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Notes from 14 March 2018 APAC Space at ICANN61

Notes from 14 March 2018 APAC Space at ICANN61

Mar 02, 2025

APAC Space @ ICANN61 Community Forum was attended by 36 participants in San Juan. Participants included at-large community, governments, registries, and registrars, amongst others. Information on remote participation is not available as Adobe Connect services were suspended during ICANN61. We welcomed Holly Raiche (At-Large Advisory Committee, ALAC Member) as the APAC Space Community Facilitator for this session.

In summary, Chuck Gomes presented on the Next-Generation gTLD Registration Directory Services to Replace Whois Policy Development Process (Next-Gen RDS PDP) in his capacity as the Working Group (WG) co-chair.

In addition, the annual APAC Space Survey 2018 was launched during this meeting.

Key action items following the meeting are:

  • Participate in the APAC Space Survey 2018. The survey closes on 20 April 2018, 23:59 UTC.
  • Discuss agenda for the next APAC Space web conference on the discuss@apacspace.asia mailing list. Suggested discussion topics include:
    • Quick introduction to ICANN Reviews
    • Update on Universal Acceptance (UA) and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)

Links to the audio recording and presentation slides can be found at the APAC Space Community Wiki webpage here: https://icann-community.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/GSEAPAC/pages/114296860/APAC+Space.

Details of the session as follows:

Introduction to Next-Gen RDS PDP

Holly Raiche opened this segment by explaining the background of WHOIS. WHOIS was first developed as an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) Protocol for directory service for ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) members to contact one another. With the establishment of ICANN, this directory service was later expanded and adopted for use by registries and registrars to provide public and free access to registrant contact details based on their contracts with ICANN in the form of WHOIS.  

Holly noted that the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was not the Next-Gen RDS PDP WG’s main concern, but the nature of discussions in GDPR would have impact on the WG’s work.

Chuck Gomes, the PDP WG co-chair, highlighted ICANN’s bottom-up, multistakeholder policymaking process. A variety of WHOIS policies had been developed over the years, but the toughest issues on accuracy, security, amongst others, still remain unresolved. While an Expert Working Group (EWG) was chartered and issued its final report in September 2015, Chuck clarified that the Expert Working Group (EWG) did not establish policy, which is left to the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO).

The PDP WG continues to grapple with the main conflict between privacy and access. Three phases for the WG have been charted: 1) Policy Requirements, 2) Policy Functional Design, and 3) Implementation. The WG is at the beginning of Phase 1.

Currently, the WG is working on 4 out of 11 questions, namely: Users/Purposes; Gated access; Data elements; and Privacy. A fundamental question that the WG seeks to address in its first initial report (aimed to start in June 2018) is whether an entirely new policy framework in the Next-Gen RDS is required to address the above requirements.

Community Discussion

  • To a community member’s query, Chuck replied that the IETF technical community have developed Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), which allows customization by geographic region and other parameters depending on the person accessing the data. One possibility for establishing requirements that vary by jurisdictions or users involved could be through this protocol. Furthermore, the WG had agreed on a minimum data set that would be made public.
  • Responding to a query on the role of RDAP and whether it had been fully considered by the WG, Chuck said that it was not up to the WG whether the RDAP should be used as Contracted Parties are already contractually required to implement RDAP when it is appropriate.
  • On whether there was a requirement or capability for data to be stored in multiple languages, Chuck replied while the current WHOIS system does not support multiple languages, the RDAP protocol would allow for it, including that of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

AOB

  • APAC Space Survey 2018
    • First started in 2017, the second edition of the annual APAC Space Survey seeks feedback from community members on your views regarding APAC Space in the past year, as well as your priorities and discussion interests for 2018.
    • The survey can be accessed here: https://go.icann.org/APAC-Space-Survey-2018
    • Survey deadline is 20 April 2018, 23:59 UTC.