ICANN 76

Dates:	11-16 March 2023 Community Forum
Location:	Cancun, Mexico
Venue:	Cancun Center
Website:	https://76.schedule.icann.org/

ICANN 76 is a Community Forum that will happen in Cancun, Mexico from March 11 through 16 and will have a hybrid format. Registration is available here.

Prep Week

From 27 February to 1 March, there will be sessions on the

• Implementation of Work Stream 2 Recommendations, phase 2 of the CCWG-Accountability process. Work Stream 2 focused on mechanisms following the completion of the IANA Functions Stewardship Transition
• Coalition for Digital Africa
• updates on or from Universal Acceptance, Planning and Finance, GNSO policy work, Contractual Compliance, SUBPRO, NCAP study 2, and IDNs

Topics

At ICANN 76,

Sub Pro

• the ICANN Board:
  • adopted the Sub Pro Final Report Scorecard in full; Section A identifies the adopted outputs. Section B identifies the pending outputs. Section C identifies dependencies;
• NCUC focused on developing Applicant Support and ensuring new applicants have more than 18 months to apply in the next round and significantly slashing the application fee (estimated USD$$240,000) for people from developing countries. The board is afraid that if they pay someone's attorney fee, it may create a conflict of interest as in "who does the attorney represent?" Kathy Kleiman recommended creating boards or groups willing to work at low cost or pro bono (she explained the EFF does this).

WDS

The Board adopted the ODA on the Whois Disclosure System and the ICANN Org renamed it “Registration Data Request Service.” This service should be operative by the end of 2023 and run as a pilot for two years to gather disclosure request volumes to determine whether to build the full Standardized System for Access and Disclosure of non-public domain registration data.

UA

• ICANN Organization and the UASG outlined progress on UA-readiness and IDNs
• EPDP on Internationalized Domain Names Team held two working sessions toward publishing the Phase 1 Initial Report focusing on top-level IDN gTLD definition and variant management.

Transfer Policy Review

The Transfer Policy Review PDP Working Group focused on Phase 2 (aka Group 2) Topics and discussed:

• reducing the cost to reduce barriers to entry; introducing formality, such as accreditation; whether registrants are getting what they need – what current channels are available – settlement, courts (costly), through registrar (TDRP);
• whether to adjust the TDRP to accommodate registrants, which would require substantial changes or a new separate system.
• gaming or potential gaming of TDRP if available to registrants – could be adjusted for that.
• This WG focuses on transfers between contracted parties, so disputes among registrants could be out of scope.
• if out of scope the WG could make a recommendation to GNSO Council that a process for registrants could be considered separately.
• Issues raised by George Kirikos (limitation period of 12 months; with Temp Spec, the Losing Registrar can win 100 percent of the TDRP disputes because the Gaining Registrar doesn’t have access to the Whois info for the FOA because of GDPR; long registration period creating confusion with ownership of the domain name in case of an invalid transfer)
• Gap Analysis - Reversal of Inter-Registrar Transfers

Geopolitical & Regulatory Developments

• The impacts of NIS2
• WSIS+20
• Proposal of the Internet General Law in Peru

ODPs

ALAC hosted a community-wide discussion of the efficacy of ODPs, asking:

1. What criteria should determine when a policy discussion is to be sent to ICANN org vs the ICANN community?
2. Could changes to the policy development process decrease the burden on the org during an Operational Design Phase?
3. When should outside expertise be brought in (such as system scoping)?
4. What would have been improved through additional community input without adding to the overall timing?

DNS Abuse

• A team of Registrar and Registry representatives are negotiating changes to the RAA and Registry Agreement (RA) with ICANN Staff. The revised contractual language will be published for comment by June 2023 (ICANN 77)

SOIs

The SOI Task Force team within the GNSO agreed on proposed changes to enhance representative transparency. However, some members are concerned that they cannot disclose their clients’ identities.

AOB

The ICANN Board

• accepted the Second NomCom Organizational Review; and
• thanked Manal Ismail for her service to the ICANN Board and Jonathan Spring for his service to the SSAC.