[Ncsg-discuss] February 12th GNSO Council meeting summary

[Benjamin Akinmoyeje]

Dear NCSG members,
Good day, and I hope your day is going well.

As one of your elected representatives on the GNSO Council, I would like to
share a quick recap of the last GNSO Council meeting.

There was a short update on the discussion from SPS about updating the
projects list and the action decision radar for GNSO councilors to improve
accessibility, based on suggestions from newer councillors who are
endeavouring to highlight upcoming voting items by flagging them more
clearly in those tools.
The chair also mentioned that during the SPS discussion, the Council
leadership began drafting improvements to the GNSO Council liaison documents
to help the Council's current and future liaisons understand the liaison
role and provide updates.

The last GNSO council meeting was held on the 12th February 2026. The
meeting was particularly unique, as it featured 3 councilors giving updates
on their respective SOIs, and ICANN Board members in attendance as guests.

We had two voting items on the agenda: the* first *was the consent vote on
the SSC's choice for the  GNSO-nominated ICANN Fellowship Program Mentor,
Imran Hossen. The vote confirmed the choice.

The* second *Council voting agenda item was on the SCCI's proposed three
(3) recommendations in its Final Report, as part of its review of the
Standing Committee on Continuous Improvement (SCCI) Policy Status Report
(PSR), proposed courses of action for each of the three processes - EPDP,
GGP, and GIP. The Council previously reviewed the recommendations at the
last meeting. The Council voted on the SCCI’s recommendations.

Thereafter, we had the ICANN Board caucus representative on SSAD, Wes
Hardiker, David Lawrence, and Greg DiBiase, come to discuss the SSAD's next
steps. The discussion was about the RDRS Standing Committee's
recommendation (recommendation 5, non-adoption) that, following the RDRS
pilot results, the SSAD 18 recommendations should not be adopted as a
package by the ICANN board. Suggest that the GNSO Council develop
supplemental recommendations addressing all concerns in the SSAD
recommendation. ICANN Board member Wes Hardaker discussed the rationale
behind the board's decision. Also, former council member and currently
Gregory DiBiase, supported the same point and mentioned the alignment paper
that ICANN published to align certain policies. The board members
appreciated the support they have received from the GNSO council in moving
forward with their non-adoption of the SSAD recommendations and managing
the situation with the ICANN community.

We also discussed with the GNSO Liaison to the GAC  on the ICANN85 GAC and
GNSO Bilateral Proposed Agenda, with the following topics as agenda items:
DNS Abuse, RDRS/SSAD, Urgent Requests/Law Enforcement Authentication(top 3
important discussions they are interested in); there was a concern to make
the meeting participatory instead of just reporting GNSO activities to the
GAC. Also, the NCSG expressed a desire to include a discussion of Human
Rights.

Finally, the GNSO Council vice chair led the discussion on prioritizing
work. She mentioned that the council currently uses the Action Decision
Radar (ADR) to display its current tasks. She shared some recent updates to
the ADR, but it is not a prioritization tool. She also shared the three
ideas currently being considered for the prioritization tool.
1. A scheduling tool that shows tasks and their due dates
2. A tool acts as a parking lot for tasks and items the council should
consider.
3. A platform with a voting and ranking system allows the council to know
which tasks to take on next.
The vice chair also listed some items for the updated prioritization
document: RPM phase 2, the Next gTLD program, DNS Abuse mitigation, and the
Expired domain deletion policy. She also highlighted NCSG's interest in
prioritizing the Transfer Policy.
A portion of the council supported a numerical ranking of topics, followed
by a substantive discussion to provide context. The NCSG pushed back on
ranking as a means to prioritize topics. The vice chair encouraged the NCSG
to articulate its preferred options for a prioritization mechanism.

I encourage other councillors to chime in. And I encourage community
members to review the GNSO meeting recording to stay abreast of council
deliberations.

I look forward to your feedback and discussions on some of these issues.


Kind regards,
Benjamin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ncsg.is/pipermail/ncsg-discuss/attachments/20260218/7ba551ec/attachment.htm>