ICANN on ccTLD Redelegations
December 18, 2004I listened in on one of the GAC meetings in Cape Town on Nov 30 and was stunned to hear Paul Verhoef, Icann VP, deliver this presentation on the redelegation of ccTLDs (country code top level domains):
• ICANN/IANA leaves the decision to the parties [government and ccTLD] in the domain (country, territory, economic area) and to reach agreement among themselves
• ICANN/IANA generally takes no action until all the contending parties agree; only in cases where the designated manager has substantially “misbehaved” would the ICANN/IANA review the situation
• ICANN acts out of interests of global Internet community and the stability and security of the global Internet
“That’s it?” remarked one South American ccTLD. “All we have to do is ‘Just say No’ to our governments”? The message seems to be that ICANN can’t possible handle disputes in over 240 countries. Governments and ccTLDs will just have to learn to sort things out and settle their differences. This is a dramatic change in ICANN policy from several years back.
I can only hope that Mr. Ver Pena of the CITC will now see the wisdom in getting his Domain Advisory Board to sit down with us at DotPH and explain the rationale for his Guidelines (on administering the PH Domain). We’ve been asking Mr. Pena for the longest time to explain what problems he sees with the PH Domain, and what his rationale is for changing (quite drastically) the way things work, and how he sees the new guidelines as resolving these problems.
So far Mr. Pena has been unable to explain to us, either privately or publicly what sort of problems he sees with the PH Domain. That’s really unfortunate, as we can’t help him fix the problems he sees if we have no idea what he’s trying to fix.
Paul Verhoef’s presentation is downloadable from http://194.78.218.67/web/meetings/mtg20/ICANN_Presentation.ppt
