ICANN in KL to decide on major Net issues
By RASLAN SHARIFKUALA LUMPUR: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the de facto "guardian" of the Internet, has kicked off the second round of its thrice-yearly meetings here, with several major issues up for deliberations.
ICANN chairman Dr Vint Cerf told reporters yesterday that delegates would discuss, among other things, internationalised domain names (IDNs), which remain a work in progress.
Cerf said a there was a need to provide a sense of the technical and policy challenges faced by the people working on IDNs.
He added that the Internet Engineering Task Force spent two years working on the technical aspects, and "we've discovered that applying those rules alone were insufficient."
Difficulties have cropped up in several areas, some language-related. "For instance, the same word can be written in a number of forms with Chinese characters," said Cerf.
The introduction of IPv6 into the root of the domain name structure would also be an important subject of technical discussions, he added.
IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) is an evolutionary upgrade to the IPv4 currently in use, and is designed to allow the Internet to grow steadily in terms of the number of connected hosts and data traffic.
Also up for consideration is the final compiled report of three WHOIS Task Forces set up last year to update the rules governing the WHOIS database.
The WHOIS database contains freely accessible information on people who have registered domain names, but is currently being abused by the likes of spammers who mine it for e-mail addresses, and others involved in activities such as identity theft and domain name hijacking.
The task forces were launched late last year to come up with ways to strike the right balance between personal information privacy, and appropriate access and use, said ICANN (www.icann.org).
The balance has yet to be found. "There continues to be tensions between the two sides," said Cerf, adding that "the tensions continue to be reflected in the report."
He said proposals in the report include providing "differential access," but "it remains difficult to resolve everything to everyone's satisfaction."
He said "tiered" access presented its own problems, such as deciding who would have access to what, and authentication.
"We have not yet discussed in detail to see if it is technically 'implementable,' " he added.
However, Cerf remained hopeful that a way would be found. "We will take the report and hopefully formulate policy to satisfy the concerns," he said.
Free the Net
Regulations related to broadband access was another key factor. "Open access to broadband facilities can make quite a difference to the Internet's evolution," said Cerf.
He also said that the Internet's growth remained affected by certain "sensitivities," such as intellectual property protection.
Citing online music downloads as an example, he said that "as the Internet continues to support these various models, there will be tensions between what the technology can do and what the intellectual property owner wants to do."
He added that "as the decade unfolds, we will see creative efforts" to better enable "these new models."
The ICANN meetings will last until Friday, when the ICANN Board Meeting will be held.
This the first time the meeting is being held in Malaysia. The Kuala Lumpur round is hosted by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC).
Malaysia, via MCMC, has been an active participant of ICANN in several areas, including IDN, where it is represented on the ICANN Board’s Committee on IDN.
Malaysia also chairs the Government Advisory Committee (GAC), in which representatives from over 90 countries advise ICANN on public policy issues.
ICANN meet here to iron out global Internet issues
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