Purpose: This public comment proceeding seeks to obtain community input prior to Board action on the final recommendations of the Generic Names Supporting Organization Policy Development Process for Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues.

At its meeting on 21 January 2016, the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council unanimously voted to adopt all the recommendations contained in the Final Report from the Working Group that it had chartered to conduct a Policy Development Process (PDP) to develop policy recommendations for ICANN‘s implementation of an Accreditation Program for privacy and proxy service providers. The GNSO‘s adopted recommendations will now be sent to the ICANN Board for its review. In line with the ICANN Bylaws, this public comment forum is being opened so that the community has a reasonable opportunity to comment on the adopted recommendations prior to Board action.

All the final recommendations from the PDP Working Group attained Full Consensus within the Working Group. The Final Report contains over twenty recommendations spanning various aspects of a privacy and proxy services accreditation program, including the inclusion of mandatory terms of service in customer agreements, procedures for relaying to a customer third party requests for disclosure of customer information, a detailed framework for both the submission and processing of requests by intellectual property rights-holders for the disclosure of customer contact information, and de-accreditation.

The Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) is the contract that governs the relationship between ICANN and its accredited registrars (a directory of accredited registrars can be found at http://www.internic.net/regist.html). Its provisions also may have impacts on registrants and other third parties involved in the domain name system. In June 2013, the ICANN Board approved a new 2013 RAA (the provisions of which can be found at http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/raa/approved-with-specs-27jun13-en.pdf [PDF, 913 KB]). In initiating negotiations for the 2013 RAA between ICANN and the Registrars Stakeholder Group in October 2011, the ICANN Board had also requested an Issue Report from the GNSO that, upon the conclusion of the RAA negotiations, would start a GNSO Policy Development Process (PDP) to address remaining issues not dealt with in the RAA negotiations that would be suited to a PDP. The GNSO Council approved the charter [PDF, 463 KB] for the PDP in October 2013 and a Working Group was formed.

The WG published its Initial Report for public comment on 5 May (https://www.icann.org/public-comments/ppsai-initial-2015-05-05-en). Due to the unusually large volume of comments received (including over 11,000 public comments and almost 150 survey responses), the WG extended its timeline in order to carefully and thoroughly consider all the input received. Having completed its review of all the comments, the WG completed and sent its Final Report to the GNSO Council on 7 December 2015 (http://gnso.icann.org/en/issues/raa/ppsai-final-07dec15-en.pdf [PDF, 1.24 MB]). On 21 January 2016, the GNSO Council voted unanimously to approve all the recommendations contained in the WG‘s Final Report, all of which attained Full Consensus among the WG (http://gnso.icann.org/en/council/resolutions#201601).

In accordance with the ICANN Bylaws, this public comment proceeding is being opened to provide the public with an opportunity to comment on the recommendations that were approved by the GNSO Council prior to their review and action by the ICANN Board.

PDP Working Group Final Report [PDF, 1.24 MB]