Executive Director's Yokohama Report 28/07/00

— filed under: IDNS, ICANN, IDNO

THE YOKOHAMA ICANN MEETINGS:

Report to Council 28 July 2000

INTRODUCTION

The Chair is providing substantial reports on the Yokohama ICANN meetings which incorporate background material to assist new Councillors to gain a perspective on the recommendations which will put to this Council Meeting. I am therefore not going to cover the same ground, but will offer a precís on my work in Yokohama and several recommendations. Interested Councillors will find other background material in my previous report ⁱ . Because much of this material is politically sensitive internationally I will give details in committee.

I believe it is appropriate to clearly state the approach I take to my delegate's role at these meetings.

I operate from the basis that I am the Society's operational arm, not it's policy arm, and as such I do my best to avoid 'political' statements except in so far as I have clear directives, e.g., arising from the Summits. This is, of course, not always possible, and where it is not then I use my judgement based upon what I know of the Society's history, current policies, and trends arising from such member fora as AGM's. This underlines the value in having more than one set of eyes and ears at such meetings, as my normal course is to raise the 'political' issues with other delegates and a decision is reached as a group. In the end it is the policy arm of the Society, e.g., the Chair, who makes the call on policy/political issues.

My role has been therefore four-fold:

Listen, record, question, and then discuss with other .nz delegates appropriate courses of action.
Attend non-ccTLD sessions where possible to extend our knowledge and representation
Network, network, network - with other ccTLD's, other constituencies, ICANN Board and staff, the GAC members, others.
Report back to Council making recommendations as appropriate.

The effect of this is that I usually focus on "process" - whether this is in debate, in speaking from the floor, or in constructing written statements, presentations etc. I believe it is fair to say that my role in this area has ensured that some formal outcomes were achieved by the meetings.

SESSIONS ATTENDED

July 12 - 0900-1000: Administration Committee (AdCom) of ccTLD Constituency meeting
July 12 - 1000-1100: AdCom Pre-meeting (ICANN funding WG)
July 12 - 1100-1200: AdCom Pre-meeting (ccTLD ByLaws WG)
July 12 - 1300-1800: ccTLD Plenary
July 13 - 0800-0900: BOF on Internationalised Domain Names
July 13 - 0900-1800: ccTLD constituency meeting (afternoon session attended)
July 13 - 0900 -1200: Non-Commercial Domain Names constituency/Internet Democracy Project
July 14 - 0730-0900: AdCom meeting
July 14 - 0900-1200: DNSO General Assembly
July 14 - 1300-1800: DNSO Names Council
July 15 - 0900-1800: ICANN Public Forum
July 15 - 1930-2100: APTLD Internet Seminar Tour planning meeting
July 16 - 0900-1700: DNSsec joint workshop

PROGRESS ON ISSUES

The major focus for ccTLD's at this ICANN meeting was on four areas:

Best Practice Guidelines and Delegation/Redelegation processes
ICANN Funding - contractual relationships needed
By-Laws for ccTLD constituency
And the Internationalised Domain Name System (iDNS) for some

Best Practice Guidelines and Delegation/Redelegation processes

By the Yokohama meeting the ccTLD's had made much progress in coming to general agreement on a Best Practices document and the constituency was looking forward to sitting down with the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) to find areas of agreement and areas for further negotiation (or standing disagreement) so that a strong position paper could be put to the ICANN Board meeting. [The likely alternative was that the Board would adopt the GAC Paper ⁱⁱ put forward at the last meeting in Cairo.] On Friday July 7 the ICANN staff posted a "Status Quo" ⁱⁱⁱ document which most of the ccTLD's did not even know about until they got to Yokohama. The ccTLD's were outraged at this interference in process. The GAC was none too pleased as evidenced in their communiqué. ^iv

ICANN Funding - contractual relationships needed

Little progress. At my suggestion the following statement from the ccTLD's was drafted (in the end I delivered this at the DNSO meeting):

"The ccTLD Constituency of ICANN, meeting in Yokohama, notes that ICANN has stated that it has urgent financial needs;

and notes:

THAT over US $750,000 in donations has already been pledged by it's members in support of ICANN for the Budget year ending 30 June 2000.

The ccTLD Constituency looks forward to progress."

This figure had risen to US $1 million by the Board meeting.

By-Laws for ccTLD

Ongoing work done by the Chair to progress further at Yokohama.

Internationalised Domain Name System (iDNS)

This is going full-speed ahead within the AP region. There are risks associated with implementation before standards are set by the IETF. I drafted the following during the BOF on iDNS and it was adopted by the ccTLD's - however it did not get read into the record at the DNSO or Board meetings. We are working on how to rectify this.

"STATEMENT FROM ccTLD CONSTITUENCY TO DNSO REGARDING MULTILINGUAL DOMAIN NAMES

Yokohama, 13 July 2000

The ccTLD Constituency meeting at the ICANN meetings in Yokohama, 13 July 2000

NOTES the importance of the development of Multilingual Domain Names to the true internationalisation of the Internet;
ACKNOWLEDGES the importance of achieving global technical standards;
AFFIRMS the work of the IETF on establishing consensual technical standards for multilingual Domain Names

and

RECOMMENDS that the DNSO:

RE-AFFIRM that the IETF is the proper body to develop critical Internet technical standards
COMMEND the IETF for their work on Multilingual Domain Names

GENERAL ISSUES

the proposed introduction of new gTLD's and any Trade Mark provisions applied
Names Council Elections
Membership At Large progress and the Election of At Large Directors
Introduction of a new DNSO constituency - Individual Domain Name Owners (IDNO)

These will also be covered by the Chair so I will only comment briefly on the last two.

The Election of At Large Directors

The actions of the ICANN staff on this issue in relation to changes to the By-Laws led to one of the fiercest "public comments" session. I led off the comments from the floor and am pleased to see that we achieved success in this area at least.

Individual Domain Name Owners (IDNO)

This is the first time I've witnessed Joop Teernstra in action in person, though I've watched him by audiocast twice previously. Joop did an excellent job and rewards the Society's investment well. It would seem that the tide has finally caught up to the need for wider representation and there was no problem in getting this passed (though it was subsequently subsumed in a larger review).

NON-ccTLD MEETINGS

The Internet Democracy Project

This meeting was hard to find as it was "hidden" under the Non-Commercial Domain Names Constituency Meeting. The Internet Democracy Project looks to both hold ICANN to it's narrow technical brief, while at the same time recognises that even that brief impacts on the wider community (the Civil Society in the parlance). The meeting considered a "Civil Society Statement on ICANN Elections" ^v As I had no brief on this I took off my ISOCNZ hat (and put on my NGO hat) to speak, and abstained on the voting (after suggesting a process solution for moving the document forward!). I undertook to bring this document back to NZ for discussion and propose circulating it to members for comment.

DNSsec

This was a joint workshop between NLNet Labs, Network Associates, and Nominum Inc which was initiated at the Seoul APTLD meeting and the focus was to be operational and managerial. In the event is was primarily a technical/operational workshop and we did not get full value by my being the attendee. A Domainz delegate would have been much more useful, and indeed it was the CEO of Domainz who pushed the APTLD run the workshop in the first place. I am preparing a separate report on this which is not complete yet - the papers will be published shortly on the CENTR ^vi website and NLNet Labs have test results and other useful links on their site. ^vii

I did not realise just how vulnerable the current DNS is, so this was valuable for me and I did learn a lot. Two points for now - anyone running BIND 4 should scrap it immediately. If they are unwilling to go to v9 (which is built around DNSsec) then they are encouraged to go to v8.2.2 at minimum - 8.2.3 is due shortly which removes the Win32 port because of problems, and fixes a couple of denial of service bugs and an information leak bug. Second - DNSsec cannot block zone file downloads by the determined.

IN COMMITTEE SECTION

RECOMMENDATIONS

In the form of suggested motions

1. THAT the Council of ISOCNZ pay a modest amount for .nz to be a founding member of APTLD

2. THAT the Council reaffirm it's informal decision that ISOCNZ not pay the invoice supplied by ICANN, but instead make a donation for the financial year ending June 30 2000 of $US 10,000 for .nz

3. THAT the Council endorse it's ICANN delegates to continue to work with the appropriate ccTLD community body to negotiate with ICANN for satisfactory contracts before any further funding is provided to ICANN

4. THAT the Council of ISOCNZ endorses the version 2.0 draft of the ccTLD Best Practices Document

5. THAT ISOCNZ congratulate the Chair of ISOCNZ on his election to the first Board of APTLD

6. THAT ISOCNZ, whilst being a participant of the APTLD at a political level, focus it's operational work on the Pacific region

7. THAT the Council of ISOCNZ pay the $US 1000 to become an observer at CENTR

8. THAT the Council ensures that delegates with technical knowledge are added to the representation at ICANN meetings especially the ASO and PSO, and that, funding permitting, these delegates be sponsored to the maximum possible level

9. THAT the Council of ISOCNZ actively encourage, and if necessary sponsor, attendance at the IETF meetings

Sue Leader
Executive Director

ⁱ Background issues paper March 2000

ⁱⁱ "Principles for the Delegation and Administration of Country Code Top Level Domains"

ⁱⁱⁱ "Status Quo" document -

^iv "Communiqué of the Government Advisory Committee, 14 July 2000, Yokohama, Japan

^v "Civil Society Statement on ICANN Elections"

^vi http://www.centr.org./wg/dnssec-wg/

^vii http://open.nlnetlabs.nl/dnssec/