The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Good morning, everyone. We will start in one minute. We're just waiting for a technical thing to be solved. Okay. Good morning, again. The technical glitch has been sorted out.
Welcome, everyone, to this new gTLD workshop. I'm Sharine Shalby (phonetic). I'm a member of the board, and over the last few years I was the chair of the gTLD program committee that had oversight responsibility on the last round of expansion of name spaces. So what I'd like to do is start with just restating the purpose of this session and then ask members of the panels representing various stake holders to introduce themselves and give a brief introduction to the agenda and get going.
We have an hour and a half. The first part of the discussion is just presentations to bring everybody up‑to‑date, and the second part of the discussion will be open to questions and answers. Anybody, please engage in a vigorous way in terms of debate and expressing your views.
What is the purpose of this session? Frankly, it's really to bring everybody up‑to‑date with what's happened since we launched that last round. As you know, there are various reviews taking place on the impact of the last round on things like consumer choice and consumer trust, and at the same time part of the ICANN stakeholder of gTLD and looking at the PDP and see if there's policy changes or implementation changes to the next round.
We want to bring you up‑to‑date on these two things and launch it into a vigorous discussion so you know what's going on prior to any launch of a new round of new gTLDs. With that in mind, I would like to ask members of the panel sitting around the table to introduce themselves.
Then I will give you a briefing on the agenda and we will kick off very quickly. I will start with on my left, so Akram.
>> AKRAM ATALLAH: I'm responsible for the new program within the global domains division. We implement basically all of the policies and the recommendations that the board asks us to implement from the community. Thank you.
>> JONATHAN ZUCK: Jonathan Zuck. I'm chair of the review of the new gTLD program that's focused in on consumer choice, competition, and consumer trust. So we'll be talking a little bit about our work there.
>> MEGAN RICHARDS: Good morning. I'm Megan Richards from the European Commission. I'm here, I think, because I'm a member of the competition consumer choice. Anyway, the same one as Jonathan is leading very capably. Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPID-LEBLOND: Good morning. I'm Olivier Crepin‑Leblond. I'm the chair of the European at large organization, and at large is part of ICANN. They bring the input of end users into the ICANN processes, and I track the health index, which we'll talk about in a moment.
>> MODERATOR: Who's next?
>> PATRICK BENNINGS: I'm Patrick Bennings. I'm the head of the information department of the counselor here. I brought with me on the study on the applications for ICANN for new domain names and opportunities and challenges from a human rights perspective, which I can share with you.
>> ANDREW MACK: My name is Andrew Mack. I'm from A.M. global based in Washington. We did a study of the new gTLD program, specifically why it did and didn't pick up in global places around the world. Happy to answer any questions about it.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I appreciate the introductions, but the panelists that are going to give presentations, I'd like them to introduce themselves at this stage. Renata.
>> SPEAKER: Thank you. I'm a member of the ICANN board and I'm a member of the board IDN working group and talking about IDNs.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Olga.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Good morning. I'm Olga Cavalli. I think I have value in this panel in my role as chair of Argentina and chair of the gTLD working group on protection of geographic names and new gTLDs.
>> AVRI DORIA: I'm Avri Doria, and I'm here as co‑chair of the policy development process working group on new gTLD subsequent procedures.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Nigel, do you want to introduce yourself?
>> NIGEL HICKSON: I'm Nigel Hickson, and I'm the coordinator. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. A small administrative matter to start with. Unfortunately, there's no translation for the session, so everything has to be in English, unfortunately. And for remote participants, they will submit their questions, I'm told, in writing and it will appear on the screen there on the left‑hand side. Nigel will read it so everybody can hear what the question is.
So let me just lay out the agenda for you.
We will start with Akram, sitting here on my left, who is going to give us an overview of all of the various reviews that are taking place on the last round of the new gTLD expansion as well as on the PDP process.
After Akram's brief overview, we hand over to Jonathan here who introduced himself earlier who gave a status and progress on the consumer trust and consumer choice review taking place.
Following that I hand over to Olivier Crepin‑Leblond who will talk about the marketplace health index. After that I hand over to Avri to talk about the PDP background and status. And then various panelists who represent stakeholders will give their views on those two things we were just talking about.
The various reviews as well as the PDP and Olivier to give a couple of minutes and Megan a couple of minutes and Olga a couple of minutes. Then we have some topics of interest we'll bring you up to date on. One is the IDNs and Renala will give that. Then the two letter CC which has been a lot of discussion about recently. Akram and Cyrus, if he's here, will give us a couple of minutes introduction.
And also, the last topic will be geographical imbalance. All of that should take roughly between around 40 minutes. That leaves another 15 minutes for questions and answers, which I will moderate.
At the end we will finish with a five‑minute summary of all the points or any conclusion or any decision or action we need to take, which Nigel will summarize to us the outcome of this discussion. Enough with the introduction.
Let's go immediately to Akram to give us an overview of the various reviews and the PDPs that are all taking place. Akram.
>> AKRAM ATALLAH: I will keep a tight watch on every presentation so that we move along. Go to the next one. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for attending the session. What I will do is give a quick overview of the current round and where we are with that so everybody understands why we're talking about the next one, which I think is important.
Then we talk a little bit about what's on the calendar and what's going on in prep for the next round and the details of some of the reviews that are going on and then I'll move it to ‑‑ on the CCT review to take from that.
Next slide. So if you look at ‑‑ if you look at the current round, you can see that basically we're at the tail end of the current round. We are left with ‑‑ we've had about 1249 total strings that can be delegated, and out of the 1249 we've contracted 1229, so there are only 20 remaining strings that can be contracted to deal with. Now, the numbers that you see on the right of these bars, sometimes that is bigger than others, but it's because they're in contention, for example, multiple applications for the same string, but only one can be delegated. This is how some of the numbers shake out.
So when you look at that, you'll see that we are left with only 20 to go. There are a few that need to be withdrawn that haven't withdrawn. There are a few that have applied for strings like mail that were found to be ‑‑ to have ‑‑ there is 20 of them, ink, that apply for home corporate mail that haven't withdrawn where the study we did on collisions found that these three strings ‑‑ they have a lot of collisions, and therefore, the board has issued a resolution not to delegate.
So we need to deal with those lagging applications that haven't withdrawn or haven't contracted to finish the round. Moving on to the next slide, the current program reviews and the policies that are going on, you can see that a lot of work has been done already between the last few years, and there is some work still going on in the competition trust and choice review.
The trademark clearinghouse is also work that is ongoing, and it's going to close shortly. The stability review, also we expect that to close next year, so a lot of these reviews will be hopefully done within the 2017 time frame, and then the orange bars that you see there are ongoing policy development that are either important for the new gTLD program or relevant to the new gTLD program.
So if you look at those, we don't have a clear time line on when they ‑‑ when the community processes will finish. These are estimations of where we think some of these will end up. And the most important one for the new gTLD program is the new gTLD subsequent procedures PDP that Avri will cover shortly.
Moving on to the next slide, on the trademark clearinghouse independent review, this was a GAC‑recommended review. We hired an analysis group to do the study, and they published their initial report and we took public comment, and in response to public comment, they are now collecting data on abandonment rates from registries and wholesale pricing from registries. I don't know how much they will get. They will finalize the report and post it hopefully in January for public comment.
So this is almost in the tail end of the review and we look forward to closing this one shortly. We are also ‑‑ we are also almost done with this. We expect to have a draft report open for public ‑‑ well, we have the report open for public comment until 22 December, and the public comments report will be published on 16 January, and if ‑‑ and the final revised report in April 2017. So also we're very close to finalizing this review. I think that, you know, the key finding is that the root is stable and the new gTLD in general did not create any issues for the root, which is very important for us. Hopefully we will close this very soon.
The next slide. This is a list of all of the published data that is under review or ongoing work that is going on. All of it is ‑‑ can be found on the ICANN website. It's also available to look into. A lot of materials, but if you're looking for specific issues, hopefully this will give you all the answers that you need if we don't cover it here today. The next slide is about the policy development activities, and as I mentioned, we ‑‑ the most important one for us is the new gTLD subsequent procedure.
I'm not going to talk about it too much because Avri is going to cover that. We have a lot of different things that they are reviewing that are very important for the ‑‑ for moving the program forward. So with that, I will just summarize that the way it looks like now is that the reviews and the PDPs are not going to be done before the 2017‑2018 time frame.
So we look forward for a lot of this work to be done. The board has already issued a resolution that they will look forward for the reviews before they will assess whether next ‑‑ the next round or the next subsequent procedure will open, and we look forward to all this work being done and then hopefully we'll get from the community some advice on the next round as well. We'll go from there.
So with that, I'll close my presentation, and I give it to Jonathan Zuck to talk about the CCT reviews. Thank you.
>> JONATHAN ZUCK: Thanks, Akram. I'd like to ask a quick question. How many people in the room do not follow ICANN regularly? Okay. That's ‑‑ the chairman of the board Steve Crocker who doesn't follow because he leads, I guess. Exactly. I'm also curious. How many of you knew that there were 1200 new top‑level domains added in the last year? How many of you in the last couple of days received a business card that had one of the new domains on it? One. Good. Two. All right. Excellent.
It seems appropriate while here in Mexico to talk about a fairly recent trade agreement between the United States and Mexico called NAFTA. Before it was enacted, there were a lot of people that thought it was going to be the most incredible trade agreement signed and a lot thought it was the end of the world. Now that it's in place for a number of years, some think it's the best trade agreement ever signed and a lot of people think it's the worst trade agreement ever put in place.
And like the new gTLD program, if you actually look at the data about NAFTA, the results are far less dramatic, right? Some good and some bad, et cetera, but it wasn't dramatically one way or the other. We face some of that same kind of discussion around this new gTLD program. There were those that believed it would be incredible and those that thought it was a disaster and pretty much those same people think it's I know credible or a disaster. What we tried to do in the review mandated as part of the affirmation of commitments, which is an agreement that ICANN signed with the United States government in 2009, we wanted to try and look at this from a real data‑based perspective, which is a relatively new way of looking at things inside of ICANN, right?
So in order to create a more realistic painting and less impressionistic painting of the new situation with the new gTLDs. So there are interesting findings for the group, but it's still relatively new. As Akram shared with you, they're not completely done delegating the new string. The year we focused on studying to look at whether there was an increase in competition, and whether there was enhanced consumer trust and whether there was enhanced consumer choice, that year has been a year of growth and just a launch of the program. So it's reasonable to assume that it will take longer to really see what the effects of the program are.
In fact, if you look at previous releases of new top‑level domains, you haven't really seen what they've contributed in, you know, until about three years. Right? So you have more of a sense with a little bit more time that's passed.
That said, there's some interesting things that I think are worth noting. So we look at competition. A number of things we look at, for example, is new sales, market share, concentration. These are some of the statistics that we're trying to compile about the new gTLDs. And if we look at the new sales, in other words, the sales of second‑level domains, the part to the left of the period that have been made in the past couple of years, it's about split evenly between the legacy gTLDs and the new gTLDs.
So that's a fairly significant proportion of new sales. If you include CCTLDs it splits pretty evenly a third, third, and third. These new TLDs have taken their place as the market has grown, but we're looking at 25 years of sales versus one year, and so you're not going to see a huge market share of change. We did see new gTLDs take about 9% of the market in this period of time. So that's a fairly significant, I think, dent, if you will, in the marketplace as well. Again, as we say, things are fairly new.
When we talk about choice, we're often talking about nonprice‑based competition, right? Have I got more choices? If the word wasn't available in a legacy TLD that are available in a new TLD. That answer in most instances is yes, but one of the most interesting statistics is a very large number, something like 70% of the new gTLDs that have been sold were available as con cat natured strings in dot com.
So my own personal example, I bought something called bigshots.photography. I bought it at a time when bigshotsphotography.com was available in com. So it's an interesting phenomena that folks are interested in this semantic web and see value in these new TLDs. In fact, we conducted a survey by Nielsen where we asked people what they liked and didn't like, what their awareness was of these new gTLDs.
There was a finding of a preference in in semantic web, and being able to tell from the suffix what kind of kind of service or product that they'd be getting to, what type of website they'd get to.
Now, the risk associated with that is they survey and also reveal people were interested in seeing some enforcement of those semantics. You have something new like .bank where there's a strict enforcement play, but doc doctor is not the same. It's interesting to see over time as we track consumer perception of the new gTLD program what it will look like into the future.
So a little bit of data and impressionistic data from consumers tells the story things are headed in the right direction in terms of competition. We also looked at trust and safeguards, and for the most part they revealed no degradation in trust, and for the most part the program seems to be doing things designed to enhance trust. They're things done to enhance trustworthy of the DNS. So that's a positive as well.
When you look at the safeguards, you look at the individual success of safeguards, and whether or not they were implemented and whether they're enforcement and both of those things seem to be the case as well. One of the downside consequences that has been predicted and concerns intellectual property holders. I'm a member of the intellectual property constituency inside of the ICANN.
There was a concern that a rapid expansion of gTLDs would lead to high costs for her trademark owners trying to essentially play a game of grabbing onto each of these new domains that came out so people wouldn't cyber squat on them, for example. There's some of that, but they're a lower level of defensive registration than there has been historically in the legacy domains.
Now, there's also a new way to protect yourself called blocking, and there's some procedures for getting the domain back or suspended that rather create kind of a basket of protections. Even those have not been used in greater degrees than they have been in the legacy TLD. So, again, the issues there is there's issues to be addressed, but on the whole the program needs to be headed in the right direction. There's the issue by the downside consequences, but there's more work to do.
In addition ‑‑ how am I doing on time? I'm done? Okay. So if I've sparked your curiosity, we will be releasing an interim report. It's not complete because there's data outstanding, but releasing an interim report on the 23rd of December for public comment. Read through it and gain an understanding of the questions we're asking and add questions we should ask or interpretations you think we're handling incorrectly. We'd love to hear about the impressions of the report and of the new gTLD program. Thank you for your time.
>> MODERATOR: Jonathan, just one question. Your review is one of the most highly visible and there's quite a bit of expectation. I think it's important to manage the expectation. What you're not going to come up with, I suspect, are concludes. You come up with strengths and direction but no firm conclusion or are you coming up with conclusions and recommendations?
>> JONATHAN ZUCK: Good question. There are some conclusions and recommendations. The larger topics won't be substantive. That said one of the findings of the group that is not new is it's difficult to get the data necessary to really do competitive analysis. If you look at any of the studies that have happened in the last ten years, they conclude more data is better. We are reaching a similar conclusion.
A large part is about ICANN taking the notion of data collection and provision more seriously so that as reviewing move forward, some calculations we're performing around market calculation can be done on a regular basis to be tracked in a comprehensive way. So that will be a very large and, I think, complex recommendation, but not specific to this little recommendation that will improve competition, for example.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Akram gave us an overview of the various review and what's happening on the PDP. Jonathan gave us a flavor of a review. I will move very shortly to Avri to talk about the PDP.
Before that, sandwiched in between the two, I'll give Olivier to talk about the marketplace health index and why it's important to listen and understand what's going on there. Thank you.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much. I'm just going to ask if Nigel can go over to the quick document, which was up for public comment a few months ago, I believe. The gTLD marketplace health index is another project of ICANN that will continue with tracking the gTLDs as they evolve in time to find out if they've actually fulfilled the original scenarios that we were wishes for them.
There's no use to have new gTLDs not to be used for competition, to not thrive for all of the original ideas of the program, to not be fulfilled. Unfortunately, want screen is behind me. It's hard to look at both things at the same time. Okay. I can't see that. Nigel is having a bit of a problem.
Effectively, there was a first document up for public comment a couple of months ago. It's a document that's sort of an example of what kind of metrics are going to be implemented to ensure ongoing tracking of the program. Metrics that might be used also for the next round, if there is one, and metrics that are looking at robust competition, marketplace, stability and trust.
We might add more things to that. Do we have the document or not?
>> MODERATOR: Your time is running out.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: I'm going to blame the Brits for that. Darn, I live in London. Looking at robust competition, diverse across the choice of service provider geography. It's over there. Okay. Scroll down to robust competition, one of the metrics for example is geographic diversity to find out the ICANN registrars by ICANN region. Are we on that page? Yeah.
So we have nice account graphics that are there. They will be displayed in simple graphics so you see the diversity across the world. In Africa there's very few. Other regions are well served, and these are metrics that enable us to do where we have to do work and what improved there.
You have TDL registry operators by region, and the page is competition. Geographic diversity is one thing and competition between different domain names is another thing. Looking at the district identities. Looking at the number of registrar accreditations and for those not aware, I think three people are not aware of the registry, and the registrars and the people that sell the domain names over to the public.
So more registrar accreditations means that you will have more choice for the consumer. Going down to the next page, you can look at the total number of gTLDs and see a steady rise in these. Total second level domain name registrations and gTLDs year on year growth rates. It was going down and going back up.
The next page, gTLD additions and deletions, of course, we're now rolling out a lot of new gTLDs, but some might be rolled back. We don't know. It depends really on how the market will work, and really what we're doing here is to track the market and see if things are progressing in one way or another. At this part this is the first report and these are examples and it's difficult to spot any trend. I see I'm about to get my microphone shut off. If we go to marketplace stability,
Using at the registrars is important. Trust in the DNS is really important and trust is really important in top‑level domains. There's metrics on this including the accuracy of who has records. I'm not going through the whole document. It's online and we can have it linked to the agenda, but this is ongoing work and we have a working group working on this. We will add more metrics, and if you do have some feedback to provide to us, there's an e‑mail address you can contact and we're welcome to receive feedback. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Olivier.
>> AVRI DORIA: I took a picture of the walls here and I like the succession of things going by as we sort of toot on our horns. The starting point for ‑‑ next slide, please. We have policies and they will show up sooner or later. We have a policy from 2007 and an application guidebook from 2012. You know this already, and I wrote thinking I was talking to a room of people that didn't know this already. We're undergoing multiple reviews on both policy and the process. We can change anything that needs to be changed and that we have consensus on changing. If we don't change anything, then we stick with the same policy and perhaps the application process will change. That would be in GDD's hands, although there would be an implementation review team, so things would change but wouldn't change all that much.
Next slide, please, and then the next again. So the current status is we already did one community, and that was the time before. We already did a community comment on some overarching issues. One of them was we asked if we need gTLDs at all? Is the new thousand enough and we can stop there? Do we need to categorize and differentiate types? Last time we had two plus one times.
We had the standard. We had the community. Then we eventually ended up having what are the geographical, though that wasn't the intention at the time of the policy. We're asking ourselves should this be done in rounds or do we want to go for some others? A lot of people that don't want to end up with a hiatus again and want something continuous.
Can we do a first come first serve process as a question is asked? How do we balance predictability and flexibility? The first principle of the last round was it shall be predictable and no surprises. Now we found out that flexibility requires surprises. So ‑‑ or at least caused surprises when there were issues to be dealt with that hadn't been thought of before. How do we balance those?
How do we improve community engagement during the process? Should we limit the number of applications?
So that went out in community comment. We got back commends and we're now processing our recommendations on that. Some of the trends look like, yeah, we want more gTLDs, and yeah, we want to do son differentiation in types. We don't know what. I'll talk battle bit more about the rounds.
Now we're basically working on four tracts going forward, so next one. That's okay. There's a quick time line that shows what was spoken of before where we're going to send out a community comment too based on the tracks we're talking about now, and our preliminary completion. We're still aiming for a final report by July 18th, when it goes into the next steps of board approval, implementation process, et cetera. That I'm not predicting, because that's beyond the PDP. The PDP is currently scheduled for July 18.
Next. And then next after that. So we have four work tracts. It's amazing how it always wants to go back first. It's kind of like the new gTLD process. Every time you think you take a step forward, you find out you take one back. Yes. We have one track which is the overall process, application, support and outreach. Looking at things like the community support program we had that, you know, did it work and did it not for developing economies? Looking at all the legal and regulatory issues, and I will give examples of these in each. String contention.
We had a lot of discussion. Obviously, if we're first come first serve we won't have much string contention, but we probably won't be first come and first serve. Objections and dispute resolution and one tract that's looking at international domain names and technical issues and operations. So some of as Akram mentioned we have 30 questions plus we're going through.
I'm not covering them. Here we're looking at was the process fear? Were the fears appropriate? Should it be the same fee for every kind of application? What went wrong with the applicant support program? Why did it go wrong? What do we do? How do we support developing economies? Did comment periods work properly? Those are the questions we deal with.
Next one. That's looking at reserve names. What sorts? How many? In the first round we sort of said, we're keeping the set minimal, and if people don't like it, they can file an objection. Then the board sort of decided no, no, no, we need lists of names so they created names. So now we're looking at their lists and your lists and other lists, and you know how big a list can we have of names that are reserved? Do we need extra registrant protections? Are second level rights efficient? Do we need more than we did in the past? Is it sufficient or do we different ones for different kinds?
Do we need to consider allowing for different ‑‑ if you're a different type or category or brand versus a community, you have a different contract. So those are the issues there. Some of the W3 issues. Rounds.
If we do do rounds, is it like the 2012 round where we get 1,000? There are people that are predicting there's another 10,000 potential applicants waiting in the wings especially if brands opens up and if we talk about 10,000 rounds ‑‑ I mean 10,000 in the next round, do we want to deal with that? Do you want to deal with that, Akram?
Do we use a first come first serve process? A lot of interest in doing that, especially because it's ongoing, but if there's 10,000 and many, how do you do that? You lose name contention there.
We're in the mode of now discussing various hybrid procedures. Things like you have an open for three months and then you do the initial processing for three months and then you open for three months, and you have set it up in a predictable way. We're not saying ‑‑ one of the things I don't expect we will find is we don't continue a next round until the reviews. This time we knew it was a learning round when we did the policy, and the notion was, we got to learn, so we have to review.
Now we're taking a notion that sure there will be things to fix, but we'll be able to do ongoing policy changes as opposed to stopping. So this time it really is the intention to have ongoing.
We had an independent objector that was supposed to look at things that were perhaps objectionable for people that couldn't afford to pay and do the process? Did that work well or badly? Do we need one? Were the objection procedures working properly? Do they need to? I'm almost done. Next one.
The work for questions, how to handle questions of technical competence and capability. That comes into if you're one applicant applying for 20, do you have to be checked for competence all the time? Also, if there are different types, does every type of registry need the same kind of competence? Does every type need the same financial capabilities? I DNs and questions like single‑character IDNs where it's a whole word in another script and another language. They're prohibited and should they be? Should we prioritize IDN string applications either by giving them a separate round or doing something else?
How do we treat IDN variance? That topic is still ongoing. As I said, these are really just example questions. One of the questions that I didn't bring up here and I think it's in NWC3 but you reminded me of it is communities. Some think we need to do more to support communities. Some think communities are rubbish and a way to get around the system. I'm being neutral now and gave the extremes of both views. That's the kind of discussion we're having there. Next one, please.
So getting involved. You can join the working group. You could join one of the specific subteams. Anyone can sign up as an observer where you get all the mail, and there's a lot of it. But you can't answer it. You just get to read it, but you can always say, oh, that was important. I want to argue.
Please make me a participant instead of an observer, and you change. All the e‑mail lists are open archive and all calls are recorded. You can check out what's done at your own leisure. You can't get to sleep at night or wake up at 3:00 in the morning. My word, what is happening with new gTLDs? Then also we do put out formal comment solicitations, so if minimally you want to just make sure that wrong thing didn't happen, one, there are ways to participate to make something happen.
There are ways to monitor to make sure that you know when something bad is happening. There are ways to check it. Nothing bad happened and nothing to comment on. So you know that. The last one.
That was ‑‑ those are the resources. Those will be there. There's the project page and Wikipage and chatter.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Avri. We heard from the reviews and PDP. We now have a series of comments that take eight to ten minutes and then I will it open up for questions and answers. The first set of comments, and speakers, please don't spend more than two minutes. Some of the stakeholders to give us their view from their stakeholder point about these reviews, about the PDP. So can I start with Olivier and then Megan and then Olga. Olivier, two minutes please. State which stakeholder you're with.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: I took more time before, so I'll take less time this time hopefully. I'm with the at‑large community. I'm the Europe at‑large organization. We bring the input from end users to the ICANN processes and the at large advisory committee is a committee that can comment on everything and anything that take place with ICANN including the new process. We have a very varied community of people from all around the world with very various views and some people are really happy about the new gTLD program and some are not happy about the new gTLD program.
On the negative side, there's a potential, of course, for end user confusion, malicious use of domain names, Spam, Phishing, et cetera. These are concerning that many people in our community have. On the positives there's more choice for registering a domain name. There was a time to look for dot com and find out nine times out of the ten it was used and somebody would try to resell it at an extortionist price.
There are concerns about the lack of geographic diversity when it comes to registrars. As you have seen from the metrics I showed earlier, there's an imbalance on that. Well, maybe we need another round to be able to address this, and as Avri actually said also, concern about the poor number of community applications. That's another one of those things.
We're very eager to learn the results of the review team. We're very active in that. We have people that are on the review team itself, and we have people actively involved in the policy development process for the subsequent procedures and we invite more end users involved in that. It's really important. At the end of the day, the Internet is for you guys, and this whole program is for the end users. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Olivier. Megan.
>> MEGAN RICAHRDS: Thanks. I'm Megan Richards from the government advisory committee. That's what I'm here to talk to you about today. I'm also a member of the CCT review team.
I think there are a couple of things I'd like to see. The affirmations of commitments which was the basis for the review has been integrated into the new bylaws of ICANN.
This shows it's not something that has worn off. It will continue in the future and it's integrated into the structure and functioning of ICANN, which is important. I'm not going to repeat, of course, what Jonathan said, which was very clear. One aspect that's important in particular for GAC was the effectiveness of the application and evaluation procedure, which is one of the things we were supposed to look at. As Jonathan said, the information is not sufficiently robust. It's very limited.
However, there are still data and there's still information that gives us some ideas of what's going on. First of all, with respect to GAC early warning advice, it's clear it was very useful in my cases to make sure that public policy issues were addressed before it was delegated. It allowed two applicants to have 80% of the fee returned for public policy reasons, and so this was one thing that we have seen has been very useful.
The issue of how accessibility and use was available for the whole world is clearly problematic and we have Andy Mack's report that Jonathan and Olivier mentioned. This is something that really has to be addressed in the future. If there's interest and if these are areas where we think and new gTLDs are demanded that's another issue. Do we increase supply or demand? The other thing I want to mention briefly here is someone mentioned the number of community applications. I think the issue that we were particularly concerned about was the success rate of community applications. You've seen of the 1900 applications, 1229 are already contracted.
That's a very good success rate. There were a lot of contentions and complications: Of the 51 community applications, 75% were rejected. Something is a bit unusual there. We had a report of the ombudsman, and this need 'more looking at.
In order to limit the time, as I said, more information is needed and we need to do more in respect for future reviews, and the whole system and the whole delegation process is still new. We still have new gTLDs being delegated, so we're looking at a moving target which makes it really complex.
So we're contradicted in what we have done so far because more needs to be done to have a fully robust and complete review.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Megan. Olga, another stakeholder view.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: So my view as a chair of the GAC working group on protection of geographic names, an internal GAC group was established in 2012 after the ICANN meeting. What's the purpose of our work? It's lower uncertainty for applicants. Prevent and avoid the use of names relevant for communities, regions and countries and lower conflicts once the new gTLD next round is ongoing. So we produce some documents that were open for public comments. They were not GAC con sensed documents. They were just background documents we wanted together.
Feedback from the community. It was the first time that GAC did that, and it was very successful. We represented the outcomes in the Singapore meeting, and after doing work with these comments and this draft document we are now focused on developing a set of best practices for new gTLD round. For ICANN for the applicants and governments. So the aim of this best practice is to help reconcile interests for applicants and have a legal certainty and clear environment versus the interests of governments and public authorities and communities.
Now we're facing this challenge of how to inject and bring this idea that is important for at least some governments into this new gTLD/PDP process. So we're challenging our time with that. We appreciate very much the openness of the GNSO and this process, but it's challenging because we have also many other working groups and lists and places that we have to also pay attention to. So I know some colleagues from GAC are participating.
I am trying to get involved personally more. There are important efforts to work together to avoid then once the process is finished. Then we have the conflicts. We're trying to work together. It's not easy to work by consensus, so it takes time. We're 170‑plus countries working together with different interests and different views of the same thing. So that's my view. Perhaps other colleagues from the GAC can add other comments once we have the time. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Now the last three topics, they are topics of interest. We're going to talk about IDNs. Renali will give us the views and the two‑letter codes and Akram will talk to about and the imbalance I go back to Avri on this issue.
>> AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Let's look at how it served a multi-community that is multilingual. IDNs are essentially domain names represented by letters and characters from different scripts and writing systems. IDNs serve the online needs of a world diverse in language and script. It received 116IDN generic top‑level domain applications, that only 6% of total applications. These applications were for IDN's in nine languages and scripts.
Against that, consider the global context with 7,000 languages spoken in the world. In terms of the population in 7.4 billion, only 90% communicate in a language not English. 46% of the people in the world connected to the Internet today and the famous 3.4 billion that everyone refers to at the IGF surprise most of the English‑speaking population.
The bulk of the unconnected or yet to be connected is 54% of the world population. They're those that need support for languages and scripts, and they require IDNs to access the Internet. The demand should be higher if they really serve a global community diverse in languages and script. In terms of adoption, IDNs only comprise 2% of the domains.
The world report in 2015 highlight two primary challenges of adoption. The nonuniversal acceptance of IDNs in Internet enabled applications, devices and systems and the lack of user awareness.
In moving forward with the new program, I believe that IDNs should be a priority. So that's an answer to the question that Avri posed in her PDP work trial. Concurrently the problem of nonuniversal awareness and lack of user awareness need to be addressed and the challenge is figuring out whose problem it is?
Like this adoption around the world, it's a shared responsibility. Otherwise, it's not going to happen. To give a rounded view in terms of status of IDNs in the route zone right now, the total is 139 delegated, 82 of these are IDN generic top level domains and 57 are IDN coded domains. That covering 21 scripts and 35 languages. More needs to be done.
>> MODERATOR: The message is clear, IDNs is a priority for the next round.
>> SPEAKER: I'll pass that on, you know.
>> MODERATOR: Akram, two minutes on the two‑letter CCs and the geographic imbalance after that and open it for questions.
>> AKRAM ATALLAH: The two‑letter CC is a hot topic. There are some GAC members that have provided their faction with the release of their country code names in the second level in the program. Although there's no GAC advised on this issue, we've worked with this two‑character release for a long time. It's important to note in 2007 the GNS or reserved names working group did the policy on the two-character release. That policy was integrated in the agreement. There are two paths for them to release the two connector codes. One path is by discussing it with the government and getting approval from the government and the CCTL registry.
The other one is that the registry will put measures to avoid conclusion and then I can approve the release. So the board has asked the staff to put a framework together to do that, and the two connectors where that would not letters and letters were released a while back. The letter and letter codes were released in three phases.
The first phase was we asked the registries to request the release, and then we looked at comments from the governments about confusability to see what we can do to ‑‑ what the registry needs to do to avoid the confusability and put the measures in place to avoid the confusability.
So for the codes that did not receive any comments, we released those. Then the second phase was to actually make sure that the comments are only about confusability, because that's what the policy says. And we move forward with everything that ‑‑ we released everything that did not receive comments on confusability. We worked with the community to come up with a framework to put measures to mitigate the confusability, and now we're about ready to release the rest of the codes based on the registry implementing these measures to avoid confusability.
It's important to also note that all the legacy TLDs do have the two collective codes released. So it's not something new that we're doing in the new gTLD program. It is consistent with the legacy TLDs as well. It's important to note that a lot of the CCLDs themselves actually allow the two connector codes to be released as well.
So this is not new in the domain name system that we release the two connective codes, and we're doing it in a step‑by‑step with consultation with the GAC and with the countries that are having concerns about that and we're hoping that actually the mitigation will meet the requirements of the governments as we move forward. So I think that the process has been very ‑‑ followed all the policies that are available, followed all the advice available and we are actually moving it in an orderly fashion and I think that it's been about time to move forward with this issue. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. So we reached the end of the various presentations and a lot of food for thought. Avri has generously given her slot away to put it to questions. If a question comes on geographical, I'll point to you. I open the floor now to questions. Please state your name and affiliation and question then. Thank you. As I said, there's no translation, so the questions, unfortunately, have to be in English. A remote participant will submit their questions in writing and it will appear on the screen above.
Who would like to ask the first question?
>> AUDIENCE: My name is (indiscernible), the chair for the finance and business and also the chair for Africa's alliance. So let me first talk with respect to the DC. Actually, it's the generally believe in BC that before we proceed to the new ETL round, it's very important it should be exhaustive review of all the studying ongoing, and that's what we're doing. And then because they also can sign up for compliance and abuse and we get to the sustained delegated new TLDs.
That is about on my region, based on the studies that has come out done by LT and Andrew Mack is that the maturity level in the domain industry in Africa is quite low. That is clear with the number of delegations or applications we received.
So going forward, I think we need to do a lot of consigning of help to view the maturity of the industry in Africa in particular. We may need to look at the market. It's important to look at the big markets. For example, Niger has a big market. It could be necessary to organize ICANN meetings in Nigeria, because the resources are there but the awareness is very low.
So the question is, what other things can we do for developing countries generally to encourage them to participate in the next round when it comes up? Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Who would like to respond to this question? What can we do for developing countries to help them participate more in the next round? Is this something the GNSO is looking at in terms of PDP policies. Jonathan. Do Jonathan and Olga want to respond? Jonathan.
>> JONATHAN ZUCK: Yes. Thanks for your question, and it's a widely expressed and discussed question inside of the ICANN community, which is how to better serve the Global South and in general in Africa, in particular. I think one of the interesting aspects of the study conducted by AM Global was that people that might otherwise have thought of participating in the previous round were unclear as to what the real business model might be to succeed with a new string.
I think that that's telling, and what we need to do is really explore as you say working on the maturity of the industry generally in Africa. I'm not sure that the next step is to try and get, you know, registries or new strings there because the strings that exist, the registries that exist have low subscription rates, participation rates by registrants.
So I feel like the ‑‑ it would almost be doing a disservice to someone to convince them they ought to go into business with a new string unless there was a viable business model waiting for them. We need to look more carefully at how to encourage better participation among registrants first. People creating their own websites and making use of IDNs where appropriate, building local content, for example, like we heard yesterday about the web series from Ghana that's gone viral around the world.
So I think that there's opportunities there, but I think that that demand has to be driven by the second‑level domains more so than finding the poor person we convinced to go after a top‑level domain only to find the market isn't ready to purchase it.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. I have three members of the panel that also want to respond. We want to allow more time for questions. I'll give you a minute each. Olga, Avri, and Olivier. I have two more questions.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you. Having to try to explain the ‑‑ having tried to explain the concept in Latin America for kind of two or three years, I can tell you that it's ‑‑ the purpose of it, one of the biggest barriers, why should I? What is the purpose? Which is the business model? Where is my interest? Now we have good stories to tell or some examples to show.
Then it's the complexity, but first is what is it for? That's what it is.
>> AVRI DORIA: Avri speaking. A part of what we're looking at is indeed why did we fail in that in terms of having that wider distribution. A lot of it also comes down to yes, are they prepared for it in terms of registry service providers and the expense. That's one of the reasons for the financial issue. When an expense is listed in U.S. kind of economy where, yes, 186,000 may not seem a lot to a corporation in that, but in Africa, et cetera, that becomes an exorbitant sum.
That whole notion, that's why the GAC recommended last time that for developing economies there be a free application, which never came about. So we are looking at those things, and it is complex. I think there's also a certain chicken and egg of if we don't have a local registry selling to us, why send money for registries in colonial power place? People do say things like that.
So, you know, the really is a chicken and egg problem on why to register and give you money if I can't register locally and give us money.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Avri. Olivier, one minute, please.
>> OLIVIER CREPID-LEBLOND: Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Now he's gone and they -- excuse me from Akram. Thank you.
>> AKRAM ATALLAH: That was a joke by the way. They never confuse me. That's for sure. I'm not going to ‑‑ I'm going to add to what Jonathan and Avri have said, exactly. In the at‑large community there's a lot of discussion on this, of course. One of the things is do we need a local registrar to sell domain names locally. You talk about the Internet, so why not buy domain names from the U.S. directedly with your credit card.
In the Global South there are less credit cards than in other parts of the world. You need perhaps a local payment method or other ways to reach the consumer and I'm using that word because the consumer will buy a domain name.
>> MODERATOR: The next question is down to this end and then this gentleman. Please state your name.
>> PATRICK BENNINGS: Patrick Bennings from the European society department. I already spoke briefly about the applicants' community‑based application. We did this because there was a low positive reply rate or acceptance rate, and that puzzled us from a human rights perspective. That's why we wanted to share this with the communities and ensure that there is a proper reflection on the community‑based applications.
Second, I have actually three points. One is the reflection, and the second is the question of the semantic domain names. I think there is an increasing link there with content, and I wonder to which extent there is a ‑‑ for us, there may be a human rights angle to that. So I don't know if that has been considered whether we're speaking about semantic domain names basically.
The third ‑‑ but that's maybe not directly for here, and this is a whole question of reserve domain names with regards to international organizations. That is a concern for quite a number of international organizations not to be confused with other existing domain names. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Who would like to comment on the content and the semantics and the human rights issue? Is anyone working on WS2 on the issue of human rights around that would like to? No one? Okay.
>> ANDREW MACK: My name is Andrew Mack from AM Global. I'm working on the human rights subgroup, and I can tell you a tiny bit where we are right now. We're trying to understand what norms are out there already. How they might be applicable in an ICANN context and how this informs the ICANN community and what is the best way to use them that doesn't ‑‑ that doesn't take us outside of mission and also doesn't constrain us among applicable law. With he came to a good point where there are some findings coming forward, and those should be, I think, pushed forward fairly soon.
You're a participant? No. Avri is as well. Those are just now being shares with the community for comment. We've had a group that's a pretty active group regularly 15 or 20 people on the calls and some very good dialogue around that with the desire to make sure the human rights are taken into account. I want to add one thing to the other conversation really quickly since we did the research Jonathan mentioned. That is the other point, which is amongst the people considering applying in the Global South, there was a strong teaming that there still wasn't enough known just generally there was the possibility of getting it for something new.
One of the questions we may have as a community is how to get the world out there if this is in fact something to continue with. How do we get the word out there and whose responsibility is it when we talk with different interviewees from the Global South.
Many of them said, I get the idea. It's not necessarily the idea of cost, but the cost of not getting the string but also explaining to the market that that's a possibility. That was perceived as very substantial.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. The second question was about reserve name and international organization. I suppose you refer to IGOs. Chris, I wonder, you've been shepherding and leading the discussion. Can you give an update on the IGOs and NGOs and where we are? Thank you.
>> CHRIS DESPAIN: Certainly. Thanks very much. Chris DeSpain, ICANN board member. Following the discussions in Hydrabad, we have now started a process of having the parties, the relevant parties being brought together effectively with an independent facilitator and try and bring everybody to the table and see if we can find a way through the ‑‑ with the IGO acronyms. It's really only the IGO acronyms plus some Red Cross acronyms that are problematic I think a meeting is arranged very soon. Is he still here? There's an meeting arrived soon. Bruce Tomkin will be a facilitator and bring everybody together as soon as possibly to see if we can find a way through. Thanks.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. The next question is from ‑‑ I'm sorry. Akram, one more thing?
>> AKRAM ATALLAH: Yeah, it's important to note that all the IGO acronyms are currently reserved until there's a policy or an agreement on how to move forward. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: I have three questions from the floor. Did you want to comment on the IGOs, or do you have questions? Okay. A comment?
(Volume too low)
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, Jonathan. I'm hour Jorge with the Swiss government and I'm the representative from Switzerland coming to you at ICANN. Just now I was having this deja vu feeling and wonders if we were in Hydrabad from one month ago or really in Guadalajara because the level of discussion to a certain extent, I don't know how the other people in the room feel, was very, very ICANNesque.
We were very much into the details of our acronyms and procedures, and I wonder whether this is really something that is easy to follow for people who are not into that, into you're meetings and work streams because it's such a challenge to be there. That's only to find out that we always ‑‑ we and I mean the people who are participating in ICANN and we should be aware of this informational gap with the people outside. We shouldn't underestimate it, and we should take it into account. If we really want to be inclusive of the wider community, the global community, if we really take in seriously the intention of involving everybody out there to serve the global public interests.
And this is a general comment, and now would come the commercial. And the comment is that we're trying from the Geneva Internet platform, which is an initiative sponsored by my government to give some information, a one‑stop‑shop point to know about the different work streams and also about the new gTLD process.
We have one website in the digital watch of the Geneva Internet platform where we try to put all the relevant information in an updated fashion so that people are really able to follow this without losing themselves amongst the many thousands of trees in this very large forest of the gTLD expansion. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: What do you mean by gTLD? You just used your own shorthand. Thank you. You made a very good point.
>> AUDIENCE: Akram made a joke.
>> MODERATOR: I thought there was a question at the end of this, but there wasn't. Okay. Go ahead. There wasn't a question but an observation.
>> OLIVIER CREPID-LEBLOND: It's Olivier speaking. It's an observation with regard to the gTLD and acronym soup at ICANN. Go to the ICANN glossary or gTLD marketplace health index, and there's a glossary there as well. I know it's terrible to find the acronyms.
>> MODERATOR: So we'll take the question from the remote participant, and then we'll come back to you. We have 12 minutes to go, so we will really need to plow through quickly the questions and give answers to them. Remote participant, please.
>> AUDIENCE: In question is regarding gTLD. He says that he wants to recall the frame of the situations regarding gTLDs. He asked what the generated turnover you new gTLD activity and in comparison with the overall turnover of ICANN?
>> MODERATOR: Akram.
>> AKRAM ATALLAH: This is Akram. I would not actually try to provide a number on this, but our finances are on our website, and we actually report on all of these things and you can find it in the presentations that are there. We do a quarterly update every quarter as well on the financials so you get the most recent numbers from there. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Please state your name and affiliation. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: (Indiscernible). I'm very happy to see the effort from the community from the ICANN staff. I have two issues to mention. The first issue is in the first round for the application, not too many applications from the developing countries, I can give you an example. For example, for China.
They sell ‑‑ less than 5% of the application is from China compared to the 20% population and the part of the market. Is there some kind of thing from the local community? Also I think I need more outreach for that if I can open a second round. I think we need to try to avoid them, the effect in the future. In the first round there's so many very good streams that were applied by some people of our organization from the developing countries.
The second that I'm very happy that I can in the IDN a lot, even though it's research and development for the past 17 years. But it's not very popular now. You also have a lot of challenges for the IDN application because there's a lot of issues that have not been solved yet. There are varies issues and also it will increase the efficiency in the future and how to protect the users. So I know I have some plans for USG, but now a days a lot of issues. There's a workshop for the future and that's based on the e‑mail address. You need to work together to see what will happen if we work together to solve the problem and to see what problem they face in the current stage. I'll finish up.
>> Okay.
>> SPEAKER: To decrypt the message, the universal acceptance steering group that ICANN is also supporting. It's trying to address the problem of this nonuniversal acceptance of IDNs and gTLDs that are longer than three letter characters, letters.
>> MODERATOR: I think on the first issue of only 5% of application came from China and, you know, that applies also to the first question that talked about Africa. We need better outreach in the next subsequent round. I think Avri has commented on that. Do you want to say something else? Go ahead.
>> AVRI DORIA: Briefly. Last time there was developed a very fine outreach program, but it never got agreed to. And time went by and time went by, and all of a sudden it was too late for an outreach program. So I think one of the important signals to this time is that we start one early. We actually agree to do one and put the finances behind it. That was one of the issues last time, was getting one agreed to and then the one that was agreed to was considered to be too big by people and it wasn't done. I had read that outreach plan. That would have been great if it happened a year before we actually opened up applications.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. I'm going to move to the next question from Benedicto, and then one more question and we will close the session after that. Okay.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I think I can, yeah. I want to touch on a point raised by Mr. Akram that refers to the second‑level domain. I want to be very careful in my comments because I did not benefit from being there and having first‑hand connect by the decision made by the board. My understanding and also in consultation with colleagues that were there is the decision was taken at a very late hour. In the meeting I think the board decision was announced on November 8, one day before the end of the meeting. There was not enough time for the GAC to divest and to elaborate on this. What is in the GAC communique's request for clarification in the decision? I think maybe that was the possible outcome for the meeting, but I do not have a temperature of how much GAC members were dissatisfied with the decision. My council is certainly one of them that is not satisfied. I don't know if it was some or many or most members.
Certainly we'd like to have some more clarity, and I thank you for explaining the history behind it. I think it's important for us, but in principle we think the decision is in very flagrant contradiction with the approach that has been followed so far in regard to counterlevel codes. I think the general approach is that they should be protected in some way. I think the decision deviates from this. We have a very market‑oriented approach. We don't see clearly how the public interest was addressed by doing this. So we'd like to have some more information.
We also think it is in contradiction with the responses given by many governments including my own in that regard. So we think is a principle, again, and I want to be very careful but we think it is a misguided decision made, and we are looking for ways in which we can address this and make sure that we have a common understanding. We think this was, again, something that was done in the very last hour, as you have said, and may be based on a very broad understanding and we'd like to have more clarity on this.
But in principle we are dissatisfied and we look to forward to challenge the decision. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Akram, do you want to respond, or do you just leave the comment sitting?
>> AKRAM ATALLAH: Thank you, your comments. We appreciate your concerns. I would be more than happy to go over and explain the steps taken separately so that you have a better understanding of what we're doing, but I think as I mentioned, the contractual obligations that are in the contract, we have to abide by them and we're following the step‑by‑step process we did together. I'll spend time with you after this to go over this.
>> AUDIENCE: I think sometimes we are concerned about taking into the context of some things that may be seen as natural consequences of some bureaucratic way of dealing with things, and because we have the bylaws that say we have to do that. Sometimes we have to take a political approach, and I think here is clearly an issue that can lead to confrontations with regard to different governments and interests. I would call for the conversation on this issue to be taken very carefully. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. For the last question, yes. The lady ‑‑ yeah. The last question. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm new here, so my question I'm not sure if it's going to be the place to ask it. I work in an association where we're an NGO, and we represent an international association of Internet hot lines where the public can report child sexual abuse material found on the Internet. I was wondering like many of the places on the Internet when people actually upload and provide and have this type of material which is illegal and made available, these are registers ISUs in many cases.
So I was wondering, what are the registers doing actually to ensure that these domain names are not abused? What are the policies in place? If you move on and you have more registers and in more places around the world, I assume that's going to be difficult maybe to keep a level of accreditation so that actually the new registers can actually follow a poll. So I'm sorry if it's not the place or the moment to ask the question, but I would appreciate if maybe you could point me towards someone with who I could get more information about it. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Good question. Akram, quick comment.
>> AKRAM ATALLAH: Quickly, I think what you're talking about and I can speak would be the restaurant that ‑‑ registrant with the domain, and they have a contract with the registry and the registrar. The registrant has a contract with the registrar where the registrar can make decisions on how they want to deal with content and if they deal with it. That's not an ICANN issue and not something we have in our contract. I hope that explains it.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. It is not very much, I agree. Olivier want to say something?
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: The contract that ICANN has, there is a section on public interest commitments. So this is interpreted in different ways can and it more or less depending on what the contract is. Some registrars and registrees take a strong stance and some a softer stance. There are several processes regarding abuse of domain names. Of course, the other parallel tract of law enforcement that works directly with the industry. There is work going on in that and the view of people in our community is there should be improvements to this as well. Hopefully by the next round this should be easier to deal with.
>> MODERATOR: We have reached the end of the session and Nigel will talk about the key points and we'll close it.
>> NIGEL HICKSON: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I don't think we need a long summary. We'll publish something on the IGF site. All workshops have summaries published, and we'll also publish some links on there, because I think this is a very comprehensive examination. We talked about the reviews that took place and consumer truth review that Jonathan spoke and we heard from Avri on the development process. That's important for the room.
These processes are open and they're not just for registrants or registrar but for Civil Society and users and governments. So please get involved in processes and give your views so if there's a subsequent round your views are taken into account. We have good discussions on geographic representation and cost and community names were raised, and these are all issues being looked at in this very comprehensive process that ICANN is undertaking. Please get involved. It doesn't cost anything. It only costs your time. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. We've had discussion on the two‑letter country code and the last discussion on registrants as well. Thank you everyone, and I'll draw the meeting to a close. Many thanks. Thank you.
(Session ended at 11:49 a.m. CT)