The four day ICANN meeting at Shanghai is now in progress.
The meeting being held between October 28 to 31 will discuss various issues
relevant to the domain name space management including the composition of the
Advisory Committees.
The agenda for different days can be seen
here.
One of the main issues that will be discussed during this
meeting is implementation of the recommendations of the Evolution and Reforms
Committee.
Different working groups will discuss with the participants
the relevant issues such as the implementation of IPV6 naming protocol,
Internationalized Domain Names, Registry issues, Participation of National
Governments in the management of ccTLDs etc.
The forum will also debate on an "Uniform Domain Name
Deletion Policy" after the expiry of a registered domain name. (Ed: As
visitors of naavi.org will recall, several issues of domain name abuse
relating to Indian Clients have been observed in the recent past due to delays
in the renewal of domain names. Professional bodies such as CII-South had
faced acute embarassments due to the booking of their expired domain names by
pornographic sites).
The "Who is Taskforce" will discuss the issues concerning
making the "Who is Database" available to public. This is both a "Privacy
Issue" and a " Right to Essential Information Issue".
The Security and stability advisory committee will also
submit its recommendations on issues concerning the security and stability of
Internet naming systems. The relevance of this cannot be underestimated in the
light of the recent denial of service attack on the Domain Name root servers.
Additionally, it is expected that the representatives of
the At Large Advisory Committee would be nominated during the meeting. This
will be the first body of the Net users to be represented in the ICANN after
the abolition of the election process.
As in the previous occasions, it appears that India will go
unrepresented in these deliberations. Ideally, the Indian Government should
have constituted different sub committees to deliberate on each of the issues
that ICANN was likely to deliberate during the meeting and developed policy
recommendations to be presented at the meeting.
Unfortunately, unlike the "Spectrum Committee"
envisaged under the proposed Communication Convergence Bill, Information
Technology Act -2000 does not address the "Domain Name Issues" and there is no
other body which is focusing on the same.
Considering the importance of the Cyber Space Economy to
the future of India, we need to wake up to the developments in the domain name
space and be prepared to participate in international meetings of this nature
so that our country's interests do not go unrepresented.
naavi.org had brought this up to the attention of the
relevant Government agencies during the time of the previous Bucharest
Meeting.
Shall we hope that we will be able to correct this
lacuna at least when the next meeting at Amsterdam comes up on December 14 and
15?.
If this is to be achieved, action has to start
immediately.
naavi.org welcomes suggestions from the public on an
action plan for putting up a representation of India in the next ICANN meeting
where the representation to most of the sub-committees under the new norms
would be frozen for a few years.
(P.S: Naavi represents At Large Organization Committee in
India which focuses on the public participation in ICANN activities.)
Naavi
October 29, 2002
Related Article:
After Bucharest, What
Should India do?
