Sophia Bekele SOI (Old)

Sophia Bekele - Individual

I represent a California based, privately held company, CBS Enterprise Group, which is engaged in international IT business. As part of its portfolio of services, the company provides systems integration services, which delivers domain registration, web hosting and email services to end users via a reseller agreement with registrars and registries.

The GNSO Council's responsibility in recommending substantive policies relating to generic top-level domains is a critical part of ICANN's function. The mechanism by which the GNSO makes such recommendations to the ICANN Board of Directors is through the GNSO Policy Development Process (PDP) set forth in the ICANN Bylaws. During 2005-7, as part of the NomCom representative, I had served on the GNSO and was active in the Policy Development Process of the International Domain Names (IDNs) and generic Top Level Domain names (gTLDs). Within this period, I was active in providing guidance to the GNSO improvement process and give specific recommendations to the independent review group, namely the London School of Economies.

Given that the GNSO structure is made up on the principles of a Constituency representation and their Stakeholders, it is important that there is a level playing field for various constituencies by ICANN as an organization as well as the processes and mechanisms by which the Constituencies operated within the community; particularly in the areas of transparency and openness and the fairness of the Constituency's processes which should continue to observe the interest of the stakeholders that are participating in them particularly the noncommercial, public interest and individual users as well as areas dealing with competing and conflict of interests. As such, I would like to bring my experience in PDP and continue my interest in this important area of ICANN.

In my personal capacity, I do not have any of my moneys, invested in companies that are in the registrar businesses. I do not believe that any activities of the Council or ICANN could have a material effect on the work I do at CBS International".

Teams: 

• Policy Process Steering Committee Policy Development Process Work Team (PDP-WT)