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There are plenty of things about ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee (GAC) to annoy most people at ICANN. I suspect they must at times be maddening even to some GAC members themselves. After years of lobbying to get the GAC to open more of their meetings to the public, I have often wished they’d close them again.

Here are just a few things that make me want to slit my wrists at GAC meetings:

• Members who don’t know anything about the issues in front of them
• Members who literally read talking points from people who have lobbied them (trademark interests, almost exclusively)
• Members who believe their job is to control the Internet, and delude themselves that they have the power to do so
• Endless speeches leading nowhere

I used to fume about it, until I realized two things:

• All these annoyances exist in every other ICANN forum as well
• It could be much much much worse

Recently, a very good article on Circle ID by Gregory Francis, along with a follow-up by Kevin Murphy on DomainIncite, show how those of us who have been tearing clumps of hair out of our scalps at the slow pace of ICANN as compared to the “real” Internet might instead be grateful that we’re not dealing with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The ITU co-ordinates all the world’s telephone systems — and we all know how well and inexpensively these are run. No-one is allowed to go to ITU meetings except governments and a few other “international fora” — basically, U.N. agencies (a recent request from ICANN to attend was turned down). At the ITU, each government has monopoly power over its nation’s phone system, and phone calls are routed internationally according to a series of cross-country agreements.

That’s how they want the Internet to work as well. Want to send an email to your friend in Greece? Sure, but it will cost you, because of a bilateral agreement between countries where you, the customer, pay the bill but have no input into how or why you are paying so much.

Now, at the ITU plenipotentiary in Mexico, the Russian delegates are saying that the ITU should be able to veto anything that the ICANN Board of Directors decides.

Consideration should be given to the expediency of having the functions of GAC carried out by a specially-constituted group within ITU with the authority to veto decisions adopted by the ICANN Board of Directors.

I suppose we should be grateful to the Russians for laying bare their goals; it is one advantage of a censored regime that the leaders become tone-deaf and don’t appreciate how ridiculous their pronouncements sound to the masses.

But we should also be grateful for the GAC. For all the stony-faced members who say nothing and then vote according to who was lobbying their bosses, there are many GAC members who care about the issues and are doing their best to communicate with the rest of the ICANN community. I rarely agree with them, but at least I can speak to them.

Sometimes the GAC seem to place themselves above ICANN, seem to think little of wielding their wrecking ball on what the rest of ICANN has built up, and indeed sometimes act as if they have veto power over the ICANN Board. But in fact they don’t, and the relationship between the GAC and the rest of ICANN is considerably more nuanced.

The ITU is a powerful group that is very jealous of ICANN. They believe very strongly that they should be running the Internet. The reason they’re not running it now is because there are a few nations within the ITU who value the Internet and put a stop to such efforts. Often, they’re the same governments that participate on the GAC.

So, yes, the GAC can be obstructionist and arrogant. But whenever the ITU gets together I get to where I just love the GAC. And so should you.

The ICANN Board met on September 24-25 2010 in Trondheim, Norway, to consider and act on the impediments still in the way of the new gTLD program. They passed a number of resolutions that provide very clear indications of how things are going.

The short version is that the news is good for new gTLDs. ICANN is nailing down the final outstanding issues and the timetable is clearer than ever.

Predictions

1. The Board will make the new gTLD program happen by March 2011.
2. The official announcement will be at the ICANN meeting in March in San Francisco.
3. The final Applicant Guidebook will be published before the San Francisco meeting, which means that we’ll know a lot even before the official announcement.

The Board is determined to make gTLDs happen soon

On a number of contentious issues, the Board resolutions gave some finality. In general, they stuck with what they had already decided. Some highlights:

• Fees: fees will remain the same at $185,000 per application. No price breaks for anyone.
• Root Scaling: ICANN estimates that they can add 1000 new gTLDs to the root per year. Of course, they can take many more applications than that, but this is the number they think they can safely introduce into the wild. Most estimates put the number of new gTLD applications at 500 or under.
• Trademarks: trademarks will need to have “substantive review.” As with most things trademarkian, this is a little complicated, but in practice it means that you can’t just go register a trademark and then use it to challenge registrations: you must also have used it in trade.
• Morality and Public Order: On this issue, where the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) essentially vetoed the previous procedure, the Board was less than clear. A working group (which I participated in) came up with some recommendations, and the Board said that they would use “recommendations that are not inconsistent with the existing process.” So we don’t know exactly what this will look like. Unless you’re planning to inflame social hatred, however, your application is unlikely to be affected no matter what the outcome.
• Vertical Integration: The Board noted that the working group tasked with sorting this out (which I also participated in) could reach no consensus, and that they (the Board) would make a decision.
• San Francisco: the next ICANN meeting after December in Cartagena will be March in San Francisco. This is the big news that makes the timeline clear.

To give a sense of the Board’s determination, here’s an excerpt from ICANN’s post-retreat bulletin:

The detailed Board discussion was guided by recent community input and provided direction in the implementation of trademark protections, the new registry agreement terms, measures to mitigate malicious conduct, and ensuring root zone stability. The resolutions indicate that many important issues have been addressed, including trademark protection, morality and public order, and vertical integration.

Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush indicated that “The board made considerable progress on the remaining issues and has asked staff to prepare additional working papers and a modified applicant guidebook for public review prior to the upcoming ICANN meeting in Cartagena in December 2010. The meeting results represent a key milestone after years of work by the ICANN community as we prepare for community discussion and debate in Cartagena.”

Reviewing the Board direction, President and CEO Rod Beckstrom stated, “ICANN is prepared to implement this important new offering to increase consumer choice and to promote competition.”

The official kick-off will be at ICANN San Francisco in March 2011

The March meeting will take place in the front yard of the tech industry, which in general pays little attention to the domain name world. This time, they will be watching, and therefore this is a perfect place for ICANN leaders to cover themselves in glory and boast of their achievement in finally getting gTLDs going. It doesn’t require much of a crystal ball to predict that this is where and when the new gTLD program will get its final blessing.

Applicants will have plenty of information before March

It seems that the plan is to publish a version of the Applicant Guidebook before Cartagena, take comments, then release a final version sometime after the December ICANN meeting in Cartagena, Colombia. Since this will be the final guidebook, it should include all the information pertinent to an application, including the dates of the application window. The San Francisco meeting is likely to be a coronation, not an election. To the extent possible, everything will already have been decided, and everything will be choreographed. Which means we’ll probably hear about stuff well in advance.

Summary

We all know better than to say “sure thing” when it comes to ICANN, right? Right…

Still, the momentum is palpable and the timeline is clearer than it has ever been. The main risk factor is new obstructionism by GAC, fueled by lobbying by trademark owners, who continue to claim that the program will be too expensive for them. But it looks as if the ship is edging into the destination harbor at last.