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A quick guide to Sydney material

1 June 2009
By Kurt Pritz

Over the weekend, we published quite a bit of material. It was published now to meet a request by the Board and the community that we post three business weeks prior to the start of a meeting; these series of postings ensure that the bulk of materials being considered during Sydney will meet this goal.

With Sydney opening on Monday 22 June, we strived to have this information up before this morning, Monday 1 June.

As such, it is probably as comprehensive a set of documents as ICANN has published for any meeting – addressing hard issues on IDNs, an important report on intellectual property issues as related to domain names, another huge piece of comment and analysis related to new TLDs, new financial analysis, more on community travel (which is coming), and other areas. I’m also pretty confident that this is the earliest (relative to an ICANN meeting) that this kind of material has been available.

So what was included?

IDNs: We posted the third revision to the Fast Track Implementation Plan. This was accompanied by explanatory memos that discuss: the form of agreement we will have with IDN TLD operators, financial contributions to ICANN, and the use of variant tables. The bottom line – we plan to launch this process right after the meeting in Seoul.

New gTLDs: We posted the Analysis of public comment, as we did before the Mexico City meeting. This document is intended to demonstrate ICANN’s careful consideration of all the comment. We decided to not publish a new version of the Guidebook since the overarching issues are not yet resolved.

Instead, we have identified several areas where the Guidebook can be amended and published excerpts – just those sections that are changing. We also published explanatory memos: discussing whether Chinese, Japanese, and Korean TLDs should be allowed to register one or two-character names since complete words in those languages are generally that short; describing all the research that has been done regarding morality & public order issues; describing a process for contractual compliance in community-based TLDs; and advocating a requirement that registries maintain thick Whois databases.

IRT and Trademark Protection: The Implementation Recommendation Team was created by a resolution of the Board to develop solutions to trademark protection issues. The IRT made its final report, it was posted yesterday. The report represents a ton of work by the 18 members of the team for which we are very grateful.

As an ICANN staff member closely associated with this important and huge amount of work, I would like to thank everyone from staff and the community that worked so hard in making it possible to publish this in time for review and discussion in Sydney.

Authors

Kurt Pritz