Archive | ICANN

As ICANN attempts to persuade the world that it deserves to be cut loose  from the apron-strings of the United States’ government, it is perhaps appropriate to review whether it is fulfilling the requirements of its founding community, never mind going forward.

The ICANN by-laws state, in Section 1 of Bylaw 3 that:

The Corporation and its subordinate entities shall operate to t’he maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner and consistent with procedures designed to ensure fairness.

Now this is pretty unambiguous.  In the first few ICANN meetings this meant that anyone could participate in the work of ICANN. You just turned up, registered (at no cost), attend and speak the sessions that interested you.

The Government Advisory Committee was a special case — it was formed specifically outside of ICANN, so it is not bound by the bylaws, and membership is restricted to accredited representatives of governments and multi-national organisations.

GAC meetings were originally held entirely behind closed doors, leading to all kinds of speculations. But over the years, the GAC began to feel more and more comfortable — holding joint meetings with other constutiencies and become more transparent. And we learned that, far from devil-worship, the GAC were doing extremely useful work that quite often had a lot in common with the ccTLD community.

Unfortunately, ICANN itself seemed to be going the other way.

In recent years, the perception is that more and more meetings were being held behind closed doors. You only have to look at the proliferation of the ‘CLOSED’ tags on the schedule.

And many of these ‘closed meetings’ are unnecessarily so.

I’ve been in a number of meetings when literally none of the participant knew why it had been scheduled behind closed doors.

It’s fairly self-eviden that if there’s a meeting of the members of a particular Council, or Working Group, that the participants in that group are the only people you’d expect to be debating, but there’s no reason why the general public can’t attend, and follow the discussions.

Transparency demands it, in fact.

The only time a meeting needs to resolve to close its doors, is if, for example it is discussing staff salaries, appointments, or reviewing privileged legal advice.

It was that dangerous radical, Margaret Thatcher, who in 1962, in a Private Members Bill, brought transparency to English local government.

Given the binding nature of the by-law that requires the ‘maximum feasible’ transparency, ICANN should not be doing worse.

A couple of days ago, at the ICANN conference in Dakar, a rumour flew around that there had been an application for redelegation of the .FK domain (Falkland Islands). And that the originator of the request was from, you guessed it, somewhere in Argentina. A quiet word with an official source within the ICANN community then confirmed that, indeed, there had been “some sort of communication along those lines”.

Historically, unlike UN or other international bodies, ICANN has been pleasantly free of the tired old arguments and flashpoints that bedevil relations between nations. Neither the Gibraltar issue, the Cyprus division nor the name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia have ever featured in the meetings of country-code administrators Over in the gTLD world, two of the key players who have worked well together for years – well, one is from Argentina, and the other is from the UK.

There was a hint in the ICANN public forum as to where the sensitivities might lie. It may simply be a matter of a dispute over the name of the territory when ICANN produces documents.

The unfortunate thing is that the label (in this case the country or territory name) often implies much more than the content (delineating a political entity or geographic area).

For many years between 1945 – 1989, Germans born in Königsberg, Memel or Danzig would not have been allowed to visit their birthplace unless their passports were issued to show the Russian, Lithuanian or Polish name. There are many other examples. “Derry/Londonderry”, for example.

These things are all shibboleths.

In his response to Sergui in the Public Forum, Rod Beckstrom’s courtly Spanish although accented, seems extremely fluent, eloquent, and stunningly impressive.

But Sergio is misguided if he thinks ICANN should make its own lists. That way lies chaos. ICANN is not mature enough, nor capable of diplomatically squaring these circles.

And it’s unreasonable to expect ICANN to do this task, since the best minds in the FCO, State Dept, and Foreign Ministries around the world struggle with these issues.

Steve Crocker is right of course.

Then I again, you would expect me to say that, because he is agreeing with me!

In the end, all that is really required is mutual tolerance, courtesy and a determination to work together in the multi-stakeholder model. And that I believe we have in spades in this unique organisation.

To members of the ICANN board, good afternoon. My name is Sergio
Salinas Porto. I am the president of the Argentine Internet Society
of Users. And I participate in LAC-RALO, and I am ALAC member in our
region.

Aside from all of this, I am going to talk like an Argentinian user
who is happy to be participating in this ICANN meeting and in this
multistakeholder proposal implemented. So that we can all
participate.

And I’m going to talk about the Malvinas Islands. You all know that
the Malvinas Islands is an issue that is very related to Argentinians.
And we have identified. In the study of geographic regions, that at
some point the Malvinas Islands were marked as a territorial state.

And the position that the Argentine government has had, as well as the
countries in the Latin America and Caribbean — and that position is
that the Malvinas Islands are not a state and not a territory, but
rather they belong to the national territory of the Argentine
Republic.

But I want to explain that I am not here to say that ICANN has to make
a political decision on political policies. Precisely what I want to
say is that ICANN should not take part or should not get involved in
this. Because, when ICANN speaks about territories, when ccTLDs are
created, when regions are assigned for certain ccTLDs or when services
are given to an Internet service, the RIRs, these imply stake in their
position. Especially when it is said that Malvinas or the Falkland
Islands are a territory. When a dot FK is created or when LACNIC or
something is created, this is taking the position of the Internet
community, even though the Internet community does not decide to take
this position.

We are asking two things, only two. First, that, when ICANN documents
are released, when they’re released in Spanish, that the word
“Malvinas” is used when referring to the Malvinas and then the
Falkland Islands. And, when the English documents are released, that
you first mention Falkland Islands and Malvinas in brackets as nation
states in their resolution 3160.28.

And we also ask that there be a revision on this issue and there be a
revision by the legal team so that we do not incur in the mistake of
having to make a definition in this issue.
Thank you very much. That’s all.