March 2009 SSAC Report

Work currently going on in SSAC include the following:

gTLD Registry Continuity Exercise

SSAC had a meeting with Patrick Jones to review a day long table top exercise that was held on 28 January 2009 to examine and test the gTLD Registry Continuity Plan.

http://www.icann.org/en/registries/continuity/and specifically http://www.icann.org/en/registries/failover/icann-registry-failover-plan-15jul08.pdf

The After Action Report from the exercise will be made available in early April. Following the After Action Report, ICANN will release implementation procedures, including an update to the plan.

SAC 037: Registration contact data display and usage: support for characters from local languages or scripts

This advisory will deal with the representation of non-ASCII character sets in WHOIS queries and more specifically port 43 WHOIS services. The issue is the internationalizing of registration contact data. Internationalizing registration contact data is a separate matter from IDN, the evolution has occurred on a separate time line.

There is still some discussion on the language, but the bottom line is that SSAC still believes that WHOIS is obsolete and needs replacement. SSAC will encourage the GNSO to define requirements and plan for a successor to WHOIS. Given the substantial investment and effort not only for ICANN, registries and registrars, but for third parties as well, SSAC believe it is impractical to set consideration of internationalized registration contact data until that successor is defined, adopted, and deployed.