[Ncsg-discuss] GNSO Council meeting January 15, 2026

[Johan Helsingius]

Dear NCSG members, as one of your Council representatives, it is my
turn to report on the latest council meeting this morning, 5:00-7:00 am
UTC. I know it was the evening of January 14 for those of us in the
Americas, but I will use UTC.

I hope my fellow Councillors will jump in and correct me if
I got anything wrong - it was 6 am for me after all.

There were two voting points on the agenda. The first one,
on the First Policy Development Process (PDP) for DNS Abuse
Mitigation Charter, caused a fair bit of discussion that ran
over the allocated time. Most of the discussion was related
to wording related to the requirement for a  Human Rights
Impact Assessment. In the end, a workable compromise that
we could live with was reached and we all voted to approve.

The second one, on the Council Guidance for the Implementation
Review Team (IRT) on Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs)
and International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) on
Curative Rights was something we weren't completely happy
with, but in the end we decided it was not a hill worth
dying on, and we all voted for approval, but with Farzaneh
conveying our concerns, and she had also already conveyed
those concerns on the council mailing list prior to the
meeting.

We were very pleased to have our own Manju Chen join us,
despite not being a councillor any more, to lead the
discussion on the Standing Committee on Continuous Improvement
(SCCI) Policy Status Report (PSR) Final Report. Manju did
very deservedly get a lot of praise for having managed
a very complicated process extremely well.

The remainder of the meeting was taken by a discussion on
Upcoming Board-Council Dialogue on SSAD Recommendations (that
again showed the GNSO Council preference for "Small team plus",
a construct that, while allowing non-GNSO parties to
participate, also doesn't really implement the traditional
balancing of powers that we are used to), as well as
an update of Cross-Community Group on Review of Reviews
by Sophie Hay, one of the two GNSO representatives to the CCG,

The next thing coming up for the Council is the Strategic
Planning Session in Barcelona next week.

	Julf