Internet governance

ICANN Board briefing materials: more cover pages than information

by kierenmccarthy on August 17, 2010

At its recent meeting in Brussels, the ICANN Board resolved that it would publish the briefing materials that are supplied to it in order to make decisions.

This decision was widely seen by those familiar with ICANN as an effort by the Board to pre-empt what would be a recommendation from the independent review team that is looking at the organization’s accountability and transparency (the ATRT). The failure of ICANN to publish any of the material supplied to it by staff has been a bone of contention for a number of years and a large number of people had highlighted the issue to the ATRT in public sessions.

ICANN’s staff this week published, in two parts, 318 pages of Board briefing materials for its meeting in Brussels [Part one | Part two]. Two things immediately struck me when going through the material: one, large proportions of the material released was already publicly available; and two, huge chunks of the documents were redacted. How much exactly? Well, I endeavoured to find out:

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.UK is 25 years old

by kierenmccarthy on July 27, 2010

The United Kingdom’s dot-uk Internet domain is now 25 years old. Which in the Internet world is ancient.

The first dot-uk registrations were in 1985 – a decade before most of us had ever even heard of the Internet. As one of the oldest, dot-uk is also one of the biggest registries in the world. According the organisation that has run the dot-uk registry since 1996, Nominet, it is now the fourth largest registry in the world with 8.5 million registrations (I thought it was fifth after dot-com, dot-net, dot-cn and dot-de. Anyway…)

Of course there shouldn’t really be a “.uk” at all. According to the international standard used to create the “country code” top-level domains on the Internet (ISO 3166-2 (or is it ISO 3166-1?)), the United Kingdom should have been represented by “.gb”, denoting Great Britain. So how come dot-uk even exists?

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Calendar for ICANN ATRT meetings

July 23, 2010

ICANN is currently being reviewed by an independent Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT). Their meetings are open, but I have only been stumbling on them by accident.
A closer look at the ATRT’s webpage reveals at the very bottom of the page a PDF that contains details of their future meetings. Not exactly the [...]

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Reflection on ICANN (Brussels)

June 26, 2010

So I have an unresolved sadness about ICANN at the end of this Brussels meeting, so I figured I would type it out to figure out why.
Like so many people in the “community”, I feel a strange sense of loyalty to the organization and yet spend about half my time being critical of it. I [...]

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ICANN’s two missing accountability clauses

June 25, 2010

Earlier this year, the organization that oversees the domain name system, ICANN, saw the first use of its Independent Review Process – its highest level of review for decisions that affect billions.
The IRP decided conclusively against ICANN. The issue was whether the organization had been right to deny the application for dot-xxx as a new [...]

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Dot-xxx approved by ICANN Board

June 25, 2010

As flagged up yesterday, the ICANN Board has approved the dot-xxx Internet extension at its Board meeting just now in Brussels.
It did so almost unanimously (two abstentions) but rather grumpily, however, with several members saying they were “uncomfortable” with the decision and appearing the blame the “process” for forcing them to make a decision. The [...]

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Dot-xxx to be approved tomorrow

June 24, 2010

The domain name system’s overseeing body, ICANN, will approve the controversial Internet extension dot-xxx, designed for online pornography, at its Board meeting tomorrow.
The pre-announcement came in an extraordinary statement read out at the start of the public forum at ICANN’s meeting in Brussels by the organization’s general counsel, John Jeffrey.
The statement said that the [...]

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ICANN Day 3: Good news all around

June 24, 2010

I’ll be honest: I didn’t go to many Wednesday sessions at ICANN Brussels. At least not physically. The remote participation tools mean that, unless you want to actually raise a point at the microphone, you can settle yourself down somewhere more comfortable and follow events on your laptop (and even your iPhone with the Adobe [...]

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Why ICANN doesn’t need to go back to the GAC over dot-xxx

June 23, 2010

This Friday, it looks as though the ICANN Board will follow the clear conclusions drawn by its independent review and approve dot-xxx.
Given the importance of the first use of the review process, the importance of the Board being seen to be accountable and the fact that the community was pretty unanimous in recent public [...]

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ICANN Day 2: The bells! The bells!

June 22, 2010

Nothing aids careful discussion and debate more than loud repetitive ringing. So thank you the Square Meeting Centre in Brussels for introducing not one but two ringing systems that go off every 30 minutes: a fire alarm and the bells from the nearby cathedral.
Despite this auditory assistance, the second (third) day of the ICANN meeting [...]

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