The latest ICANN meeting from 26-30 March in Lisbon, Portugal was a busy and interesting one and the key discussions included the following:

• Changes to WHOIS services
• Registrar Accreditation Agreements
• Regional At-Large Organisations
• ICANN’s Operating Plan and the development of its new Strategic Plan
• .XXX top level domain application rejected
• Internationalised Domain Names

Changes to WHOIS services

Discussions about possible changes to the WHOIS services for .com and other generic Top Level Domains have been making slow progress for a number of years, but the latest development is the formation of a working group. The group has 120 days to consider stakeholder input and report back to the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) Council, who will then decide whether to recommend changes on WHOIS policy to ICANN’s board. There are hotly opposing views on this topic: the European nations want more privacy protection and less public information whereas some Intellectual Property lawyers want as much information on domain name registrants to be as publicly available as possible. This is a controversial topic as we well know from development of consensus on .uk WHOIS policy in 2002.

Registrar Accreditation Agreements

There was also a discussion about the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement, particularly in the light of the current difficulties being experienced by registrants following the collapse of the accredited registrar known as RegisterFly. The CEO of ICANN has called for reform of the agreement and wider registrar policy. This was particularly interesting as we have recently revised the Nominet registrar contract and incorporated good practice terms, the aim of improving industry standards.

Regional At-Large Organisations

Three new Regional At-Large Organisations were formed at this meeting, that are intended to give Internet users from Africa, Europe and Asia-Australia-Pacific direct input into ICANN’s policy process. The groups have been formed as part of ICANN’s attempts to allow more public participation in its decision making process and also reflects the fact that sometimes there are regional issues that need to be addressed. We will be watching to see how effective these groups will be as end user participation is one of the ongoing challenges for ICANN.

ICANN’s Operating Plan and the development of its new Strategic Plan

We made a series of inputs into discussions about ICANN’s recently published Operating Plan and the development of strategy for the organisation going forward. One of the developing issues is how oversight of ICANN might be provided, should it become fully independent of the US Dept of Commerce.

.XXX top level domain application rejected

The application for a .XXX generic top level domain for “adult entertainment” related names and content was rejected by the ICANN Board. I strongly suspect that this won’t be the last we hear of this one.

Internationalised Domain Names

Discussions focussed on identifying all of the issues around the introduction of IDNs, which were numerous and there are certainly differing views on how the issues might be addressed and how current global standardisation efforts may assist.

This entry was posted in April, 2007.
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