RE: [registrars] ICANN Drafting Committee & Permanent Names Counsel Representative Elections

["Michael D. Palage" <mpalage@infonetworks.com>]

According to one of the motions agreed upon in the Santiago meeting, any
substantive issue impacting the registrar constituency must be put to a vote
before the entire membership, not just those members attending the ICANN
regional meetings. Although I agree that Jim Bramson is probably the best
candidate for representing the registrars' viewpoint in the UDP drafting
committee, and I would have voted from him if given the chance, I request
that in the future the ICANN board and their legal counsel contact either
the secretariat or the Names Counsel Representatives before selecting a
member to represent the registrars viewpoint so that it can be put forward
to a vote according to our agreed upon by-laws and procedures.

I understand that time is of the essence, but that should never be an excuse
for not following the rules, it sets a dangerous precedent. This issue of
the registrars maintaining their autonomy will become more important as we
continue to handle many more volatile issues in the near future, i.e. ethics
requirements on the warehousing of domain names by registrars - see Santiago
minutes.

I am intending to announce the opening of the nomination phase for the
registrars constituency's permanent Name Counsel representative elections in
the upcoming week or two. The ICANN board has requested that the permanent
members be seated by the November LA meeting. Because of the continual
extension of the testbed period, it was agreed upon by the membership
attending the Santiago meeting that we should amend the by-laws to elect the
permanent Name Counsel representative prior to the end of the testbed
period. If there are no objections, I would like to begin this nomination
process by mid-September. As always I welcome everyone's feedback, both
positive and negative :)

P.S. Any member that is considering running for a names counsel position
please prepare a resume/position statement in a single HTML formated
document .

Best regards,

Michael D. Palage



-----Original Message-----
From:	owner-registrars@dnso.org [mailto:owner-registrars@dnso.org] On Behalf
Of JIMBRAMSON@aol.com
Sent:	Thursday, September 02, 1999 6:36 PM
To:	registrars@dnso.org; daveg@netsol.com; phils@netsol.com
Cc:	slevi@skadden.com; rrodin@skadden.com
Subject:	[registrars] ICANN Drafting Committee

Most of you know that as part of the ICANN Board's resolutions in Santiago
the ICANN staff has been directed to assemble a drafting committee to
prepare
"implementation documents" based upon the model domain name dispute
resolution policy that many of us have been working on the past few months.

Louis Touton, who is organizing that effort, would like to have a
participant
from among the registrar community and has asked AOL to play that role.  We
have agreed to have our outside counsel at Skadden Arps sit on the drafting
committee.  Since our role is intended to be "representative," we will be
updating you periodically during the next few weeks about the drafting
committee's efforts and discussions.  And we will look for your input on
changes that are proposed to be made to the current draft policy.

Given the hard work and compromising which has already gone into the
existing
draft policy, and our mutual interest in finally having a policy that can be
uniformly adopted by the registrars, we will push to minimize the changes
made by the drafting committee absent substantial, broadly-accepted
justification.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Jim Bramson
Counsel
America Online, Inc.
703-265-2267