ICANN’s more recent public meeting was the policy forum in Prague. ICANN 83 came to a close last Thursday.
One of the outputs from ICANN meetings that many within the broader community keep an eye out for is the missive from the GAC, which is where governments sit within the ICANN circus. Their communiqué, which I’ve included below, covers a number of administrative bits, like the number of attendees and gives a high level recap of the meetings they were involved with during the meeting. However the “juice” is usually in two sections of the document:
- Issues of Importance to the GAC – this covers the various topics that governments are interested in. For anyone following ICANN or Internet governance matters there’s very little of surprise here.
- Advice to the ICANN Board – this is the real “meat”. GAC can issue formal advice to the ICANN Board. It’s not exactly “binding”, but the Board (and the broader ICANN community) should pay attention closely. It would be very hard for ICANN to move forward with something that all the governments strongly opposed.
So what’s in the “advice” section this time round?
They’re interested in “abuse” and “online harms”. The only “advice” they’re issuing this time round is that the Board urge the GNSO Council to move on more PDPs around DNS abuse:
To urge the GNSO Council to undertake all necessary preparations prior to ICANN84 towards starting targeted and narrowly scoped Policy Development Processes (PDPs) on DNS Abuse issues, prioritizing bulk registration of malicious domain names and the responsibility of registrars to investigate domains associated with registrant accounts that are the subject of actionable reports of DNS Abuse.
However you’d have to wonder if that is really what they want or how they’ll determine that this is enough. The rationale section is very vague and open ended.
Before new strings are added to the DNS as a result of the next round, further work on DNS Abuse is needed to stem the increasing cost to the public of phishing, malware, botnets, and other forms of DNS abuse. Furthermore, the GAC encourages PDPs that are targeted and clearly scoped to achieve results according to shorter timelines.
The GAC appreciates the wealth of proposals for further policy work recently expressed by different parts of the community and maintains they all deserve attention. The GAC supports multistakeholder action to achieve Consensus Policy outcomes and encourages, for the time being, prioritization of specific issues such as malicious use of bulk registrations.
Given this timeline, the GAC encourages progress on commencing narrowly-scoped PDPs between ICANN83 and ICANN84.
You can read the entire document here (PDF).
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