ICANN Friday
Calling all interested civil society groups, universities, and academics - please be involved in ICANN working groups. There’s a worry - it’s a personal worry of mine, and I’m speaking only for myself - that ICANN isn’t getting enough input from these actors. The GNSO restructuring will include a broadening of the “stakeholder group” for noncommercial registrants as well as a focus on open working groups as the atomic unit for policymaking. This means that thoughtful, persuasive people from the noncommercial side (as well as the commercial side, of course) will have an opportunity to get involved in a single-issue working group without having to navigate all the complexities of ICANN’s structures and politics.
Friday was the public board meeting. Our new Chair is efficient and the Board wasn’t given anything substantial to actually *decide,* so we zoomed through the agenda and finished before the mid-morning coffee break.
As I said during the meeting, I’m worried about the new gTLD process recommendations, particularly the idea that ICANN is going to decide which strings are “contrary to generally accepted legal norms relating to morality and public order that are recognized under international principles of law.” (During the week, both “blasphemy” and “sedition” were added to these norms.) And the idea that an application will be rejected if “an expert panel determines that there is substantial opposition to it from a significant portion of the community to which the string may be explicitly or implicitly targeted.”
These are just strings without context, limits on the use of these strings can’t be enforced, and it’s a big, diverse world out there that doesn’t harmonize on content or communities. (What does “implicitly targeted” mean, anyway?) But the next step is for ICANN staff to narrowly interpret the recommendations in some way that makes them implementable in staff’s view, and for that implementation to be discussed with the GNSO council. I’m hopeful that this can happen in short order; I’d like to see us going ahead with new gTLD applications.
I’m also worried about the “fast track” for IDNs that would be subject to the approval of governments (that’s the GAC’s view, anyway). ICANN has been well-served by being able to point to the ISO 3166-1 list for the authoritative reading of “what is a country or territory, and what code stands for that country or territory.” Trying to create IDNs on the fly as an exception to the ongoing IDN policy process (that’s the “fast track”) without an authoritative list may put ICANN in the middle of definitional disputes, may undermine ICANN’s existing policy processes, and suggests that *all* ccTLDs should be subject to governmental approval - which is not the current situation. I’m all for IDNs, and ICANN should have rolled them out sooner in my opinion, but it won’t make sense to over-correct for the slowness by adopting an arbitrary policy.
After the board meeting I did indeed visit the Univ. of New Delhi Law School, and it was a treat to be there.