October 2002 ICANN Meeting Report
On
Overall, the remote location of the meeting resulted in very
low turnout among noncommercial organizations and those interested in domain
name and public policy issues. The low attendance was unfortunate in light of
important issues on ICANN's agenda including major changes to ICANN's structure
and procedures, together with discussion of domain name
registration data and its openness, accuracy and privacy.
Most of the meeting was devoted to a set of bylaw,
structural and procedural changes called the "Evolution and Reform"
documents. These documents were the product of eight months of work following
ICANN's own declaration of its shortcomings and failures in February. The
Reform documents give a new independence to the country code top
level domain name registries, who move into their own supporting organization,
the Country Code Name Supporting Organization (ccNSO).
They also eliminate the Protocol Supporting Organization, continue the Address
Supporting Organization and rename the Domain Name Supporting Organization to
be the Generic Name Supporting Organization (GNSO).
Unresolved in the Reform documents is the status and ongoing
relationship of ICANN with the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) such as ARIN and RIPE. Throughout the Reform process,
the RIRs have actively worked for much greater independence
from ICANN (seeking ICANN as their oversight organization, not their policy making forum).
In the public forum, ACM-IGP voiced
concerns about the Reform documents, including the elimination of direct
elections for half of the ICANN Board seats by the public (widely seen as key
to ICANN's legitimacy), the continuing broad and loosely defined scope of
ICANN's mission statement, and the adoption of extremely short, mandatory
timelines for domain name policy development which make participation largely
impossible for constituencies (such as the Noncommercial Constituency) and
organizations without fulltime paid legal staffs.
Also presented at the meeting was a report of the WHOIS Task
Force, charged with improving the accuracy of the WHOIS
domain name registration data. The report highlighted concerns over
inaccurate information, the need for uniformity of formats and elements, better
searchability, and better protection of domain name
registrants from data mining and marketing use of the data. Missing from the
report were calls by EPIC and others for creation of an "unlisted"
option for domain name registration, in which individuals, home based
businesses, political organizations and others could choose not to share their
personal information in the globally accessible WHOIS database.
One positive note of the meeting was the short ceremony
announcing the birth of the Regional Latin-American and Caribbean IP Address
Registry (LACNIC), a new RIR spun off from ARIN.