ICANN Vancouver Report: December 2005 President
This is the last ICANN meeting before the Wellington one in March 2006. The major streams of work for us at the meeting were:
- prepare operationally for the Wellington meeting
- seek sponsorship for the Wellington meeting
- engage with ICANN to ensure our policy objectives are met, particularly around the ccNSO
- invite the ICANN board and community to Wellington for the next meeting.
Wellington meeting
Much of our effort focussed on this. The details and achievements I will leave to Keith to describe in his report to the ICANNZ06 meeting committee, but I will observe that there was a great amount of work put in by all InternetNZ people present. The DVD went down very well, and it seemed that any mention of New Zealand in the public forums achieved a round of applause. We certainly have a high profile in ICANN.
ccNSO
David Farrar attended the ccNSO meetings and the Asia Pacific At-Large group and will provide a detailed update in his report. The key outcome from our perspective is that the by-law changes required from ICANN to alter ccNSO' s constitution into one that will attract more members has been agreed and sent to the ICANN board. This should be ratified before Wellington, so we may see at least .uk and maybe some of the others signing up at that meeting. Also, TWNIC has been confirmed as the secretariat for ccNSO, and its our old friend Ian Chiang who will be doing the work. (Ian was the previous APTLD secretariat.)
WSIS
There was a session on the WSIS and the way forward. Ambassador Karklins, president of the WSIS Tunis phase was present. He distinguished the broad policy objectives of reducing Internet costs and improving access, especially in developing countries, from Internet governance. He described the new Internet Forum, to be set up in the wake of WSIS. He said that the Forum is not an oversight body and will not be involved in day to day operations. It will take nonbinding decisions if it takes decisions at all. The forum will be convened in 2006. Most other things about the forum are yet to be determined.
Karklins said that knowledge of the WSIS decisions was hard to understand, and said that this was because it was fudged (my word, not his) in order to get something that everyone could agree with.
Markus Kummer (WGIG secretariat) said that he found the ICANN community constructive, and that ICANN has coped with tortuous processes and this has paid off. WSIS has ended up by endorsing ICANN and its activities.
Keith was on the stage for this session. He said that WSIS Tunis was a beginning not an end, and that knowledge about Internet operations developed through the process. WGIG showed that participants could go through an open process. Prepcom 3 highlighted a different meaning of open and transparent decision making, because the private sector and civil society were locked out for much of it. He was concerned that the decisions were made by governments on the basis of trading relationships rather than on stability of the Internet.
Lynn St Amour of ISOC gave a hard-hitting speech. Capacity building is still the most important need. There are still millions who can' t get the Net. The genius of the Internet is that its decentralised architecture maximises user power and choice. We must preserve its open and decentralised nature. The Net is not the phone system, and she is very pleased it is not being forced into yesterday' s governance mould. WSIS was an open process by government standards but still a government one and civil society was locked out.
Strategic planning
Debbie and I attended an ICANN strategic planning workshop. My impression was that a lot of work had gone on this and some sensible objectives and measures were being proposed, but that they did seem quite low level compared with what I would see as strategic.
Coalition for ICANN Transparency
This group ran a PR campaign –literally, that' s what they did –throughout the meetings to get mindshare of the attendees over ICANN' s behaviour around the Verisign contract. The group had a booth staffed with PR staff, distributed a summary of the previous day' s events (from its perspective, of course) to all attendees with their morning newspapers, and took sponsorship on the conference satchel. Interestingly, the group itself is non-transparent, in that its website does not make clear who its principals are.
On the second day of the conference the group announced legal action against ICANN to prevent it reaching agreement with Verisign. This action was dismissed by the court during the conference.
IANA
Dave Conrad, the new IANA GM, gave substantially the same presentation to the ccNSO and to the ICANN board. IANA has been doing badly because its staff are doing the wrong things, its processes are a mess, and because ICANN has not prioritised it highly enough. Dave gave figures to show improvements since his hire a few months ago. He also observed that even compiling statistics was very difficult because of the lack of consistent ways to measure things in IANA until now.
IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names)
The ccNSO had a session on this. A working group has revised the IDN guidelines in the light of the phishing and spoofing problems that the previous approach allowed. The technical approach has changed from a "per language" approach to one which takes into account different scripts.
Charles Sha' ban of Jordan highlighted some of the problems. Intellectual property issues loom large. A well-known name could be transliterated or translated into another language in another script, and this could give rise to infringements.
Charles also highlighted the issue of TLDs being IDN. If this is not the case, names are hard to type as people have shift keyboard modes between different labels in names. Directionality is also a problem here in that, if a right to left script is used, it would be logical to have the labels in a name in the opposite order (ie moc.elgoog instead of elgoog.moc). There is considerable scope for confusion.
IDNs are moving ahead rapidly with the version 2.0 guidelines being given to President' s (Twomey, that is) Committee on IDNs for implementation.
Public forums
There was considerable concern, or rather anger, directed at the ICANN board over 2 significant issues - .xxx and the Verisign agreement.
The application for the proposed sTLD .xxx went through the ICANN processes set down over the last year or so and was approved by ICANN in June. Now, of course, it is stalled after the US Government wrote to ICANN and asked it to reconsider its decision. The cause of the US action was the concern expressed by some national governments and some US citizen groups that setting a domain for pornography gave official sanction to it. Much of the anger around this focussed on the GAC which had refused to engage on the topic. According the ICM, the registrar and sponsor of the domain, it sought to brief the GAC at its every meeting from Cape Town onwards. Milton Mueller railed against ICANN for changing the rules in mid-stream by acceding to the US government request for review and urged it show backbone by making a decision on the matter now. Were ICANN to resolve to implement the domain, this step would require the concurrence of the US Department of Commerce, which approves all changes to the root zone. Such a step might cause DOC to refuse the change, which would be the first time its power of veto has ever been exercised.
The board said that the matter had been referred back to the GAC. Becky Burr asked what the board what the GAC' s process for reconsidering the issue was and when the board expected to receive the results. Questioners tried to push the GAC chair, Sharil Tarmizi of Malaysia, to give a timeframe for a recommendation to the board. No commitment was forthcoming although Sharil said it would be discussed intersessionally before the next meeting. Becky also asked how GAC made decisions, observing that the board / GAC relationship seemed not to accord with the US constitution.
This could be a big issue in Wellington. We need to confirm that Netsafe agree with .xxx and seek to clarify the New Zealand government' s position.
ICANN has published a proposed revised Verisign contract. This contract contains many provisions that have caused concern, including presumptive renewal (ie Verisign can' t lose the contract except for non-performance), Verisign' s right to sell data including traffic data and Verisign' s right to increase prices by 7% per annum. The agreement also terminates the outstanding lawsuits that the two parties have against each other since the Sitefinder episode. Attendees gave 2 kinds of comment: many of the ICANN regulars stood up and told ICANN to think again, that the draft agreement had been reached by an unacceptable, closed process, and that the gains for Verisign were not be tolerated. Others said that they were software developers or e-commerce operators and the smooth operation of the .com domain was vital, so they urged ICANN to sign the agreement. Those making this point all appeared new to the ICANN community.
This likely but not guaranteed to be resolved by Wellington. Even if it is there will still be fallout at the meeting.
Comment
Both the issues described above (.xxx and Verisign) have been caused by ICANN not following process. In both cases this is in the face of pressure from more powerful bodies - Verisign with its "corporation-busting" litigation on hand and the US government on the other. What this says about ICANN is that, for all its lofty ideals and values, its board responds to legal threats just as any other small company that wanted to stay in business would.
We may want to think what incentives and other measures can be placed on ICANN by a wider group of its stakeholders to counter the pressure from a few large companies. This appears to be what motivated the Coalition for ICANN Transparency to sue; the notion being that if ICANN responds to legal threats then suing is necessary to get its attention. In practice the CFIT suit can be seen as part of the PR campaign. It is also possible that the .xxx sponsor will resort to litigation if it does not obtain a satisfactory decision soon.
ICANN was clearly sobered by the feedback it received on both the .xxx and Verisign issues. The board appears not to have anticipated the depth of feeling caused in it s community, in the Verisign case at least.
Visit by Laurence Millar
At my suggestion, Laurence Millar (the head of the ICT branch in SSC) visited the meeting. He was there for 1 ½ days at the end of the meeting period, and observed much of the public forum and open board meetings. He was introduced to Vint and several of the other governments and ccTLDs. Laurence came away with a much better idea of what ICANN is, how it operates, and what InternetNZ expects of the government in this area: to support the Internet and ICANN by participating in inter‑government processes to ensure ICANN' s continued ability to operate.
Conclusions
The Wellington meeting should be well-attended, and will have some very significant issues to deal with. These may attract press attention in their own right that we will need to be prepared for.
The ccNSO is likely to become far more representative body at or around the Wellington meeting. While another step on the road, this represents the culmination of a huge amount of work by PDT, Keith and others.
The pressure on the GAC to be responsive and make timely decisions will continue at Wellington and beyond.
The Wellington meeting will become an even greater demand on all our time as it approaches.
We should be looking forward to our own ICANN meeting, and should be preparing to try to make it the best we possibly can.
