[Rubber Duck]

What we have not been able to do is present to you a detailed implementation plan.
So the next stage that is now before us, if you are to proceed and the board does vote for this resolution, is that we shall have to sit down and do, in great detail, the actual implementation planning for the related implementation and -- which will be reflected in requests for proposal documentation and draft contracts for the gTLDs.
We must not underestimate how much more work there needs to be done.
And if I can just, quite specifically, pick up some of the points that have already been raised. To the points made by Susan, Wendy and others relating to some of the objections, objection criteria.
We have had the chance to speak to major international, experienced arbitration organizations, and we have had the chance to take -- we have had lawyers in well over a dozen jurisdictions doing work for us, working through these issues, and we have been able to come to the conclusion about that it is implementable. What we will now need to do is go back and further advance that as to what specifically would be required to actually operate a process for implementation.
This is very similar, if you like to think of it at the initiation. Uniform dispute resolution procedures. And one of my colleagues shared with us earlier today, and I thanked them for the idea so let me share it further. If you go back prior to the UDRP, there was no global intellectual property regime. There was intellectual property regimes reflected in national jurisdictions. There was law related to it, there were treaties, but it's reflected in national jurisdictions.
The UDRP process has built a de facto form of -- over its period of time, a de facto form or place for a global approach to intellectual property as it applies to domain names.
We will be confronted with establishing the same sort of framework and evolutionary process for development and the foregrounds of headings going into the future.
So we need to think through, A, very carefully, what are those procedures and criteria that we shall come back, but also, importantly, the role that the arbitrators have played in the UDRP I think is key.
They have built up over a period of time from their experience a body of precedent which now has sway and real effect in the international Internet environment.
We should expect to see and we are looking for that level of experience of arbitrators to bring similar sorts of capability to this development work, and we are very conscious as staff of the advice we have received from the board and board members on some of these policies. They are not at all easy.
So that will be one of the things that we shall be coming back, reporting. We will be making available for public comment and we will be making available for board approval in the months ahead.
A second one is some of the points that the chair of the Governmental Advisory Committee has put forward. Quite a number of the recommendations from the GAC principles have been incorporated so far in the implementation planning.
But we have not had the opportunity to fully take all of the issues and take them to the next level of detail. And it is certainly our intent. Specifically, issues around geographical terms is clearly something that we will have to consider and write up an implementation terms and bring back for consideration with the board and the community.
So I just wish to make the point to the members of the GAC is that the communiqu�s that are put forward, principles for consideration, are certainly being listened to in great detail, or being observed in great detail by staff preparing thinking on implementation. But it's happening in layers as we deal with levels of detail in this task.
Another very important area that we have yet to do to put forward for implementation is the key issue of what is the -- what is an analysis of the industry structural separation of registries and registrars in the generic top-level domain space.
The original ICANN compact, the basis upon which ICANN was first brought together, was on the basis of a separation of registry and registrar. Indeed, it was a concept by the international ad hoc committee prior to the formation of ICANN, or at least it was discussed in that format.
So the concept of a separation of registry and registrar in the industry circumstances as of 1998 was embedded within agreements, within legacy agreements in the generic top-level domains, the legacy agreements.
Clearly, the market continues to evolve.
This issue of how do you think about, in the long term, the benefits to the consumers of whether you should or should not have industry structural separation and what should the rules that apply to that is a key question. As we have already indicated at the Los Angeles meeting and since to members of the community, we have commissioned outside international computational economists, people with experience on these issues, to prepare reports on this specific point.
We have not yet received a report. This report will be made available for comment and will be a key basis of consideration for what may well be terms in the draft contract on that particular issue.
Similarly, the pricing of application fees, as has been pointed out by board members, the application fee process, the council's recommendation is that this process should be cost-neutral. And you will have heard from the chief operating officer that ICANN's budgeting has quite separately been structured -- or by the chair of the finance committee, in particular -- has been structured so that ongoing operational costs and expenditure is structured one way and that there will be separate reporting on the new TLD process and the costs and revenues associated with that.
The recommendation from the council has been that the second part needs to be cost-neutral. In other words, it is cost recovery.
I can inform you that we have so far spent about $10 million, and we -- I expect that in the total, we will spend somewhere between 10 and $20 million. And it will be fully accounted to the community, and full details will be made available.
We will, of course, have to make decisions about which of those costs are appropriately applied. May I give you an example.
The cost of the GNSO Council's work itself in developing the policy, I think that's something like around $2 million. The question is whether that's an appropriate figure that should be included or not.
We shall have to have that as a discussion.
The other part, of course, is over what period of time do you immortalize that expensive, over how many applicants, and what sort of risk premium do you need to bring in, considering inevitably that there shall be lawsuits.
So there's, you know -- part of life.