Joint ALAC-GAC meeting at ICANN63 in Barcelona

ALAC and GAC met at a joint meeting at ICANN63 in Barcelona on Tuesday, 23, 2018, with a three-item agenda that covered new gTLD’s, EPDP and follow-up to joint the ALAC-GAC statement issued at ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi.

1) As noted by Ana-Cristina Neves, the GAC Liaison the ALAC, the two bodies had at their earlier meetings discussed technical details of the new gTLD’s, but not yet whether they are needed in the first place and who needs them.

These questions were deemed to be good ones, but they were not directly answered in the ensuing discussion. It was pointed out that experiences of the 2012 round are still being gathered and that there is still way to go before the answers are there.  At the same time, the PDP is running...

In Alan’s view it is questionable  whether another few thousand general gTLD’s are needed, but there seems to be demand for certain groups like city, community and brand TLD’s. He added that the ALAC had already posed similar questions to the Board.

Holly noted some points from the CTT Review Final Report such as parked domains, consumer perception of the domain name’s connection to the actual products and services it relates to, and measuring consumer trust. 

From the GAC side, a view was also expressed that the questions about the viability of the business model are not for the governments to answer.

2) Similarity of interests on many EPDP issues was noted by the Chairs of both the ALAC and the GAC.  Alan noted that even though privacy of registrants is important, information available for cyber-security work for preventing malware, phishing, spam and other dangers are of critical importance to end users. 

Kavouss inquired about the ALAC position  on whether the Unified Access Model should be dealt with within the current EPDP. Alan replied that even though ALAC as such has not discussed this,  he can’t see “how we can survive without something like the UAM” and that it has to be part of what we’re doing, not necessarily before May 2019, but quickly in any case.

3) A short follow-up text to the joint ALAC-GAC statement issues at ICANN60 in Abu Dhabi on “Enabling inclusive, informed and meaningful participation at ICANN” had been drafted by Ana and Yrjö in order to point out to the Board that it had not answered to all the concerns expressed in the Abu Dhabi statement.

The text was presented to the joint ALAC-GAC meeting. Both approved it later during the week, and it was included in the GAC Communiqué.