The Business Constituency Newsletter

	WELCOME

	Welcome to the latest issue of Bizconst News, the Business Constituency newsletter. This year has been a busy one for the BC, something clearly reflected in the wide variety of business and news outlined below. Hot issues at the moment include WHOIS developments, an interim round of sponsored TLDs, transfers and the first of the two WSIS preliminary meetings. We hope that this newsletter continues to provide you with relevant information regarding all the issues and news. Its aim is to give a snapshot of an issue with onward links to fuller detail and background information. The secretariat would be pleased to hear your comments about the newsletter so we can continue to improve it. With all best wishes of the season and a happy New Year! Gary

	ICANN MEETINGS IN TUNISIA

	ICANN meetings were held in Carthage, Tunisia 27-31 October. ICANN Board Meeting The Board fixed a date to issue a request for proposals for an interim round of sponsored top-level domain names. This was in response to a call from the GNSO Council and is consistent with the position advocated by the Business Constituency. For full details of this and all eight resolutions passed at the meeting: http://icann.org/announcements/advisory-31oct03.htm Cross-constituency and BC meeting A meeting of the BC, ISPCP and IPC constituencies took place the morning of 28 October. In the afternoon, there was a Business Constituency meeting.

	GNSO COUNCIL LATEST

	At its December meeting, the GNSO Council agreed to proceed with a policy development process on the "Need for a Predictable Procedure for Changes in the Operation of TLD Registries". This is a response to avoid problems such as those experienced with the surprise introduction, and subsequent withdrawal, of Verisign's wildcard service. Constituencies were asked to provide input to Council and Grant Forsyth has volunteered to co-ordinate the BC responses.

	New WHOIS Task Forces

	The GNSO Council meeting in Tunisia established three working groups to tackle three new areas within WHOIS. Each constituency was asked to provide a representative for each group. The BC representatives are: Sarah Deutsch Improving accuracy of collected data David Fares Restricting access to WHOIS data for marketing purposes Marilyn Cade Review of data collected and displayed

	PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN ICANN: PRELIMINARY STUDY

	A preliminary study of public participation in ICANN has been published by John Palfrey, Clifford Chen, Sam Hwang, and Noah Eisenkraft of Berkman Center for Internet & Society. This study considers to what extent ICANN has achieved its stated goal of a "representative" and "open" decision-making process. Review of postings by members of the Internet user community to ICANN's e-mail lists and public online forums showed that public commentary for or against a given proposal does not correlate strongly to an outcome either for or against that proposal. The data suggest that the Board has been more likely to rely heavily upon staff recommendations and upon the input of the Supporting Organizations.

	ICANN NEWS

	ICANN website The ICANN website has been redesigned with a clearer home page and easy-to-navigate menus. Each constituency now has a 'Resources' bar on the front page, very useful for finding information quickly and efficiently. Direct links to constituency websites do not appear on these pages, however, and the secretariat has asked that these links are included on this first level rather then two levels down from the GNSO link. ICANN staff Doug Barton has been appointed as General Manager Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)

	INTER-REGISTRAR TRANSFERS POLICY LATEST

	The Transfer Assistance Group along with ICANN staff, is currently in the process of implementing new transfer procedures, based on 29 policy recommendations approved by the ICANN Board. A useful page on the ICANN web site outlines the latest developments in transfer policy: www.icann.org/transfers

	WSIS

	Paul Twomey, CEO ICANN spoke at the WSIS Geneva at which he reminded the audience of ICANN's bottom-up multi-stakeholder model and its limited technical coordination role. He also told the audience that the introduction of IPv6 would solve all future concern about IP address shortage - it will provide over a billion addresses for every man, woman or child on the planet. The sub text here is that there is no need for any other organisation to allocate addresses - as they are not a scarce resource. www.itu.int/wsis BC member Talal Abu-Ghazaleh made a statement to the final plenary session on 12 December

DATES FOR YOUR DIARIES

Secretariat office closed	24 December - 26 December 31 December - 2 January

ICANN meetings, Rome	2 - 6 March 2004