As the co-chairs of the Working Group for Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation Issues, we are writing this blog post to try to answer some of the questions that have been raised by the broader Internet community regarding the status of our work. We also will describe the process that a community-based Working Group uses to develop consensus-based policy proposals for consideration by the ICANN Board in order to add context.
Working Group Status Update – the Path Towards a Final Report
Our Working Group was chartered by the Council for ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) – the body charged with developing policy for generic top-level domains (gTLDs) – in October 2013. Our task was to conduct a Policy Development Process (PDP) to develop recommendations that would guide ICANN’s implementation of an accreditation program for privacy and proxy registration services. ICANN has committed to creating that program. At the moment, the operation and use of privacy and proxy registration services are governed by a limited set of specific rules in the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement. These rules will expire on 1 January 2017.
GNSO Working Groups are formed and operate in accordance with established operating procedures approved by the GNSO Council. One of these rules requires that, prior to finalizing its policy recommendations, a PDP Working Group must first publish an Initial Report for public comment. The rules also require a PDP Working Group to evaluate and take into consideration the public comments received. PDP Working Groups are expected to carefully consider and analyze submissions, explain the rationales for agreeing and disagreeing with the comments, and determine how these matters will be addressed in a Final Report.
Our Working Group published our Initial Report in May 2015. The Initial Report contained some twenty preliminary recommendations as well as several open questions on matters that the Working Group had yet to reach consensus on and for which we specifically solicited community input. The Working Group is now actively reviewing the many public comments received, following the GNSO rules described above, with a view to determining whether modifications need to be made to our preliminary recommendations and a possible final consensus reached on the open questions we had. To be clear, the WG also is reviewing comments on issues on which we believe we had reached consensus.
We expect that, as in several previous ICANN Public Meetings, the Working Group will hold another open community session at the upcoming ICANN54 Public Meeting in Dublin, Ireland, in October. Our aim is to submit the Working Group’s Final Report to the GNSO Council following the Dublin meeting, once we have completed our review and analysis of the input we received. The full Final Report will contain all of the group’s consensus recommendations as well as any remaining proposals that did not achieve final consensus and minority statements, if any. The GNSO Council and the broader community will be able to evaluate all of the deliberations that the Working Group engaged in throughout our work process. The GNSO Council will then vote on which of the Working Group’s recommendations to adopt. Adopted recommendations will be subject to another public comment period before being reviewed and voted on by the ICANN Board.
Some Observations on the Work of Our Group and the Public Response to Our Initial Report
Since the inception of our work, we have been impressed by the dedication and collaborative spirit shown by the many members of our Working Group. Comprising representatives from all the GNSO’s Stakeholder Groups and Constituencies as well as ICANN’s At Large Advisory Committee and independent contributors, our members willingly embarked on weekly conference calls (sixty-four meetings have been held to date), reviewed multiple reports, participated in a full-day intensive face-to-face meeting at ICANN48 in Los Angeles, and formed Sub Teams to evaluate the thousands of public comments received. Although the Working Group deliberations have at times been contentious, we clearly have had an overall commitment to working together and finding consensus that made it possible for us to issue a detailed Initial Report in a timely fashion.
Similarly, we have been struck by the response of the community to our solicitation of public comment. Among the over 11,000 comments and 350 survey responses we received, many were from individuals who hitherto had not participated in an ICANN policy development process or attended an ICANN Public Meeting. Comments also were received from commentators based in various different countries located in a variety of global regions.
The sheer volume of responses obviously has made our work of preparing our Final Report much more challenging than we had perhaps anticipated initially. We have adjusted our work plan to ensure that we have enough time to consider the many substantive comments received. Our preliminary look through some of the comments received also indicates that we will need to be clearer in many places in our Final Report; for example, what it is that the Working Group agreed by consensus to recommend that ICANN adopt as policy, what it did not, and what we could not reach a consensus on.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank not just our hardworking Working Group colleagues but also the many commenters who provided feedback on our Initial Report. It is a testament to the importance of public commentary and the resilience of ICANN’s bottom-up, consensus-based community model of policymaking that the Working Group’s Final Report will be informed by the substantive contributions of so many members of the public.
Don Blumenthal, Graeme Bunton & Steven Metalitz (Working Group co-chairs)