Whois & Transfers Task Force Open Meetings Held on Sunday afternoon (local time), the purpose of these two meetings was to continue the dialogue between the respective task forces and the impacted stakeholders (at least those that were present). Louis Touton, ICANN General Counsel, kicked off both sessions with an explanation of what his recent briefing on the subject of policy development actually meant. His message was very clear - there are no real previous examples of the establishment of consensus policy by which current task forces can model their behavior. In other words, we are forging new ground and ensure that we dot our "i's" and cross our "t's" as it relates to the contractual requirements that describe how consensus policy is created within ICANN. In other words, he was saying that consensus policy could not be created if consensus does not exist. A finely tuned point, but I believe that the message was heard loud and clear.
After the introductions, the discussion quickly moved, not to the typical task force drudgery of point-counterpoint-defer, but rather to a concerted effort to discover what the real requirements of each impacted stakeholder are and an exploration of what some of the possible implementations might look like. The general agreement in the hallways was that it was a very productive meeting that represents a significant step in the right direction towards discovering what the consensus is on these important issues.
I expect at this point that we will see some substantial differences between the current Interim reports and the next reports produced by these task forces.
8:15:13 PM
