[ALAC-Announce] FOR COMMENT: ALAC Statement on the Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Recommendations for ICANN Board Consideration

[ICANN At-Large Staff]

Dear All, 

 

Please see below a note from Alan Greenberg, ALAC liaison to the GNSO, on
the draft ALAC Statement on the Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery
Recommendations for ICANN Board Consideration, that is now open for comments
from the At-Large community through 9 September. 

 

**

 

At its meeting of 23 August 2011, the ALAC requested that I draft a
statement on the PEDNR Final Report for discussion and ultimate approval by
the ALAC. The initial draft was reviewed by the regional representatives on
the ALAC ExCom and the revised draft below is now available for comment at
https://community.icann.org/display/atlarge/At-Large+PEDNR+Workspace
(https://community.icann.org/x/DYCYAQ).

 

ALAC Chair, Olivier Crépin-Leblond, has requested that comments be submitted
by ALAC and At-Large for a five day period 2-9 September, followed by a five
day vote of the ALAC, starting on 9 or 10 September.

 

The statement is reproduced here for your convenience. Comments should be
posted to the Wiki.

 

Alan

 

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*DRAFT* ALAC Statement on the Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery
Recommendations for ICANN Board Consideration

 

The Post Expiration Domain Name Recovery PDP was initiated at the request of
the ALAC in 2008, and we are pleased to see that it may now come to a
positive conclusion.

 

The original request was made because, at that time, there were absolutely
no guarantees in place that a registrant could renew or otherwise recover a
gTLD domain name if it was inadvertently allowed to expire. Earlier ICANN
actions including the creation of a Redemption Grace Period (RGP) for most
registries, and developing the Expired Domain Deletion Policy (EDDP
Consensus Policy PDP) had been carried out with the intent of putting such
guarantees in place, but business practices had changed and the guarantees
no longer existed.

 

The originators of the request for the Issue Report which triggered the PDP
had hopes that the end-result would be far more pro-registrant than what has
ultimately come out of the PDP. This can be attributed to a number of
causes, including the need of the PDP Working Group (WG) to come to a full
consensus on the outcomes, and this of course had to include the Registrar
Stakeholder Group.

 

However, the largest problem can arguably be said to be the extreme
difficulty in getting active and continued participation in an ICANN WG by
those parties whose livelihood and business success do not depend on the
PDP. To be clear, it is a major challenge to get users who are active in
ICANN purely as volunteers to participate, particularly in a process which
often takes close to three years. This clearly endangers the balance of the
ICANN multi-stakeholder model.

 

Given these conditions, the ALAC is pleased that some progress was made in
advancing gTLD registrant rights and that ICANN will be taking positive
action to educate, inform and support gTLD registrants, who are ultimately
one of its core, often forgotten, stakeholders. As such, the ALAC encourages
the Board to ratify the PDP Recommendations as approved by the GNSO.

 

At the same time, the ALAC advises that the Board duly consider what might
be done to ensure that, in the future, the multi-stakeholder model can be
strengthened to allow users to more equitably influence the outcomes in
future policy discussions. Such evolution is a core necessity identified by
ICANN's Accountability and Transparency review as well as to meet the goals
of its Strategic Plan.

 

 

**

Regards,

Heidi Ullrich, Seth Greene, Matt Ashtiani, Gisella Gruber-White, Marilyn
Vernon, 

ICANN At-Large Staff