November 2017 – SSAC Liaison Report

(as at 28 November 17)

1. SSAC MEETINGS.  Since ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi, the SSAC has held one meeting on 15 November, at which the primary topic of discussion was planning for the Name Collision work tasked by the ICANN Board.

2. SSAC WORK PARTIES.  I am currently serving on four SSAC Work Parties:

• 2017 SSAC Membership Committee – This Committee reviews SSAC members who are approaching the end of their 3-year appointments and assesses potential new members. There has been only one meeting of this Committee during this period and that was 20 November.
• IDN Harmonization WP – This Work Party has already released SACs 084, 088, 089, 095 and 099.  The latest was released on 17 November (see para 3 below).  Additional aspects of IDNs are still being considered for possible further SSAC Reports. I attended one meeting of this Work Party on 28 November.
• SSAC Review WP – This Work Party has been recently established to manage the 5-yearly SSAC Organizational Review as mandated in the ICANN Bylaws. ICANN staff are currently assessing responses to the Request for Proposal which was released on 7 July.  The Work Party met once during this period on 16 November.
• IoT WP - This Work Party was established to consider challenges to preserving the security, stability, and resilience of the DNS in the emerging “Internet of Things” (IoT). I attended one meeting during this period on 13 November.
  
  

3. SSAC REPORTS. There has been one SSAC Report issued since my last Liaison Report on ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi: 

SAC099: SSAC Response to the ICANN Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Guidelines Working Group dated 17 November 2017

This report responds to a question from the IDN Guidelines Working Group which sought SSAC’s opinion on whether records which are “not-authoritative” should be constrained to comply with IDNA2008 by the IDN Guidelines. In its response, the SSAC recommends that for normal infrastructure records and other records identifying hosts:

• It should be either:

- a traditional label, i.e., a string consisting of American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) letters, digits, and the hyphen with the further restrictions that a hyphen cannot appear at the beginning or end of the string or adjacent to another hyphen, or

- a valid A-label complying with RFCs 5890, 5891, 5892, 5893 (also known as IDNA2008) and their successors, and not in any way dependent on mapping.

• These records should be used without delegated variants, other variations, and, insofar as one can control it, any infrastructure records that create a referral, such as Canonical Name (CNAME) or Delegation Name (DNAME) records pointing into or out of the Fully Qualified Domain Name, even if the DNS protocol or other procedures allows those mechanisms.

4. SSAC REPRESENTATION ON CCWG ACCOUNTABILITY. There have been no meetings since ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi of the CCWG-A Plenary or the Diversity Sub-group of which I am a member. However, there are currently four reports from Sub-Groups out for Public Comment (Diversity, Ombudsman, Staff Accountability, and Jurisdiction) and I have provided email summaries of these reports to the full SSAC.  The SSAC is currently considering whether there are any aspects on which it should comment.