Yesterday, they were in New York; tomorrow, they’ll be in London. Then Hong Kong on 24 July and Abu-Dhabi on 4 August (see here for more details). The idea is to spread the word as well as gather more input on the process. And the biggest bone of contention at the moment is the issue of how to deal with trademarks with a whole new raft of Internet extensions.

The New York meeting was visible online using our new conferencing software that we also used at the Sydney meeting, which includes video, audio, presentations, a chatroom and a Q&A box. And you can see a full archive of the meeting in links below.

What was most interesting out of the discussions (from my perspective anyway) was a blog post produced by the New York Times on the day. It is a pretty good summary of events and also helps put it in context. It’s useful to get the outside view when you spend too long in the ICANN bubble.

The post, Brokering Peace Between Brand Owners and Domainers, pretty much hits the nail on the head when it comes to a lot of ICANN’s work – particularly from the staff perspective, where a huge amount of the work is trying to find a solution that people with strong and opposing views can live with.

Anyway, an interesting piece, have a read when you have a second.

The video archive of the New York meeting is available in four parts:

Part I: Run through of the Trademark Protection report produced by the Implementation Recommendation Team
Part II: Reports from WIPO and eNom on the trademark issue
Part III: Public feedback and questions from the floor
Part IV: Malicious conduct panel discussion

And the archive for the London meeting is also in four parts:

Part I: Intro and summary of the IRT report on trademark protection
Part II: WIPO recommendations on trademark protections; eNom reflections on IRT report. Other reflections on IRT report and other suggestions for solutions to trademark issue. Some questions from the floor
Part III: Public feedback and questions from the floor
Part IV: Malicious conduct panel discussion

With Sydney opening on Monday 22 June, we strived to have this information up before this morning, Monday 1 June.

As such, it is probably as comprehensive a set of documents as ICANN has published for any meeting – addressing hard issues on IDNs, an important report on intellectual property issues as related to domain names, another huge piece of comment and analysis related to new TLDs, new financial analysis, more on community travel (which is coming), and other areas. I’m also pretty confident that this is the earliest (relative to an ICANN meeting) that this kind of material has been available.

So what was included?

IDNs: We posted the third revision to the Fast Track Implementation Plan. This was accompanied by explanatory memos that discuss: the form of agreement we will have with IDN TLD operators, financial contributions to ICANN, and the use of variant tables. The bottom line – we plan to launch this process right after the meeting in Seoul.

New gTLDs: We posted the Analysis of public comment, as we did before the Mexico City meeting. This document is intended to demonstrate ICANN’s careful consideration of all the comment. We decided to not publish a new version of the Guidebook since the overarching issues are not yet resolved.

Instead, we have identified several areas where the Guidebook can be amended and published excerpts – just those sections that are changing. We also published explanatory memos: discussing whether Chinese, Japanese, and Korean TLDs should be allowed to register one or two-character names since complete words in those languages are generally that short; describing all the research that has been done regarding morality & public order issues; describing a process for contractual compliance in community-based TLDs; and advocating a requirement that registries maintain thick Whois databases.

IRT and Trademark Protection: The Implementation Recommendation Team was created by a resolution of the Board to develop solutions to trademark protection issues. The IRT made its final report, it was posted yesterday. The report represents a ton of work by the 18 members of the team for which we are very grateful.

As an ICANN staff member closely associated with this important and huge amount of work, I would like to thank everyone from staff and the community that worked so hard in making it possible to publish this in time for review and discussion in Sydney.