ICANN Ponders International Domain Names
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Consistency, clarity and support for non-Latin characters are considered by Internet governance group.
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(InfoWorld) - A U.K. governance organization will review The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as it tries to increase transparency afterÂ criticism of its close U.S. government ties. The report from One World Trust will be made public when it's completed next year, said Paul Levins, ICANN's executive officer and vice president of corporate affairs. ICANN, a private, nonprofit organization that controls the administration of the DNS (domain name system), is reworking its accountability practices, Levins said. "Frankly, the community has told us this is an issue we need to deal with," Levins said. In October, ICANN started a consultation toÂ develop new management operating principles, Levins said. ICANN also plans to document its board meetings better and revamp its Web site to make its 12,000 pages more accessible. The organization, based in Marina del Ray, California, falls under theÂ oversight of the U.S. Commerce Department, which has led to criticism that the U.S. government wielded too much influence over the Internet's development. In September, an existing agreement between the department and ICANN was extended for three years, although the U.S. government could grant ICANN total autonomy after 18 months.
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Weeklong discussions in India about the creation of online domain names entirely in languages other than English led to greater understanding but no major decisions, the chief executive of the Internet's key oversight agency said Friday.
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Internet users may soon see two new domain name suffixes in their browser window: &quot;.post&quot; to identify the postal community and &quot;.
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A proposal by the overseer of the Internet&#39;s addressing system could make it a lot easier for people to reserve the domain name they want for their Web site.
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened a week-long meeting on Monday where it will address critical issues like new generic top level domains, internationalized domain names and the organization's efforts to become more accountable and transparent. The international public meeting, the second of three of its kind ICANN has planned for this year, will also include discussions about a major expansion of available Internet Protocol addresses, as well as about the process for accrediting registrars. Taking advantage of the meeting's venue in San Juan, Puerto Rico , the agenda also includes the first General Assembly of the Latin American and Caribbean Regional At Large Organization, formed in March. "We're very pleased to be in Puerto Rico," said Paul Twomey, ICANN's president and CEO, during a press conference at the Caribe Hilton hotel, adding that the meeting's agenda is full of significant issues and efforts. ICANN oversees the Internet's address system and as such carries the critical responsibility of ensuring the overall security and stability of the Internet. A key effort ICANN is involved with is improving the transparency of its operations and the accountability of its decisions, areas critics regularly complain about. "We must ensure we're in the leading edge of transparency and accountability," Twomey said. ICANN commissioned an independent study about its transparency and accountability in December from London's One World Trust, which reported its findings in March. It concluded that ICANN is a very transparent organization but that it can improve certain areas, including explaining better how it uses input from stakeholders when making decisions. ICANN has been taking steps to address these issues and, earlier this month, issued a response to the report. On Saturday, ICANN released for discussion at the San Juan meeting online a set of draft principles and frameworks for accountability . ICANN wants to improve making it easier for people to find the vast amount of information on its Web site, Twomey said. ICANN also wants to be faster in posting information online about its meetings and initiatives, he said. However, the transparency and accountability issue will likely remain on the table until ICANN removes its special ties to the U.S. government. Since its creation in 1998 to progressively absorb Internet management functions until then handled fully by the U.S. government, ICANN has been criticized for lacking transparency in its decision-making process and for responding disproportionately to U.S. interests. In September, the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. Commerce Department and ICANN was renewed for three additional years, a disappointment for those who had hoped for ICANN's full autonomy. Also in this week's agenda is the Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) initiative, which aims to revamp the DNS (domain name system) so that it can support domain names in a broad range of languages and alphabets that can't be represented via the ASCII character set. "You'd think this would be simple. It has turned out to be really hard, technically," said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman. Another initiative on deck for discussion is the drafting of a policy to introduce new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to add to the well-known ones like .com and .net. Like the IDN effort, this gTLD project has run into technical challenges. The meeting will also feature a tutorial on the IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) effort to expand significantly the amount of IP addresses, because of the expected shortage under the current IPv4, Cerf said. The San Juan meeting, ICANN's 29th International Public Meeting, ends Friday and will feature more than 30 sessions and workshops.
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is seeking ideas and opinions on ways to modify the agreement terms it enters into with Internet registrars to protect individuals and organizations that do business with them. The effort stems from theÂ recent debacle involving registrar RegisterFly, which ICANN had to strip of its accreditation due to poor quality of service, which prompted massive and loud complaints from many of its tens of thousands of customers. At its 29th International Public Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, ICANN on Monday hosted a workshop to discuss possible changes to its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and steps it is taking to make sure registrars provide good service to their customers. Participants in the workshop, titled "Protection of Registrants," generally agreed that the RAA is due for a makeover to prevent another RegisterFly-like situation and because much has changed since the RAA was last amended about seven years ago. "We need to deal with registrar accreditation and the procedures by which we accommodate registrants," said Susan Crawford, an ICANN board member who moderated the discussion. Among the issues panelists and audience members debated was the need for Internet registrars -- companies ICANN accredits to sell Internet domain names to individuals and organizations -- to escrow their customers' data with ICANN or another third party. That way, in the event of a registrar meltdown, ICANN, which manages and oversees the Internet's domain name system, could access the customer data and help customers switch to another registrar. "This is important to registrants. We want to be able to reconstitute a registrar if it fails so that registrants can continue to have access to their domains and be able to work with them," Crawford said. Ironically, in its current form, the RAA has a data escrow provision but it hasn't been implemented for several reasons. "It put a burden on ICANN to receive data, so the cost was all on ICANN. And until recently, there wasn't a budget item for the registered data escrow program," Crawford said. Details on how this escrow will work need to be established, such as what will constitute a valid trigger for the data release and what data will be stored. Jon Nevett, policy and ethics vice president of Internet registrar Network Solutions, said that ICANN's Registrar Constituency, which he chairs, has worked in recent months on the data escrow program with ICANN, which recently requested proposals to provide escrow services. A key point for registrars is how ICANN will protect their customers' data if it needs to be transferred, Nevett said. "There is a lot of private information in this data," he said. One of the issues ICANN is trying to work through is what data would be put in escrow. Under the current RAA provisions that data includes: registrant, administrative contact, technical contact, billing contact, name servers and expiration dates. "When the provision was drafted, these were the elements that were believed to be critically necessary to restore the functionality of a registrar," said Mike Zupke, ICANN's Registrar Liaison Manager. Changing the data requirements would require amending the RAA, he said. This issue is an interesting one, considering individuals' privacy concerns when registering a domain name, concerns that have prompted the appearance of "proxy" services that let registrants "hide" from the public some of the information they submit to a registrar, Crawford said. Nevett argued that providing data to an escrow party that the registrant wants to keep from public view doesn't compromise privacy, because the escrow data wouldn't be publicly available. Meanwhile, Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports Webwatch, suggested that ICANN provide more information about registrars, including ratings, so that consumers can make better informed decisions when choosing one. There are about 900 registrars currently, according to ICANN. "Measures that increase compliance are good," Brendler said, adding that ICANN might consider setting up a system to rate registrars and hold registrars to best practices guidelines. Stacy Burnette, ICANN's director of contractual compliance, said that starting next month her team will publish a report twice a year with results from their registrar audits. Citing preliminary results, Burnette said that in March her team found that of 881 audited registrars, 19 had non-working Web sites, and that in April, 192 registrars had invoices that were overdue by 30 days or more. Based on these findings, her group is seeking compliance from the offending registrars. Her group is also currently doing a "code of conduct audit" to ensure that registrars are not engaging in conduct that would give "the appearance of impropriety," she said. Meanwhile, a future audit will focus on registrars' back-end systems performance, checking on issues like availability, downtime and outages, to see if they are meeting standards set in their agreements with ICANN. Moreover, an ongoing audit is focusing on registrar data retention requirements, while a future audit will verify whether registrars are maintaining the required commercial liability insurance levels, she said. "We want to encourage compliance to enhance ICANN's ability to preserve and enhance the operational stability, reliability, security and global interoperability of the Internet," Burnette said.
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(InfoWorld) - Participants made good progress discussing changes to Internet governance during an ICANN meeting in Puerto Rico that closed on Friday, leaders of the organization said. One topic that leaders worked on was the future enablement of non-Latin characters in domain names. ICANN hopes to support Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, and other characters in the future, but that's easier said than done. In 2003, ICANN made an attempt to widen the acceptable characters but found that its rules were too permissive, said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman. "There could be confusion between similar registrations that might mislead users," he said during a conference call to discuss the meeting. One potential source of confusion is that some characters in different alphabets might look similar but mean different things. For example, in Cyrillic, the word for "restaurant" looks in the Latin alphabet like "pectopaht." That opens the door for users to register domains in different languages in a way that could confuse users. ICANN hopes to develop rules that will prevent such confusion. ICANN plans to be able to test the use of international domain names live on the Internet by November. The test will include a mechanism to take them out instantly if they create a problem, Cerf said. The group has already tested the process in the lab. "We are confident that none of the infrastructure is likely to encounter problems, but you never really know until it's in that live environment," he said. The meeting also included a discussion on continuing to encourage IPv6 use. That's particularly important now because ICANN has determined the current system, supported by IPv4, for allocating the numerical address space will exhaust available numbers around 2011 or 2012, Cerf said. The wide adoption of IPv6 will support the continued addition of new numerical addresses. Cerf said there was significant progress in efforts to enable digital signatures to help authenticate the match between domain names and Internet addresses. The digital signature would validate that the Internet address associated with a domain name wasn't corrupted, either maliciously or accidentally. "This is a significant change in the core architecture of DNS," he said. The group also worked on developing a more regular process for allowing the introduction of additional generic top-level domains. ICANN worked on such policies in 2000 and 2003 and will take those experiences and try to establish a more regular practice for making additional domain names available, Cerf said. ICANN is on track for the introduction of new domains by the middle of 2008.
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(InfoWorld) - Internet governance experts remain divided overÂ last week's decision to extend the U.S. government's oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), with some calling it appropriate and others portraying it as unwise. The strong sentiments on either side reflect a chronic, troubling tension that has enveloped ICANN since 1998, when it was formed to progressively absorb Internet management functions until then handled fully by the U.S. government. Often accused of lacking transparency in its decision-making process and of responding disproportionately to U.S. interests, ICANN carries on its shoulders the critical responsibility of ensuring the security and stability of the Internet. With so much at stake in matters of global communications and business, it's no surprise that governments and private-sector enterprises have high expectations and deep concerns about ICANN. Those supporting the continued U.S. supervision say ICANN isn't yet ready to manage the Internet's domain name system by itself, and note that ICANN, a private, nonprofit company in California, has to improve how it makes decisions and establishes policies. By contrast, the other camp argues that while ICANN is far from perfect, the U.S. involvement creates political friction with other countries and delays ICANN's development. Over the years in a series of memorandums of understanding (MOUs), the U.S. Commerce Department has been ceding tasks to ICANN, with the goal of eventually giving ICANN full autonomy. Last week, the MOU got extended for three more years, and increased ICANN's autonomy. However, the Commerce Department continues helping ICANN increase transparency and accountability and overseeing the security and operation of root name servers. "Extending the MOU was the only reasonable course of action at this point," said David McGuire, director of communications at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), in a phone interview. "ICANN has to improve its accountability and transparency and openness. ICANN needs to address that before we can have a meaningful conversation about it standing alone," McGuire said. The CDT is a Washington, D.C., nonprofit think tank focused on Internet public policy issues. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) in Arlington, Virginia, also supported the decision, calling it, in a statement, "a necessary and important step" toward full autonomy, while noting also that ICANN must improve its transparency. Meanwhile, the Internet Society, a nonprofit education and policy group in Reston, Virginia, said in a statement that the new agreement moves beyond an oversight model, gives ICANN more flexibility and assigns the U.S. government "a more discrete role." However, some predict the continued U.S. oversight will do more harm than good. Ian Peter, senior partner at Ian Peter & Assoc. and founder of the Internet Mark 2 Project in Australia, said via e-mail that ICANN needs a healthier dose of internationalism. "The oversight role for ICANN should be global and multistakeholder -- not a single government," wrote Peter, whose Internet Mark 2 Project analyzes issues affecting Internet governance. Oscar Robles-Garay, general manager of Mexico's Internet NIC (network information center) for the .mx domain, feels pessimistic about last week's decision. "Three years from now we'll have the same problem as today, exacerbated by even more strident criticism from some governments against ICANN and the Commerce Department," Robles-Garay wrote in an e-mail interview. Milton Mueller, professor of information studies at Syracuse University in New York, agrees that international resentment will grow as a result of last week's decision. "The U.S. government is a big part of the problem with ICANN's accountability and process. U.S. government involvement sets up a privileged 'back channel' for influencing ICANN decisions so that powerful interests ... can get their way while bypassing the procedures everyone else has to use," heÂ said in anÂ e-mail. Â
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Network Solutions is standing by its controversial policy of automatically registering some domain names that are the subject of searches on the companyâs Web site.
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The Internet's domain name system is in danger of being swamped by speculators who harvest expired site names and re-register them, a practice that could make it harder to fight cybersquatters, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.
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The U.S. government is loosening its grip on the domain name system and is edging closer to giving ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- a greater measure of autonomy in making decisions about the future of the Internet.
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Saves a little time and money, but not enough The registry for .uk domain names has proposed a change in the way that name disputes are handled, but the proposed fast-track system faces criticism for not being radical enough.â¦
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The EU applauded the United States government's moves to make the Internet's domain name organization independent Monday, but said it would monitor the process. ICANN is now set to go private in 2009.
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A controversial practice enables some domain name registrars to make short-term gains from registering domains that others might want. Now Google -- the vehicle for their revenue -- says it wants to do something about that.
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.cat for the Catalans? ICANN San Juan 2007 Tuesday brought more on the expansion of the top-level domain (TLD) landscape - namely a discussion of what are referred to somewhat jokingly as geoTLDs. These are really two distinct kinds of TLDs - one for information about cities or purely geographic regions, and another for linguistic and cultural preservation.â¦
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ICANN, the body responsible for the internetâs domain naming system, has convinced a court to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit filed against it by domain registry VeriSign over its interference with the launch of VeriSign&#39;s Site Finder service.