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International Affairs Committee Report - 4 March 2006

22nd February 2006


IAC has met face to face in Auckland in January. The main agenda items were strategic and business planning.

Business handled through this period is:

  • APTLD representative
  • IGF (Internet Governance Forum)

There are also two major outstanding items on ICANN’s agenda which will likely be important at the Wellington meeting:

  • .xxx
  • the Verisign contract
APTLD representative

Peter Dengate Thrush has another year to run in his position as APTLD board member.

Next year there will need to be a nominations process.

Internet Governance Forum

The IGF is the outworking of the WSIS process. Recall that WSIS had the potential to produce a UN bureaucracy which would duel with ICANN and USG for control of the Internet. WSIS finally agreed instead to a ‘forum’ for governments to discuss cooperation on the Internet.

At the preliminary IGF meeting last week, the participants agreed that:

  • the IGF should meet only once per year with each meeting to last 3-4 days.

  • IGF should be multi-stakeholder (not just governments) with participation open to any with expertise and interest

  • The agenda will be set by a multi-stakeholder programme committee

  • The secretariat will be in Geneva, funded by the Swiss government, and headed by Markus Kummer (who headed the WGIG secretariat)

  • The main topics for the first meeting later this year are to be capacity building, multilingualism and spam.


.xxx

Recall that this is a proposed sponsored top level domain intended to provide a single home for adult content so it can be filtered more easily. The application has passed through ICANN’s processes and has since been held up after USG asked ICANN to review the application, following complaints from the government of Brazil. At Vancouver, a lot of heat was placed on the GAC over this issue.

IAC’s and InternetNZ’s view is that ICANN should follow its own processes and that we regret interference by governments in those processes.

Verisign contract

Verisign holds the contract with ICANN for the registry for .com and .net. It is also engaged in litigation with ICANN over ICANN having forced Verisign to take down its ‘site finder’ service which, many claimed, effectively broke the DNS.

Verisign and ICANN have negotiated a draft contract which gets rid of the outstanding litigation, but provides Verisign with an indefinite presumptive right of renewal and allows for 7% per annum price increases. This is held to be unacceptable by many Internet users and registrars. A recently-posted revised draft softens some of these provisions but it is unlikely to meet with wide approval among the ICANN community.

This topic may cause fierce debate at Wellington.

Colin Jackson

Chair, IAC

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