We carefully reviewed every critical aspect. Each executive was called on to indicate whether his or her group is fully prepared to fulfill their role in supporting the program. While we noted the ongoing presence of risks that were identified and highlighted to the Board and community in June, and the mitigation steps that have been taken, each executive indicated approval to proceed. As a result, Chief Operating Officer Akram Atallah and Michael Salazar gave me the green light to move forward.

On Thursday, we held an information call with the Board of Directors. I informed the Board that we are prepared to move forward and to open the program as planned. In the package of materials, available at http://www.icann.org/en/minutes/, you can see the items that have been completed, as well as target dates for open items that require final resolution. These include support for needy applicants and a discussion of the timing of the next application round. The issues should be settled before the application window closes on 12 April but their resolution is not essential before the window opens on 12 January.

We thank the community, the Board and everyone involved in developing and refining this program, which will open the Internet to greater innovation at the top level.

Since the roadshows began in September as part of the broader new gTLD awareness-raising effort, ten members of the Board and more than 15 staff members have spoken at over 50 events that ICANN has either participated in or organized. The events have spanned our geographic regions, covering 38 countries, and more are scheduled before the Board-mandated communications period concludes in January.

The goal of the roadshows is to get the message out that a major change is coming to the Internet, and that includes increasing awareness of both the pros and the cons of applying for a new top-level domain. A new gTLD is an opportunity for online innovation but it has risks. Organizations that choose not to apply may need to take steps to protect their brand or name.

We see awareness rising around the world. Media coverage of new gTLDs has been impressive – thousands of articles have appeared around the world since the roadshows began in Brazil on 12 September. The blogosphere and social media platforms are full of commentary.

And in my travels I learned a lot about how this coming innovation is seen around the world. Like the ICANN community itself, views have been mixed throughout the roadshows. We have heard strongly held views on both sides. Most of the discussions were balanced and at every event that I took part in, opposing views were welcomed and often vigorously expressed.

But our goal was never to convince anyone to apply or to sell them on the value of having a new gTLD. It was to give people the facts and let them form their own views.

A great benefit of my travels was the chance to meet so many members of the ICANN community. Dozens of community experts participated actively in the events and in many countries I also met with community members at informal get-togethers.

Many community members also organized roadshow events. I would like to thank them and all our other hosts around the world for their support, engagement and generosity.

This is an important program because it provides the safety and security of uninterrupted registry services in the event of an emergency. There may be occasions when a new gTLD registry is unable to continue their operations and it is the role of the EBERO to provide continued service in that situation. The main goal of the EBERO Program is registrant protection. The program partners ICANN with select organizations that will provide support to sustain critical registry functions for a period of time, or in the case of one registry operator being transitioned to another.

It is important to note that if EBERO services are required, the fee for their service will be paid from the Continuity Operations Instrument (COI) required for all new gTLDs.

We are currently reviewing the RFI responses, particularly the costs associated with these services. We expect to share that information publicly before the launch of the New gTLD Program, scheduled for 12 January 2012.

Once the EBEROs are selected, potentially from the RFI responses, the names of the selected parties will be made public.

Please stay tuned for additional information as we move forward with this program. Our goal is to share as much information as possible to maintain complete transparency throughout this process.

If you have any questions about the EBERO selection process, please contact us directly at ebero@icann.org.

Karla Valente
Director, gTLD Registry Programs

With that comment, the Chairman seemed to welcome the possibility of greater online innovation and competition. These are two core reasons for the existence of the new program that could potentially introduce hundreds of new top-level domains names into the global Internet.

Senator Rockefeller cautioned that expansion of the domain name system should be done slowly and carefully – and ICANN shares that view.

The other witnesses criticized the program but even if some of their criticisms sounded reasonable, those criticisms were dated and thoroughly addressed during the seven-year development of the program.

I gave the Committee a brief history of the new gTLD program and highlighted the seven years of thorough, transparent and inclusive discussion and debate, including: 2400 public comments from 47 extended comment periods that resulted in over 1400 pages of comment summary and analysis, formation of ten independent expert working groups, and 59 explanatory memoranda and independent reports.

Not only were the comments of my fellow witnesses received and considered during this time, their recommendations were largely adopted. A long and careful deliberative process produced this program. World-class experts on intellectual property, economics and Internet security developed solutions and those solutions were reviewed by the Internet community and vetted by governments.

I also explained that new gTLDs will have even greater safeguards than the TLD registries that exist today and will include enhanced protections for trademark holders. The new environment will sharply reduce the need for defensive registrations.

Senators Amy Klobuchar and Kelly Ayotte expressed the need for engagement by law enforcement in this process and urged ICANN to work closely with law enforcement agencies to make the Internet environment more secure. I clearly stated ICANN’s commitment to implement law enforcement recommendations wherever possible, as soon as possible.

I pointed to ICANN’s past work in the development of consumer protections, the history of collaborating with the law enforcement community, and the ongoing, urgent negotiations with registrars to improve consumer protections in the contracts registrars sign with ICANN.

In response to their comments, I also confirmed ICANN’s commitment to monitor the new gTLD process to ensure ongoing, smooth operation of the planned, time-phased delegation of new gTLDs. This commitment was easily made as it is something ICANN already takes very seriously and has embedded in its planning.

My sincere hope is that the facts I gave the Senate Commerce Committee last week, and will give the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology on Wednesday, will help create greater understanding of this new era of online innovation, and bring some balance to the PR offensive launched by some parties.

As we move forward with the launch, it’s worth bearing in mind where we have been and what is at stake. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Lawrence E. Strickling summarized this in his recent comments regarding the multistakeholder process that led to the approval of the New gTLD program: “The multistakeholder process does not guarantee that everyone will be satisfied with the outcome. But it is critical to preserving the model of Internet governance that has been so successful to date that all parties respect and work through the process and accept the outcome once a decision is reached.”

I had the privilege of speaking Wednesday morning with the men and women attending the AFRALO capacity building program. AFRALO is the African expression of At-Large, the group within ICANN representing the voice of individual Internet users.

AFRALO Vice Chair Tijani Ben Jemaa and Chair Fatimata Seye Sylla have built a five-day training program to give African civil society the tools and knowledge to participate effectively in the ICANN policy development process.

What struck me was the enormous vigor with which the Africans have seized upon this opportunity. All 24 AFRALO At-Large Structures, from all over the continent, sent representation to this meeting. That is no small thing.

Some non-African delegates to ICANN 42 have moaned about unsteady, intermittent, or slow Internet connections. Imagine living in Africa, where it is not unusual for someone to ride a bike to the next village in order to use the one connected computer in the area.

Some non-African delegates felt their travel to Dakar was long and tiring. If you flew here, imagine having to drive across a continent to get here.

Even some of us on the ICANN staff have to brace ourselves to function during the long hours and multiple demands of facilitating the meeting. Imagine the members of the African delegation volunteering a week (or more) of their own time, to learn about policy-making, about a technology many of them can access only sporadically.

In short, our African participants have shown a breathtaking amount of vision and dedication toward the technological future of Africa. Each of us who has spent time with them has come away impressed with their generous attention, insightful questions, and obvious desire to lead their neighbors on line as full-fledged members of the digital world.

Over the last two years, Internet access has risen from 5% of the African population to 11.5% of the population. That number needs to be higher, and many challenges still lie ahead. But that astonishing growth, and the diligence of our African participants, convinces me there is now no holding this continent back from its future on line. 

Every corner of ICANN supports them. The Joint Applicant Support Working Group has recommended ways to help developing economies afford their own gTLDs. Our ongoing overhaul of ICANN.ORG will offer robust support for people accessing our site by mobile phone. Our Language Services department is providing an unprecedented amount of French translations.

This is how ICANN says, “Welcome, Africa!” We’re thrilled that through AFRALO, Africa has answered, “Welcome, ICANN!” Vive les Africains!

NORC intends to use Whois Registrant contact data to classify the kinds of entities that register a representative sample of gTLD domain names, including natural persons, legal persons and Privacy or Proxy service providers. NORC will then analyze Internet content associated with each sampled domain to classify the entities that appear to be using those domains, along with any observable potentially commercial activities. Draft study results are expected to be published in mid-2012.

Entity and activity classifications are not predefined but will be developed during the study, based on sampled data, to help the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) and ICANN community better understand the variety of possible correlations that may emerge. ICANN looks forward to working with NORC to publish statistics that describe how various gTLD Registrants identify themselves, in order to inform future gTLD Whois policy discussions.

To learn more about the Whois Registrant Identification Study or other studies now being conducted at the request of the GNSO Council, please visit http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois/.

The new look removes some clutter. For example, contrast the way links to social media tools now appear on the site, up in the banner area:

Before:

After:

If the icons are not self-explanatory for any visitor, hovering the mouse cursor over an icon pops up a tool tip with a more explicit label – “Photos,” “Videos,” “Twitter,” and so on. The newer version strikes us as more modern and streamlined.

We’ve also introduced a fresher color palette than the staid blue which, over time, had become something of a corporate cliché on web sites. The clean white background really makes photos pop, putting appropriate emphasis on the people who drive ICANN’s work.

More importantly, this step is merely an interim refresh – new art on top of the existing site structure. Along with contractor Four Kitchens, the ICANN Communications Team is working hard on a complete redesign of the site’s information architecture and user interface. This work stands on the shoulders of the excellent research the Revere Group provided about site visitors through a survey and interviews in 2009. A cross-departmental team of ICANN staff continued in-depth interviews with site visitors in late 2010, reaching out to every Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee at ICANN to ensure their voices are heard as we undertake the redesign of this important communications tool.

All this research identified the requirements that our redesign will drive toward. The forward-looking list of site requirements is lengthy, but some notable ones we’re targeting include much better “findability” of resources and documents on the site, both by navigation and by search. And the redesigned site will offer a robust, fully supported mobile view for those accessing by phone. (This audience, demographers say, is growing so rapidly that by 2015, more individuals will access the Internet by phone than by computer.) ICANN.ORG will also be hosted differently, providing better resilience against unintended downtime and optimized loading time for visitors from around the world.

There is much more to say about this project, so I’ll post an update here from time to time. The conclusion for now is that we think the changes you see on ICANN.ORG are a step in the right direction – merely the first step on an ambitious journey we expect to conclude by the end of this year.

My name is Chris LaHatte, and I am ICANN’s new Ombudsman.

I will be available online to assist and facilitate the ICANN community as the organization faces many challenges from the gTLD expansion, the huge growth in Internet use in the developing world, and the cultural interplay and resolution from new participants in ICANN.

I am an experienced mediator and lawyer and have practiced in New Zealand, Taiwan and Central Asia. I qualified as a lawyer from the University of Auckland and earned a Masters Degree in Dispute Resolution from Massey University, with judicial settlement conferences as my thesis. I am a Fellow of the Arbitrators and Mediators Institute of New Zealand, a mediator for the New Zealand Law Society on cost issues and a construction law adjudicator.

After practising as a barrister for many years, I have come to see alternative dispute resolution as the most effective tool in dealing with conflict. I have presented papers and written articles about aspects of dispute resolution and other matters and I am an author for Thompson Reuters on court procedure.

Outside of this, I am the husband of Mandy, a schoolteacher, and the father of three teenage children, and I practice my conflict resolution skills on them.

I look forward to serving you, the ICANN Community. Please don’t hesitate to contact me at ombudsman@ICANN.org.

That’s the day ICANN’s Board of Directors votes on whether to finalize the Applicant Guidebook, a document that explains how any established institution (such as a government, business, or non-profit organization) can apply to operate a generic top-level domain (gTLD) of its own choosing. If the Board approves the Guidebook as final, the clock starts ticking on a process that could lead to hundreds of new gTLDs by 2013. In addition to familiar TLDs such as .com, .org, and .net, Internet users could potentially see new domain name extensions made of almost any word, in any language.

New gTLDs are expected to introduce innovation, choice, and competition to Internet services. World press is already following the issue of new gTLDs with great interest, generating coverage from Reuters, Associated Press, National Public Radio, ABC News, ZDNet Asia, and other outlets.

But the future of top-level domains is not the only substantive topic ICANN tackles this week.

Hot Topics at ICANN 41

ICANN’s vibrant volunteer community will consider many other important issues between 19 – 24 June. A partial list includes:

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). IDNs enable people who use languages based on scripts other than ASCII (letters A – Z) to offer users domain names in non-ASCII characters. (Example languages include Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, and many others.) But some issues still need much more work. For example, if you type in Arabic, a character that looks the same from one keyboard to another may produce different technical code when typed, depending on whether your keyboard was made in Iran or Pakistan. When the character is used in a URL, the differing code can take you to a site you didn’t intend to visit. These “variants,” and associated issues, are being dealt with so that all users from all regions can reliably visit the sites they want. The discussion continues on Monday.

Inter-Registrar Transfers. Transfer-related issues are the number one area of complaint according to data from ICANN Compliance. Should there be a process or special provisions for the urgent return of a hijacked domain name? The GNSO Council votes on the issue Wednesday.

New gTLD Applicants from Developing Countries. If the Board approves the process for creating new gTLDs, developing countries may have a need for a new gTLD, but lack the financial means to apply for and operate it. A working group comprised of members from ICANN Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees has been considering how such groups might be funded if they apply for a TLD. The group offers a report on Thursday.

These are just a few examples of dozens of topics that the ICANN community will attempt to move forward during a week containing more than 120 panels, presentations, workshops and other sessions. If you’re not in Singapore, you can participate remotely for most sessions. For details, see the Remote Participation Page and the full meeting schedule.

The GNSO Council has expressed interest in understanding, broadly and in depth, relay and reveal requests sent for privacy and proxy-registered domain names, how such requests are originated and processed, and what factors promote or impede timely communication and resolution.

This survey is aimed at establishing a foundation for that future study by gauging the willingness and ability of request originators, privacy/proxy providers, and registrars to participate, by identifying factors that would facilitate or inhibit their participation, and by developing a list of individuals and organizations potentially willing to participate.

The Interisle team expects to spend approximately four months on the project, during which time they will develop and launch an on-line survey, reach out to relay/reveal request originators, privacy/proxy providers, and registrars, and conduct follow-up interviews. Participants will be asked about whether data documenting their own relay/reveal experiences could be shared and under what conditions, their potential interest in participating in such a study, and tools that would make participating easier.

This survey is expected to help the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council determine whether a sufficiently broad, representative request sample could be obtained to obtain meaningful results from a future in-depth study of Relay/Reveal requests.

ICANN looks forward to working with Interisle to gather input from a geographically-diverse set of potential participants, establishing the essential foundation for such a study.

To learn more about the proposed Whois Privacy/Proxy Relay and Reveal Study or additional studies now being conducted at the request of the GNSO Council, visit http://gnso.icann.org/issues/whois/. Interisle’s point of contact for the project is Chris Owens, whois-survey@interisle.net.