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Term of Reference 1: Recommendations
1. There are two other GNSO policy development processes that have a direct bearing on the work here: the PDP Feb 06 on Policies for Contractual Conditions for Existing TLDs1 and the work which has been undertaken on internationalized domain names (IDNs)2. The final IDN Issues Report was released on 13 July 2006 and can be found at
http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/.../msg02677.html. The results of this PDP (since it is in a more advanced stage) will inform the two additional work streams and will need to be taken into account when making final recommendations about the two other PDPs.
Some early finding that there are some key principles which are important including consistency of treatment, equitable treatment of registry operators. The PDP Feb 06 will inform and will be co-coordinated with the two additional work streams before the Dec 05 work final report.
We do not expect delays.
4. The Washington DC meetings showed that there were additional justifications for introducing new gTLDs including "[a] small TLDs [is]
OK if it meets the needs of the community that has put [the idea] forward and doesn't exclude others that are within that community; the new gTLDs introduced so far do not yet cater for parts of the international community that use characters sets other than the limited set from the ASCII character range; a policy is required for the introduction of IDNs at the top level, and [we] need to consider the political and cultural environments as demand for these IDNs is increasing...". Part of this work is being addressed through the IDN Issues Report referred to earlier.
Term of Reference 2: Recommendations
15. Applicants must offer a clearly differentiated domain name space with respect to defining the purpose of the application. The effect of requiring differentiation on IDN top-level domains has not been fully discussed and further input is required. >>>
The above comments suggest to me that introduction of Clone Dot Com registries is a complete red-herring much as I have always stated.