[kictanet] ICANN Reforms

[Bitange Ndemo]

Envisioning a 21st Century Organization to Coordinate the Internet
Addressing System: A Shared, Global Public Resource



Last week the seven, international members of the ICANN Strategy Panel on
Multistakeholder Innovation convened online. The panel includes:
Chair:  Beth Simone Noveck Panelists: Allison Gilwald, Joi Ito, Karim
Lakhani, Guo Liang, Geoff Mulgan, Bitange Ndemo GovLab Support Team:
Stefaan Verhulst, Jillian Raines, Antony Declercq


The Multistakeholder Innovation Panel is an external advisory group formed
to bring fresh insights and outside perspective to ICANN’s ongoing process
of planning its own evolution.

It has been almost 15 years since the creation of ICANN in 1998. At that
time,  ICANN was perceived as an experiment in translating the principles
of participatory democracy – or what is known in Internet governance
parlance as “multi-stakeholderism” – into practice. Since then the
Internet’s usage has exploded and the process of managing the unique
identifier system that enables communications to flow seamlessly across a
unified, global Internet is facing numerous challenges. At the same time,
innovations in governance from big and open data, open innovation, open
contracting, open peer review, crowdsourcing to expert discovery allowing
for more participatory, open, and transparent processes of governance have
emerged.

The Innovation Panel supported by the GovLab is working to make
recommendations to the ICANN Community for how to evolve the ways ICANN
manages and coordinates the domain name space.  Starting with the
principles of multi-stakeholder governance – including transparency,
accountability, accessibility and inclusiveness – the goal of the panel is
to address new ways to realize this vision more effectively. “The aim of
the panel isn’t to tackle global issues of Internet governance but to
articulate what a 21st century ICANN, whose functions are quite narrow,
could look like and how it could operate given the innovations in
governance happening across the world,” added Panel Chair Prof. Beth
Simone Noveck.

During the call, members discussed how to capture the principles,
platforms, practices and strategies for opening up ICANN and how to make
its processes more effective and more legitimate at each stage of a
policymaking process from issue-identification to agenda setting to
solution-development and implementation to evaluation and review.

Members agreed that the seven of them alone do not possess all the wisdom,
know-how and insights necessary but, rather, their highest and best role
is in stewarding a broader conversation around the question: what might it
mean to manage and coordinate a shared, global public resource in the 21st
century?





To that end, the Panel wants input as it starts to map:
•
The technologies and platforms that exist for identifying know-how and
enabling participatory decision-making across stakeholders.

•
The best models for leveraging collective intelligence, open innovation
and open data around the world – that could be applied to the ICANN
processes;

•
The variables that are important to consider when designing innovative
ways to manage and coordinate – using new technologies.



To help frame the discussion, members also discussed three current topics
on which ICANN is working. The goal being to help frame how to experiment
around participatory decision-making on these issues:

•
Next-Generation Registry Directory Services/“Thick” Whois:

◦
The Next­Gen Registry Directory Services is a proposed successor for
today’s Whois database (a publicly searchable repository of data on domain
name registrations). This proposed new system would collect, validate and
disclose generic top-­level domain (gTLD) registration data for
permissible purposes only, with some data elements accessible only to
authenticated requestors.

•
Name Collisions:

◦
During implementation of ICANN’s decision to open up and allow for new
generic top-level domains (gTLDs), the likelihood that name space
collisions between existing gTLD strings, applied ­for new gTLD strings,
and non­-delegated TLDs became apparent. Specifically, local top ­level
domains used internally by private enterprises may potentially conflict
with names yet to be allocated.

•
Internationalized Domain Name Variants:
◦
Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) use character sets such as Chinese,
Arabic, Cyrillic or other non-­Latin characters. An IDN variant TLD can be
defined as one that may look like or be considered exchangeable with
another TLD by a user of the related writing system. For example, a string
in traditional Chinese characters commonly has an equivalent string in
simplified Chinese characters. The issues that need to be resolved around
supporting IDN variants in the root zone include how to avoid “visual
confusion” and how to construct a “look­up table” in the root so that all
variant queries are properly directed.

We’ll soon be launching an online platform to gather input and ideas and
reach out widely to the global audience focused on innovations in
governance.  In the meantime, I am requesting you to give us your input on
what type of multistakeholder arrangements you want to see ICANN adopt.


Ndemo.





University of Nairobi
Business School, Lower Kabete Campus