Author: Emily Taylor

Emily Taylor is an Internet law and governance expert, as well as independent consultant and adviser to a number of Internet registries.

She was the director of legal and policy at UK registry Nominet for nearly a decade, devising and managing the organization’s policy processes, its dispute resolution mechanisms, as well as acting as its spokesperson on the international stage.

Emily has been a member of the Internet Governance Forum’s (IGF) Advisory Group since its inception, as well as an ex-director at CENTR, an organization that represents European registries. She is currently a director of Oxford Information Labs, which specializes in website accessibility for people with visual impairment and cognitive difficulties.

Emily has an MBA, law degree from London’s College of Law, and a BA from Cambridge University. She has two children and lives in the UK.

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Story
16 January 2013
A dangerous sense of déjà vu

In May 2012, the Whois Review Team delivered its final report to the ICANN board with a real sense of achievement.

As the system for providing details about who is in charge of any given Internet domain name, the Whois is critical to the proper functioning the domain name system. As such, it is one of four issues highlighted for independent review under ICANN’s deal with the US Government, the Affirmation of Commitments.

Every three years, a cross-community team has to look at the extent to which ICANN’s Whois policy and implementation are effective, meet the legitimate needs of law enforcement and promote consumer trust.

Despite being an apparently inoffensive directory of contact details, Whois has proved one of the most intractable and divisive issues within the ICANN community for more than a decade. The reason why is due to the different interests rolled up within Whois, and how these interact with ICANN’s power dynamics.
Column
26 July 2012
Making the choice: ITU or ICANN?

According to Saki, “a man is known by the company he keeps”. When you cut through the hysteria, hyperbole and doomy predictions about WCIT, you’re left with the now-familiar Internet governance binary choice: ICANN or ITU.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the unanswerable, and unanswered, question of how a transition from one to the other would be made, whether the “Internet community’ would accept any forced change, or whether it would just go off and do its own thing (as usual). Let’s focus instead on which is better, ICANN or ITU.

It’s clear that if these things were done on merit, neither organisation covers itself in glory. ICANN, the enfant terrible of Internet governance is the once-beautiful child, full of potential, capable of greatness, now transformed into the spotty, grunting adolescent, slouching in doorways and developing unsociable habits. It continues to baffle observers by its capacity to ignore the things it should be doing, and do the things it shouldn’t.

Column
29 May 2012
Whatever happened to Enhanced cooperation?

Last week, I took part in a panel discussion on Enhanced Cooperation at the UN Commission for Science and Technology for Development with Theresa Swinehart of Verizon and Parminder Singh of ICT for Change.

I was a bit surprised to be invited, to be honest, because "Enhanced cooperation" has been a bit quiet recently. It made me reminisce: back in the day, Enhanced Cooperation was Internet governance viagra.

The story goes like this. Imagine you're a government rep in 2003. You hear that this thing called the Internet is going to be really big. When you ask who's in charge, you are given the worrying answer:

"No one. It's a distributed network, that's the point."

So, like any good regulator, you look for choke points and quickly find the domain name system. You are troubled to learn that it's controlled by a California corporation, and the US is the only government in sight.

The US government, and its role in overseeing ICANN became a hot button during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
Column
21 April 2012
The fight for an open Internet

In 2005, I came across an article in the New York Times about a funny little battle that was going on in the Internet corner of the world that no one outside of the small circle of Internet geeks seemed to understand or care about.

This article was memorable for several reasons. First, it was cogent, humorous, it rose above the dirty, confused, detail and explained why this stuff was important for all of us. Secondly, it was written by a politician. That politician was Carl Bildt.

Fast forward to this week. I was asked to moderate a couple of sessions at the Stockholm Internet Forum, and to provide some reflections at the end of the conference. This article highlights some of the themes I picked up from the two days of discussion.


Taylor moderating one of the sessions. Credit: Swedish Internet Forum
Column
27 December 2011
On the FTC and Whois

The Federal Trade Commission’s letter to ICANN of 16 December has been ruffling feathers – and quite right too. Although its principal theme was the introduction of new generic top-level domains, the letter highlighted the need for accurate Whois data as a key element in protecting consumers against online crime.

The FTC cited the recently published draft report [pdf] of the Whois Review Team, which I chair. The Whois Review was set up to fulfill ICANN’s obligations under its Affirmation of Commitments with the United States Government. Therefore, while the Whois Review is “ICANN’s own” (as the FTC puts it), the Review Team is a group of volunteers drawn from a broad spectrum of stakeholders: from techies to governments; policemen to privacy experts. So, we were convened by ICANN, not working for ICANN.