Summary

  • The GNSO Council reappointed Sebastien Ducos as its liaison to ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee through the ICANN93 annual meeting in 2028.
  • Ducos's annual report describes a missed bilateral in Seville, late exchanges on registration-data accuracy and a proposal to get policy leads talking between meetings.

A liaison's job is to make sure two rooms hear each other before the doors close. In June, the rooms in Seville had plenty to say about registration data and no bilateral meeting at which to say it together. That account comes from the liaison himself. The GNSO Council has now given Sebastien Ducos a second two-year term, ending at ICANN93 in 2028.

In his 30 September report, Ducos says communication among the liaisons broke down ahead of ICANN86. The GAC had asked to skip the bilateral. Questions about registration-data accuracy and a 15-day registrant-verification timeline then arrived late in the meeting cycle. He calls the exchanges reactive. That is a precise institutional failure: the topic reached the table after the table had been taken away.

The repair he describes began in August and September. Topic leads on both sides exchanged questions, and a pre-ICANN87 discussion of accuracy and verification took place on 28 September. For the next term, Ducos wants at least one exchange between conferences on live subjects such as accuracy and DNS abuse, with six to eight weeks' warning before one group formally asks the other for action. Those timings are his proposals. Their value will be visible in the next contentious policy conversation, when the first difficult question arrives early enough to change a draft.

The liaison's written job description makes him a messenger in both directions: he explains GNSO work neutrally to the GAC, brings GAC views back to the Council and observes Council meetings. The Council can renew him once. It has done so. A second term buys continuity; it also gives readers a clean way to judge whether the message starts arriving on time.