By Nick Patience
The chair of the committee set up to advise the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on government- related issues got a predictably rough ride at the ICANN meeting in Berlin yesterday. The governmental advisory committee (GAC) held a closed session lasting most of the day before its chair, Paul Twomey finally took questions in an open forum in the early evening.
Twomey had to deal with a lot of criticism over the closed nature of the GAC meeting. He said it was necessary as government representatives would simply resort to press release-style platitudes if forced to deal out in the open and he claimed that some of the countries had been at war with one another only a few years ago and therefore were sensitive about dealing with issues in public – even if it is only about domain names.
Many argued that the role of the GAC, despite being officially just an advisory one, was government intervention by another name. They protested that the whole point of ICANN is the private sector taking over control of the DNS from governments, and this goes against the whole point of ICANN. Twomey countered that this was not the case and reiterated that the board could ignore GAC’s advice if it chooses to do so.
It was not clear who actually attended the GAC meeting, but whoever it was claimed to represent over 33 governments and treaty organizations worldwide. Twomey made it clear that questions should only be directed at him and not at any other members of the GAC.
The group issued a document outlining a few issues upon which it was to advise ICANN. First, it will recommend the adoption of some of the findings of the recent report by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on the management of the domain name system. Specifically it recommends the adoption of the principles on best practices, dispute resolution and cyber-squatting. It also advocates ICANN adopting WIPO’s recommendations on the transparency of data about domain name registrations.
In fact the GAC is so enthusiastic about the WIPO findings that it wants to hear back from the ICANN board by the time of the next ICANN meeting in late August about its implementation of the dispute resolutions mechanism. Although some at the meeting called for a delay in implementing any of the WIPO proposals until they have been discussed further, Twomey says the GAC feels the report, which went from a draft in November 1998 to a final version at the start of this month, has already had sufficient input from the public and interested parties.
The GAC also recommends that where the manager of a country’s own top-level domain does not have the support of the relevant community, ICANN should act to reassign management of the domain. Just such an issue came up when representatives from two country’s ccTLDs were apparently expelled from the GAC meeting, one of which because it was not said to be a national government and the other – Moldova – because the private company running the ccTLD did not represent the interests of the people of Moldova. Regions such as Taiwan and Hong Kong were also excluded because they do not constitute national governments. There were some plaudits for Twomey and his committee among those gathered at the public meeting, but overall the mood was suspicious and at times, downright hostile.
