[council] GAC Communiqué on new gTLDs
>From GAC Communiqué:
The GAC provided ICANN with extensive comments on the DAG version 2 in its
letter to the Board dated 18th August. The GAC appreciates the reply provided
by the Chairman of the Board on 22nd September. Following discussions in Seoul
however, both between GAC members and with other stakeholders, the GAC feels
that many of its concerns remain outstanding, related in particular to:
- the need to take full account of the security, stability and resiliency
issues including those identified in the recent root scaling reports. These
concerned the potential cumulative effects of changes resulting from the
introduction and implementation of DNSSEC, IDNs, new gTLDs and IPv6;
- the importance of further economic studies to improve the community's
understanding of all the costs, benefits and market impacts;
- the need for more effective protection of intellectual property rights;
- the ongoing discussions within the community regarding structural
separation between registries and registrars, price caps and the potential
impacts on competition in the DNS market;
- the need to explore track differentiation between categories;
- the need to respect national public interests and sovereign rights
regarding strings with geographical meaning;
- the need to assist developing countries which would otherwise be
constrained by their limited access to financial and technical resources.
In the expectation that a new draft of the Applicant Guidebook will be issued,
the GAC does not intend to comment at this stage in detail on version 3.
The GAC therefore intends to provide more comprehensive comments to the Board
before the next meeting in Nairobi.