[GTER] ICANN

[Gustavo Molina]

de http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2132226,00.html

The  Internet  addressing  authority  has  been criticised as secretive, but new
president  Paul  Twomey  says  the  organisation is to turn over a new leaf Paul
Twomey,  the recently elected president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names  and  Numbers  (ICANN),  believes  the organisation's next step is to look
beyond  OECD  nations  to  accommodate  the  interests of the Internet community
worldwide.

Twomey  said ICANN has three main objectives in the near future, the first being
to  "be  very  open  and consultative with all the stakeholders". ICANN has been
criticised for ending the practise of online voting to elect board members.

"Formerly there was a process of online voting, but in the view of the committee
it  probably  hadn't  worked as well as it could have," said Twomey. He said the
voting process was very vulnerable to "branch stacking", and pointed out that in
North  America  and  Europe the number of people who voted was in the thousands,
while in South East Asia the number of votes was in the millions.

ICANN  will  now  rely more heavily on the At-Large Advisory Committee, which is
charged  with talking to other Internet organisations and individual users about
how ICANN interacts with them.

The  other  objectives  are  to  fulfil  obligations  set out in a memorandum of
understanding  with  the  US  Department of Commerce, and extend the outreach of
ICANN to global Internet communities, according to Twomey. He added the Internet
has moved from being an OECD community to a truly global community.

Twomey  denied recent reports that he is in favour of governments taking control
of  the  domain  name  system,  saying  the system is "an area of public/private
partnership".

"There  are certain overlaps in public policy, and that's where government plays
a role, and where dialogue should be the strongest," said Twomey.

Perhaps   the   biggest   problem   facing  ICANN  is  the  interoperability  of
internationalised  domain  names  --  particularly  domain  names with non-Roman
characters,  according to Twomey. "This is a very complex issue, technically, in
a business sense and in a linguistic sense," he said.

"For  example, the amount of trade that takes place across Asia Pacific is... at
the  trillion  US  dollar  level, and the primary languages are Chinese, Korean,
Japanese  and  English,"  said Twomey. If the DNS systems in different languages
can't  talk  to  each other, then some of that trade will be jeopardised. Twomey
said that two-thirds of Australian trade goes to South-East Asia.

ICANN  is also concerned about the introduction of IPv6, which will increase the
number of Internet addresses available, and new sponsored top-level domain names
such  as  dot-health.  "It's  important  to  implement  [these] in such a way it
maintains the stability of the Internet," said Twomey.

The whois database, which administers the administration and contact details for
domain  names  is  also  under  review  as ICANN attempts to juggle accuracy and
consistency with privacy concerns.


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Gustavo Molina          mailto:gustavo at molina.com.br