Developing Countries Seek Focus on DNS Management at WGIG Meeting
GENEVA -- Several developing countries fervently asked the U.N. Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) to focus on domain name-, IP- and root server management. They also again proposed an inter-governmental, multilateral, multi-stakeholder international body to manage these issues.
WGIG won’t have enough time to consider the broad list of topics raised in 21 issue papers, ranging from intellectual property questions to cybersecurity and cybercrime, warned delegates from India, Brazil and Syria. The WGIG holds a series of open and closed meetings here this week in order to prepare its preliminary report to present to WSIS PrepCom-2.
Ever since the original dispute about DNS management was addressed under the label of Internet Governance, “we seem to be debating how many other issues can be put under this overall chapeau,” said a delegate from India’s Ministry of Telecommunications. The meeting was still struggling over a working definition of what Internet governance is on Tues. “But that was not the original concern,” said the Indian delegate. “We are here because certain countries felt with good reasons that they were excluded from the decision-making process regarding the Internet infrastructure.” Many of the questions were already being dealt with by other organizations like UNESCO or WGIG’s partner Task Force on Financing Mechanisms that will present its results during the Prepcom.
Like other developing countries, India was “not at ease with the limited influence of governments of various countries in ICANN and in particular with the purely advisory role of GAC,” the Indian delegate said. The delegate from Brazil was unhappy that the international community must follow decisions by a private entity created by one govt. “as if we had negotiated an international treaty with binding resolutions,” referring to the Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Dept. of Commerce and ICANN. While Brazil didn’t necessarily want the U.N. to absorb ICANN, its management tasks couldn’t be left to the private sector alone, he said.
The Brazilian parliament is putting pressure on its govt. on the issue of public representation and regulation in global Internet management and that’s “why we will come back to ask these questions again at the next Prepcom and the Tunis Summit and after that at another place,” the delegate said.
The chmn. of ICANN’s Govt. Advisory Committee (GAC), Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi, presented a report about the GAC’s work. “In the early years, GAC very much was giving advice,” said Tarmizi, but said that had changed as a result of ICANN’s reform process. GAC got additional responsibility and powers, said Tarmizi’s report. Between 1999 and 2005, representation went up from 23 countries to 100, with the percentage of developing countries rising. A new platform or international organization or forum might mean an end to the GAC effort, which is currently hosted by the European Commission.
Despite that, the EU called “internationalization of Internet Governance” one of the core topics besides the “organization and administration of naming and numbering, including the operation of the root server system” and “the stability, dependability and robustness of the Internet, including the impact of spam.”
The US delegation didn’t respond to the internationalization calls Tues., but stressed that every working definition had to consider the openness of architecture and standards, had to preserve stability and the free flow of information as a cornerstone, had to include the concept of multiple stakeholders and liberalized markets, and had to be made with an understanding of the dynamism of Internet development.