ICANN Los Angeles Recap
Most people would jump on the opportunity to spend 10 days in Los Angeles. Sun, surf and stars - it doesn’t get any better.
Of course, most people aren’t involved in ICANN. 10 days with no sunlight and all of our surfing was done on the web.
A typical ICANN meeting starts out with the pre-meeting activity. This time, I flew down a couple of days ahead of the pre-meetings for some pre-pre-meetings to make sure that the pre-meetings went smoothly. Confused yet? Me too and I’ve been doing this for eight years.
The big item on the agenda this past week was the issue of Whois. The problem that we face is that ICANN’s requirement to publish personal contact information on the web via Whois contradicts privacy laws in many countries. We’ve been actively involved in trying to find a compromise between the anti-privacy crowd who wants to continue with Whois in its current form regardless of what the law says and the pro-privacy folks on the other hand that are looking for exemptions that would allow regular people to opt-out of having their data publicly accessible. Not all of their data, just their phone number and email addresses.
The anti-privacy folks (mostly the same people that brought you the RIAA and other over-zealous intellectual property organizations) don’t like this approach because they believe that this will make it easier for normal folks to infringe on their intellectual property rights. I won’t go into the details of their arguments, but suffice to say that there is very little in the way of “intellect” in their opposition.
I personally spent four days in various back-room meetings trying to negotiate a compromise that would work for everyone. At one point, I had an explicit agreement from the intellectual property representatives, but when the chips hit the table, they “forgot” that we had made a deal. Serves me right, I should have had them sign something. Never do a handshake deal with a lawyer from Hollywood.
I won’t go into all of the gory details around Whois, there are a bazillion press reports on the subject. Dvorak called me “stupid”, elsewhere I was referred to as “emotional” and that I was “overreacting”. Very few of the reports actually got the details of the story right - most of them were heavily influenced by the highly-organized lobby against our compromises. Never underestimate the capabilities of a ticked off intellectual property lawyer.
Nick Jesdanun and Burke Hansen wrote my two favorite stories, although what Burke thought was an attempt at a protest was actually an aborted attempt to sneak out to the washroom.
The next big issues on the ICANN policy agenda relate to domain tasting and “front-running”. There will also be some additional work in the area of domain transfers. We will continue to take a leadership role on these issues as we have on other ICANN issues in the past. It is an important organization that makes important decisions related to the future of the internet and we believe it is critical for us to make sure that we look out for the interests of our business and those of our resellers in this forum.
This meeting also marked the end of Vint Cerf’s term as Chairman of the Board. At a gala event at Sony Studios, everyone from Al Gore to Darth Vader participated in sending Vint off in style with the kind of words and more than just a touch of Hollywood flourish.
Vint will be replaced with Peter Dengate-Thrush, a long time ICANN participant with roots in the ccTLD community. Tucows completely supports Peter and we strongly believe that he will have a positive effect on ICANN and its future direction. It is definitely worth noting that Peter was one of the few ICANN directors that voted against allowing Verisign the unchecked capability to increase domain name registration prices.
The next ICANN meeting will be held in New Delhi this coming February. Tucows will of course be there - our 28th consecutive meeting. Whew!
(photo’s by AP and Joi Ito)
