NAIROBI, KENYA, 26 OCTOBER 2009 - An impressive performance by South Korean guitarist Lim Jeong-hyun -- better known by his online alias Funtwo -- marked the opening in Seoul of the first meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers under the organization's new governance structure.
Funtwo's rendition of Pachabel, which has been downloaded 68 million times on YouTube, was a departure from usual ICANN opening ceremonies dominated by long speeches. The meeting is also the first for ICANN's new CEO Rod Beckstrom. He is expected to demonstrate to more than 1,000 participants from 111 countries that the change in ICANN is not only in the entertainment department.
One of the questions that dominated discussions leading to ICANN's new governance agreement was how international the organization is and whether the U.S. government will continue pulling the strings. The U.S. Department of Commerce had previously been in charge of ICANN oversight.
"If you look at our stakeholder groups and the board of directors, five out of the 22 are African -- we are very global, but I don't think any organization is ever practically global. We need to be based somewhere," said Beckstrom.
Apart from dealing with the geopolitical Internet infrastructure issues involved in the governance agreement, and who controls what, ICANN is expected to tackle bigger challenges involving the Internet, its performance and security.
Top on the list are the controversial issue of new generic top-level domains and whether applications will open soon or not; DNS (Domain Name System) security root signing in July of next year and the mandate that new TLDs must be DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) compliant; policy development on post-expiration domain name recovery; inter-registry transfers; and fast tracking of IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names).
IDNs allow the use of non-Latin-based language characters in the entire Internet address, which will increase the number of Internet users in global regions where languages such as Amharic, Chinese, Korean and Arabic, among others, are spoken. The IDNs have been going through public testing for 18 months and had been privately tested a year before.
The IDNs will lead to the Internet becoming more global. Currently, some Web sites that are not based on Roman characters are not visible in some parts of the globe.
"Introduction of IDN and its policy will pave the way for the future. Internet users should use other languages and minimize costs," said Choi See Joong, chairperson of the Korea Communications Commission.
On Nov. 16, ICANN will start accepting applications for country TLDs to fast track the IDN process.
Currently, there are 21 active generic top-level domain (gTLD) extensions, such as .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and 249 country-code top level domain (ccTLD) extensions, such as ke, .mw, .za, .zm, .ca, .fr, .de, .us, .uk.
Large companies tend to register their Web sites in all of the gTLD and ccTLDs in order to protect their brands and intellectual properties. These companies will have to invest more money in new gTLDs, and are, therefore, largely opposed to the addition of gTLDs.
The board will determine whether to fast track new gTLDs that do not raise security, economic and copyright issues. The city of Berlin is very vocal with its application of dot-Berlin as a new TLD.
"New gTLDs will provide enhanced consumer protection. I have a friend who rented a flat in Paris, but getting there found that it was not what was promised. If there was dot-Paris, then you would know that Web site is from a certain registry and must be secure," said Peter Dengate, ICANN board chair.
Speaking at the press conference opening the ICANN meeting, Dengate said some of the gTLDs may be genuine, while others may be questionable and that is why ICANN commissioned a study on new gTLDs and whether they will be beneficial to Internet users.
Most of the decisions at the meeting will be made at a public session of the ICANN Board of Directors Friday.
