Just over a year ago, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the U.S. Government's Department of Commerce transferred the NTIA's stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions to the global Internet community. The Customer Standing Committee (CSC) was established in accordance with Article 17.3(b) of the 1 October 2016 ICANN Bylaws, and conducted its first meeting on 6 October 2016. The CSC was created as one of a number of committees and entities of the multistakeholder oversight structure.
The CSC Charter and ICANN Bylaws (Article 17) require that the "…Charter will initially be reviewed by a committee of representatives from the ccNSO and the RySG one year after the first meeting of the CSC." As it is now one year after the first meeting of the CSC, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) and Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) have established a CSC Review Team to conduct the charter review.
In planning for this review, the ccNSO and RySG have agreed on terms of reference and have appointed four members to the review team: Abdalla Omari and Martin Boyle by the ccNSO, and Donna Austin and Keith Drazek by the RySG. The mandate of this review is limited to considering whether the CSC Charter is adequate and provides a sound basis for the CSC to perform its responsibilities as envisioned. In particular, the review will focus on whether:
- the Charter enables the CSC to fulfil its role
- any aspects are ambiguous and would benefit from amendment.
- any elements of the CSC's work that were unforeseen at the time the Charter was drafted would benefit from being included in a revised Charter.
Next year, two other reviews will evaluate the effectiveness of the CSC and performance of the CSC as it relates to oversight of Public Technical Identifiers (PTI).
The CSC Review Team has received written comments from the CSC and intends to conduct interviews with the CSC and PTI. At ICANN60, the review team will consult with country code top-level domain (ccTLD) managers and generic top-level domain (gTLD) operators attending the meeting, and will also conduct a public hearing. For more details on the timing of the meetings in Abu Dhabi, please look at the CSC Review Team wiki space.
Following ICANN60, the review team will prepare a report of its findings, which will include proposed changes to the Charter, if any. The report and any proposed changes to the Charter will be posted for public comment with the intent of preparing a final report for consideration by both the ccNSO and GNSO Councils before ICANN61.