[ALAC] Draft statement on PEDNR

[Alan Greenberg]

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, followed by a five day vote of the ALAC.

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.