ICANN Prague issue index (27 Jun 12)

ICANN's new CEO, Fadi Chehade, gave a well-received inaugural speech to attendees at the organization's meeting in Prague.

In the highly personal address, he promised the organization would listen more, internationalize through understanding others' culture, improve its technical competence and make decisions solely in the public interest.

Meanwhile, outgoing CEO Rod Beckstrom gave a speech in which he listed his achievements while in charge, including a controversial claim that he had personally written and directed the "Affirmation of Commitments" which saw ICANN gain autonomy from the US government.

That claim was subsequently picked apart by the organization's former head of corporate affairs Paul Levins in a public blog post. Levins noted that discussions had been going on for 18 months before Beckstrom took the job and the first draft was produced prior to him entering the organization.

Imagine the ICANN and the community as a newly married couple who didn’t taken the time to publish a bridal registry.

Two weeks after the fancy wedding reception party (the Big Reveal), the newlyweds now have 13 toasters (dot-app), 11 hat stands (dot-home), and 10 paintings on black velvet (dot-art). Not to mention some really strange kitchen gadgets that the newlyweds and their friends never figure out how to use (dot-ping, dot-men, dot-parts).

Newlyweds love their family and friends, though, and have to write nice little thank you notes to all the gift givers. Which is what we’ll do now, on behalf of the ICANN community, in the form of awards. Without further ado, here are...

The digital archery memorial new gTLD awards

So many candidates were worthy of this award, it seems a shame they can’t all get a prize.

Bronze: The auto industry

ICANN announced it was suspending its "digital archery" scheme for prioritizing applications for new Internet extensions.

The scheme - which saw people click on a button as soon after a given time as possible - was widely criticized by the Internet community as being flawed and unfair.

ICANN highlighted the fact that it had been given reports demonstrating that the system was not working properly, and that only 20 percent of applicants had used the system, despite its intended close this week, as the reasons for the suspension.

The news was greeted with both relief and frustration. Many of the 1,000+ companies applying for new gTLDs had invested in automated systems to improve their changes of coming first in the process.

A replacement for the process had not yet been decided but ICANN is expected to announce later this week that it will no longer break down applications into chunks but deal with them all at one time.

Two weeks after new gTLD reveal day, what does the world outside the sheltered ICANN sphere think of the exercise? Which proposed strings are they voting for with their mouse clicks?

.Nxt looks for some answers and wonders what this will all mean for the new gTLD program as it progresses.

Searching .Nxt's own database for clues

The most clicked link in the .Nxt new gTLD database isn't a potentially contentious string like dot-sex. Instead, it's dot-ismaili.

Ismaili is a branch of Shia Islam with somewhere around 20 million followers worldwide and the application for dot-ismaili as a community gTLD came from the Aga Khan Foundation, founded by the imam of the Ismaili community, so there is probably little chance that anyone in the community will object to the application.

Nitin Desai was a key architect of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) as Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General for Internet Governance between. Previously he had held several Under-Secretary roles at the UN, as well as at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and as chair of the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).

We asked about his reflections specifically on the IGF, two years he had stepped down from running the annual conference.

Nitin Desai came out of retirement to build IGF. Photo: Richard Sambrook

The biggest success: the multi-stakeholder format. The largest lost opportunity? Not enough attention on over-the-horizon issues.

Controversy over the WCIT meeting in Dubai in December continued unabated. The meeting will revise a treaty covering international telecommunications rules that was originally agreed in 1988.

Previously confidential documents on the process were leaked and then published on a new website called WCITleaks.org. Relatively little controversy resulted from the actual contents of the documents, with a number of Internet organizations having already highlighted changes that concern them with regard to the Internet.

In the meantime, the working group overseeing the process met again in Geneva in an effort to produce a final document for the process. They were unsuccessful. There are too many pages of content and so a further meeting will be required, most likely in October.

The most unsettling moment in the multi-day meeting was the refusal of the chair of the process to identify whether a key proposal was intended to include the Internet. The entire controversy of the WCIT meeting revolves around whether it will be used as way for the ITU to involve itself directly in Internet matters.

During April and May 2012 the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, responsible for preparation of the Dutch position on the ITR review during WCIT 2012 in Dubai, consulted technical and business experts and stakeholders in a series of meetings. The main conclusions are represented in this summary report.

The ITR review is "managed" by the Council Working Group on ITR’s, and is building on the preparation that has been taking place over recent years, now with one more official meeting planned to take place in Geneva, 20 to 22 June 2012. In the years leading up to where we are today it has become clear that the ITRs will remain in place – even if some countries in earlier stages of the discussions were of the opinion that they were no longer necessary. So the focus is on getting the best possible result out of the meeting in Dubai, in December 3-14 this year.

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure gave yet another speech urging calm over the WCIT conference that will take place in December.

Speaking on the first day of a three-day council working group whose job it is to prepare documents for the conference, Toure noted that "many of the fears, concerns, and criticisms" surrounding the conference were the same as when the regulations that will be reviewed in December were created back in 1998. "Those fears and concerns were unwarranted," he noted.

Toure also said that no issues would put be put to a vote but would be arrived at through consensus. He also highlighted the positive aspects that could come out of the conference. "WCIT is an opportunity to create a stable international regulatory framework providing the right conditions to allow markets to flourish globally."

Danish ISPs have agreed to a protocol that would cause all of them to block trademark-infringing content online if so ordered by a court.

The agreement came following pressure from the government and will be appear in the form of a "Code of Conduct". The relevant government department - the Ministry of Culture - has been threatening to introduce a range of new laws to combat online infringement.

The result of the agreement will be that a company needs only take action - and win - against a single ISP for the decision to be reproduced across all ISPs in the country. The system will be automated.

The government has promised to back efforts to developing platforms that promote legal content, as well as expand awareness campaigns on content piracy.