ICANN Has Issues
Susan Crawford, a board member for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is in Lisbon, Portugal for the organization's big meeting that begins this weekend. She made a list of hot-button issues on her blog that are ripe for discussion and I thought I would elaborate.
ICANN board decision on .xxx. ICANN has twice rejected similar proposals to create a virtual red-light district since 2000. They could vote at this meeting on whether to approve the domain name for use by pornography sites.
Domain name system root server attack. A distributed denial-of-service assault in February lasted almost eight hours and targeted six of the 13 root servers that form the backbone of the Internet.
Principles on transparency and accountability. Questions still loom about how ICANN is trying to improve its work in the face of criticism that too much occurs behind closed doors and without enough input from the Internet community.
"Whois" data. The debate over public databases that store Web address owners' information (including names, organizations, postal and e-mail addresses and telephone numbers) is expected to continue.
Other issues up for discussion: Memorandum-of-understanding signings with new "Regional At-Large Organizations," which act as the coordination point in each region for public input to ICANN; a final report from the President’s Strategy Committee; International domain names laboratory tests and next steps; ICANN operating plan; and RegisterFly accreditation termination and the larger issue of ICANN registrar accreditation.
More on accreditation: Some Internet experts have concerns about ICANN's pledge to review its registrar accreditation process in Lisbon. They worry that officials might handle the issue hurriedly, causing more harm than good.
The questions raised by ICANN's leadership are complex "and there is no way that the community can address them intelligently and reach consensus on the best course of action by next week," Internet Commerce Association counsel Phil Corwin said.
A more realistic timetable would be to aim for adoption of new rules at the San Juan, Puerto Rico ICANN meeting in late June, he said. Before changes are made to ICANN policy, "we need to know a lot more about what went wrong with RegisterFly," the company whose customer service failures prompted the ICANN action.
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