One of the “nice thing” been an ICANN regular is you get to travel to all sort of exotic places for ICANN meetings. You also get invitations to castles and palaces hosted by Ministers and Mayors. For example, like having dinner at the Cape Castle, the oldest castle in African continent.
Read the rest of this entry »
During the breakfast pre-panel discussion, a few of us were sitting around and discussing IDN Top Level Domains (TLDs). Normally, such debates goes no where but surprisingly, we actually got some agreement this time!
The first thing we note is that there is no perfect solution. Every proposals has some problems – it does not work with ccTLD; it breaks gTLD; it does not handle minority languages/scripts; it has collision with other languages; etc. So we should just try to find a solution which has the least amount of pain, so long it works, can scale and can be implemented reasonably.
Another thing to note is that gTLD, sTLD and ccTLD are very different from one another. It is unlikely we can find a solution that works for all type TLD. We should tackle them individually and differently.
Read the rest of this entry »
Why is it that we have very interesting discussion openly during dinner or breakfast, but put everyone on a panel on stage, everyone become so quiet and so polite?
This happened at my IDN Workshop yesterday. I wasn’t able to join the pre-panel dinner but I was told everyone have a lot of interesting debates. The morning preparation meeting I have with them are also very heated. I thought we going to have a lot of fun later on stage.
But no, I was so wrong.
I dont mean the panel is lousy (it isn’t – the panelists done a great job I think) but it could have been so much more vibrant and exciting, only if they aren’t all so polite and more willing to speak their mind.
Is it because after two session of debate, everyone is tired? If so, maybe we should not have all these pre-panel meetings. Or perhaps I should just armed myself with a video recorder at the pre-panel dinner and replay them at the session itself.
ps: Of course, I am just kidding on the last suggestion. :-)
Arrived in Cape Town last night. I think they overbooked the hotel so they give me a president suite1 which is pretty nice but pointless for me. Never figure out why anyone need such a big room.
Anyway, I am here for the ICANN meeting. Particularly, I am helping to moderate a panel for the IDN Workshop. I missed the IDN panel dinner last night so I catch up with my panelists only this morning. Other then the usual suspects from the ccTLD, we also have Microsoft (Michel) and Mozilla (Darin, presented by William) this time round. It is going to be fun ;-)
We also have pretty heated discussion on IDN.IDN2 which is pretty interesting. Most importantly, we actually have some rough consensus so I’m going to talk about that in the following policy panel later.
1 Yes, I am switching room later today.
2 See my previous article on IDN.IDN.
Vint Cerf, who is normally a private person, wrote an article for CircleID as titled.
In a sense, ICANN has become the only globally visible body charged with any kind of oversight for the Internet. The scope of this oversight responsibility was deliberately and intentionally limited in the process of the creation of ICANN. But as the Internet continues to grow, as domain names become increasingly visible in the context of the World Wide Web, and as the so-called “dot.com” bubble expanded between 1998 and early 2000 and then burst, many people with concerns or complaints about problems associated with the Internet or use uses (and abuses) have turned to ICANN expecting it to address many of these issues.
This is very much what I said about ICANN in the last one year, that ICANN charter is names & numbers; that while it is part “Internet Governace” but it is not all to it; that we should not expect ICANN to solve all the other Internet problems; that ICANN is in this unfortunately position been the ‘only girl in town’, or in this case, ‘the only target to shoot’…
The common misconception is the Internet is all de-centralization. It is actually both; Above IP, it is and should be absolutely decentralize but when you dealing with core infrastructure (IP & DNS), like it or not, that’s is centralized.
Another misconception is ITU is all about the ‘old worlds’ and didnt ‘get it’. Regardless of the history, look at some of the issues that has been discussed in the recent WTSA and it is obvious they did get it.
Back to topic, there are some fundamental problems with ICANN. Here are some of what I think:
1. Building trust among stakeholders – particularly governments around the world is extremely important yet lacking. The reality is that many governments play a big role in developing Internet in their countries (especially outside US) and not engaging them is silly. Transparency is important to build trust, not the other way round. ICANN been a US corporation is also not helpful to towards this end.
2. Speaking of trust, it is also related to the arcane root server operation. Be more open about it – that all the root servers (including those shared-anycast ones) takes the zone file from “A” Root Server, which is operated by Verisign. Verisign in turns takes the zone file changes order from ICANN/IANA signed off by US DoC. The US DoC link is bad. Hiding it wont make it go away.
3. ICANN is bloated; for the amount of work they are chartered to do, they have too many highly paid executives doing too many travelings and too many committess bloated by lawyers & etc. They should look at ways to cut-cost and ‘delegates’ more to the community. All they just need to do is ask and RIRs and regional Internet organizations would be more then happy to help. Not engaging these existing organizations and having more committees of their own only increase cost yet adding little value to the whole.
ICANN has just announced the nominations for ICANN board and Joi Ito was “selected” as the representive for Asia Pacific.
I play a small role in recommending Joi to the nomination committee and also providing advises to him during the process. I am glad he was selected by the NomCom. Congulations and welcome to ICANN. :-)
Yohoo! Verisign suit against ICANN (wrt to Sitefinder) is dismissed! :-)
But then again, everyone (including Verisign I believe) expected this suit will go nowhere. IMHO, the other reason it is filed is to set a court precedence of what is within ICANN ‘jurisdiccion’ over Verisign and what’s not. As to that goal, Verisign has already won as the suit already forced ICANN to make declaration of their representation.
I feel quite bad to controdiact Vint Cerf in the open forum but my comment that whether to have IDN Top Level Domain is an ICANN issues and not IETF was well-received with an applause from the audience. So I am really glad that ICANN board passing the resolution to form a new President committee on IDN and gave acknowledgement to the RFC 3743 JET Guidelines ;-) I wish we could have more concrete action plan but at least this is a start. I believe we should also try to rope in the Arabic community, particularly those who are doing real work on the ground like GCC. I may not agree with everything they do (like the alt. Arabic root) but I respect them for doing work to move their community forward.
I stayed on one more day because Jonanthan from BBC World wants to do an interview with me on IDN issues (in my personal capacity of cos). We end up wandering various part of Chinatown in KL looking for interesting location shots. It is suppose to be shown 2 weeks from now and I wonder how it will look like…too bad I dont subscribe to cable.
Incidently, the corridors conversations, bar and dinners discussions clearly indicate the recovery of this industry. I feel I am back in the dotcom days with companies investing in new ideas. If the last ICANN is gloomy, this one certainly feel good!
[Update 31st July: Jonanthan informed me the radio session is now available on BBC Webcast]
[Update 10th Aug: the TV interview is also available online]
Khaled Fattal, CEO of MINC gave an presentation of MINC yesterday on MINC. A very nice presentation with a nice story, about involvement of local community, respects of different culture, one that is difficult for people who believe in the bottom-up process to dispute. But he never managed to answer my question what has all of these do with multilingualism at all because he sound like he is talking about general Internet Goverance instead. And I certainly dont remember MINC’s charter covers Internet Goverance issues. Vint cut short our debate but gave a wonderful analogy of cow-cart vs rocketship and asking him to start building his own rocket instead :-) Amadeu Abril i Abril also went up to the mike at the end of the session and make an excellent speech, much better then I could.
Most of today was spend in the UNDP-APDIP Internet Goverance discussion. Since this is kind of the first meeting, most of it are in doing some high-level overview of things. But of interest, most support the effort, requesting to create some framework to raise issues from the AP region to the WSIS. Adam contribution on the issues to be address like spam, interconnection, security, internet crime, etc was a excellent one but unfortunately most of the people around the table arent ready to discuss it yet.