This morning Markus Kummer was here to address ICANN about the Working Group on Internet Governance within the UN. He said at several points that it was still not clear what “internet governance” means, and proposed that answering this question would be the work of his Working Group. Nor is it clear what “multi-stakeholder group” means. But there's a process and he is right now (with one other person, and without funding) the Secretariat for that process. The goal is produce a paper by June 2005.
Wolfgang Kleinwachter made an argument that “basic services” — like infrastructure and the DNS — don't require governmental involvement, but “enhanced services” — like applications — require a great deal of government involvement. He's trying to use the telecom structure, flip it upside down, and then have it ensure that the DNS doesn't get touched by this group. I'm not convinced that this makes sense — particularly because the government view of this issue would insist that basic services need regulation too — perhaps even more so.
Another comment: “What ICANN is doing is very much philosophical, not really technological. . . We intend to compete with you. . You're not improving. . . We would like to compete.” This was an individual speaking.
Network security, IP rights, data protection, spam, and multilingualism — that's the list that Kummer gave for internet governance. Cerf comes up and says that ICANN is focused on low levels, enabling components of the internet. [paraphrasing] “The part that stimulates interest in governance lies at the edge of the net. So — spam is a consequence of email. It has little to do with the underlying network. It strikes me that a great deal of the governance debate has to do with the edge. This is outside ICANN's purview. We could help explain technical things to you. Eg, with multilingualism — internet can carry any form of script — so we'll help explain that to you.”
Twomey then says that these issues link back to technology and also to geopolitical issues. [paraphrasing] “So even if ICANN wished it could do something simple in the multilingual or country-name arena, the reality is that there's a treaty that we have to look to. Even if it would be nice to have a one-stop place to fix all problems, you still have to go out and look at the rule of law and go to other organizations — complex web over last hundreds of years.”
Paul Wilson says that MOU now in place is the last one. Question is whether before the end of WSIS there could be some clear statement of relationship between ICANN and USG. It seems to Wilson that if ICANN needs to overcome WSIS concerns it should clarify this relationship.
Twomey responds: [paraphrasing] “Kofi Annan told me that you can't wish away history. This MOU represents a policy statement that USG wishes to transition out of a 30-year history of their role. As was made clear in December in 2003, the countries that will most lose if this technology stops working are those that are least likely to support a government-only solution to this problem. So the MOU is a due-diligence document — checking to make sure that multistakeholder work actually happening. We are ahead of timetable on our milesones, but I can't say whether we'll be able to pass the test for the transition. USG now saying that they're satisfied with us and committed to the transition. MOU is not some sort of charter/legislative something — it's due diligence. You'll find that as ICANN becomes more businesslike we're making contingency planning for failure (we showed this plan to the GAC), and the USG plays no special role on failure in taking functions forward. Govts, cctlds, RIRs, techies will do that.”
Peter Dengate-Thrush reinforces what Vint said about layers — ccTLDs can handle their own local policies. Govts should not necessarily be managing ccTLDs unless there's a relationship that already exists.
Izumi Aizu says [paraphrase] “there are many issues inside ICANN that are relevant to the working group – new gTLDs, whois privacy, multilingualism. Users are difficult to self-organize, and we need money in order to be part of ICANN meetings.”