris, but we should certainly be confident and engage all there in 
the IGF about the role we have played in their concerns.

 So thank you, Chairman.  That's a long presentation this time, but I 
think there's a lot of issues in front of us on the table.

 [ Applause ]

 >>VINT CERF:   Thank you very much, Paul.

 Before we break, I would like to just reinforce one or two things.

 First of all, attendance at the GNSO -- the review of the gTLD process 
is actually very important.  I want to encourage all of you to 
undertake that, to participate in that discussion.

 Second, with regard to the planning cycle, the strategic plan and then 
the operational plan and the budget, it's my understanding that we're 
going to try to link the budget and the operational planning together 
so that it's a little clearer during the operational planning phase 
what the costs are likely to be for various choices.  That will help us 
prioritize, I think.

 I think it's very important to get feedback from all of you who are 
interested in the accountability and transparency frameworks.

 That feedback will be more useful coming sooner rather than later, 
because it will be an important part of the review of the joint project 
agreement that will be undertaken in the early part of next year.

 Apart from that, the only other observation I would make, Paul, is 
that with regard to the complex changes that are occurring in the IANA 
root zone file processing, it may very well be a side effect of -- one 
example is a side effect of a large number of sites that are being 
served by the same host.  And the coordination is required before all 
of those entries are altered, because the ccTLD operators are all 
individually consulted and changes are confirmed with each of them.

 We may have an opportunity to pay attention to the behavior patterns 
of the various ccTLD or other TLD operators and adapt this process to 
make it more efficient rather than less efficient as a consequence of 
these group arrival requests.  So I urge staff to start taking 
advantage of what we see might be a trend in order to make it more 
efficient.

 Paul.

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   I think that's good advice, Vint.  I want to 
reinforce on that particular issue, in operating the IANA function, 
IANA staff, I think quite appropriately, never go near being proactive 
in making changes.  Changes are made to the root zone only on request.

 So part of what you are referring to will also be the need to ensure 
that the requests processes is managed and accelerated.  And part of 
the delay frankly is if I have 18 TLDs on one server, and we get 
responses from 15 but not from three, the process just stops because we 
have got to get the request from all.  So I think that's part of the 
problem we need to manage for.

 >>VINT CERF:   My reaction, of course, is that the tactic here is to 
get the request done sort of ahead of time, somehow.  All worked out 
with the operator who can now present to us a confirmed, authenticated, 
high integrity request from the group.

 Anyway, I leave that to IANA to work out.  But just paying attention 
to changing conditions and trying to take advantage of those seems to 
me a useful tactic.

 I think we have completed -- oh, I'm sorry, Paul, one more?

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   I'm sorry, Vint.  There's one other point.  I should 
have made it during the presentation.  Perhaps I can make it now.

 I just want to make a point about security and stability as it's come 
up in discussions.  This is an area of growing feedback and interest 
that we are receiving.

 I think it's coming up through the strategic planning process, it's 
coming up through other consultations we are receiving.

 I think the community should be completely assured that in the 
consideration of that, that the ICANN board and staff certainly, at 
least, are completely committed to the ICANN mission and know creep 
beyond the mission.

 So that the whole issue of cyber security and security on the Internet 
is a very, very broad issue.  It has lots of players involved in it.  
There is no way in which ICANN is going to respond to this increased 
request outside its mission.

 Although, in the strategic planning process, potentially the 
operational planning process, some more exploration of how we as a 
community could potentially do more within our mission may be 
appropriate, I wanted to reinforce there would be no -- we are very, 
very concerned about that bright line that sits around our mission 
statement.

 >>VINT CERF:   Does that mean I should have a T-shirt made that says 
"No creeps are allowed in the ICANN meetings"?

 All right.  I think we have completed our session for the open forum 
this morning.

 I now leave it to all of you to conduct your business until we meet 
again in open session.

 We'll call this session to a close.

 Thank you very much for your participation.

 [ Applause ]