Response to Philip Sheppard's email to the GNSO Council on the .net rfp

["Bruce Tonkin" <Bruce.Tonkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Hello Philip,

First let me re-state a conflict of interest with respect to the .net
RFP.
I am employed by Melbourne IT, which owns 10% of Neulevel, a participant
in the Sentan proposal.

> please note this Telcordia revision (issue 4) seems only to 
> correct a minor typo in the previous version.
> There is still no attempt by Telcordia to react to the public 
> comments to its basic report, beyond the vendor comments.
> There has thus been no reaction to the concern discussed in 
> the last GNSO council meeting.


Actually I think Telcordia did respond to a couple of the issues that
have been raised in Council discussions.

From:
http://www.icann.org/tlds/dotnet-reassignment/review-of-findings-03may05
.pdf 

"Telcordia will not evaluate or address policy considerations"

It does not seem that ICANN has sought any external review of the policy
issues, and review of policy compliance.  Thus presumably this aspect of
the RFP has been left to the ICANN staff or ICANN Board.   Telcordia
carried out a purely technical review.

Telcordia also stated:
"Competition and specific GNSO policies were undefined in the RFP"
Thus Telcordia defined its own sub-criteria and had these reviewed and
approved by ICANN prior to the commencement of the evaluation.   The
focus of these sub-criteria were on "aspects that promote competition in
the registration of domain names".

It seems to me that it is actually the ICANN staff and ICANN the legal
entity that needs to respond to some of the issues raised by the
applicants and by the public comments.

It also seems to me that when Telcordia was selected as an evaluator, it
identified various limitations of the RFP with respect to establishing
an objective evaluation of the applicants.  Some of these limitations
were identified during the public comment process on the RFP.   I think
a deficiency in the process is that Telcordia should have been selected
prior to finalisation of the RFP.  Any issues in carrying out an
evaluation could have been resolved through a public process to finalise
the criteria.    For example a definition of competition could have been
developed with public input.

I expect that the applicants would have provided stronger applications
if they had access to the final scoring sheets and associated metrics
used by Telcordia prior to the submission of their applications.

Regards,
Bruce Tonkin