[governance] IGP Newsletter, Vol 2.04

Fri Oct 12 17:29:18 EDT 2007

======================================
Internet Governance Project Newsletter
======================================
...current events in Internet Governance and the activities of the Internet Governance Project.
http://www.internetgovernance.org

Volume 2.04
October 12, 2007

========
Contents
========

[1] Two IGP Workshops at 2007 UN Internet Governance Forum
[2] Sunsetting Whois?
[3] IDNs Finally Here?
[4] IANA's DNSSEC Best Practice: No One Party Should Be in 
Control
[5] The Politics of DNSSEC: The Light Begins to Dawn at 
IETF
[6] GigaNet program set
[7] OECD: Mobilizing Civil Society for the Internet 
Ministerial
[8] Upcoming IG Events

======================================================
[1] Workshops on DNSSEC and "Public Policy" at the 2007
     UN Internet Governance Forum in Rio
======================================================

For the second year in a row, IGP is co-sponsoring two workshops at the Internet Governance Forum. This year the Forum will be held in Rio de Janeiro, from November 11-15. A sharp increase in submissions this year to the increasingly important global discussion venue meant only workshops that addressed substantive Internet policy issues and brought together multistakeholder perspectives were selected. Continuing its leading role in making Internet governance discussions accessible to a global audience, IGP workshop attendees will be able to pose questions or participate in the discussion either in person or online using the online collaboration technology, Elluminate.

-----

IGF Workshop: "DNSSEC: Securing a Critical Internet Resource"
14 November, 2007
Meeting Room III, Hotel Windsor Barra
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Start time: 10:30 (Rio de Janeiro); 13:30 (Berlin); 7:30 
(US Eastern); 19:30 (China)
<http://www.internetgovernance.org/events.html#IGF2007DNSSECWorkshop_111406>

This workshop, co-sponsored by the IGP, CGI.br, and EuroISPA considers Internet governance and cyber security, and particularly DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). The workshop will focus on the tensions and complementarities between global and national policy making, and the pursuit of global governance solutions to cyber security problems. DNSSEC is an IETF technical standard that could improve the security of the global DNS and reduce criminal or disruptive acts. A critical step in deploying DNSSEC widely is the signing of the root zone file, a critical Internet resource. The procedure for signing the root, and more importantly, determining the authorities who control the digital signing of this critical Internet resource has yet to be decided. What kinds of institutions, processes, and coordination are needed to secure the root and ensure demand for DNSSEC services? Are there specific and complimentary roles that governments, international 
organizations, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector can or should play? This session brings together experts to address these questions.

-----

IGF Workshop: "Public Policy on the Internet: What is it, who makes it?"
14 November, 2007
Meeting Room VI, Hotel Windsor Barra
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Start time: 18:30 (Rio de Janeiro); 21:30 (Berlin); 15:30 
(US Eastern); 4:30 (China)
<http://www.internetgovernance.org/events.html#IGF2007PublicPolicyWorkshop_111406>

This workshop, co-sponsored by the IGP, the Government of France, Ian Peter and Associates Pty Ltd, Afilias, and the 
Internet Governance Caucus deals with three closely related themes derived from the Tunis Agenda:

What is "public policy" on the Internet? Can we reliably identify when Internet governance issues become "public 
policy" issues, and can these be isolated and extracted from "day-to-day technical and operational matters"? When 
do we need global as opposed to national policies for the Internet? Is the claim that states have a "sovereign 
right" to make policy for the Internet compatible with the global scope of the Internet and the generally non-territorial reach of networked computers? Do national states adequately represent all aspects of the public interest at the global level? What was intended by the Tunis Agenda's call for the "development of globally-applicable principles on public policy issues associated with the coordination and management of critical Internet resources"? What kind of "globally 
applicable principles" could be applied to the Internet resources? How would such principles improve and guide 
Internet governance? In what venue would such principles 
be developed and adopted?

-----

The full slate of IGF workshops can be viewed here:

<http://info.intgovforum.org/wsl3.php>

=====================
[2] Sunsetting Whois
=====================

ICANN's domain name policy making Council is considering a revolutionary move. Since ICANN's binding policies are supposed to be based on "consensus" and it is clear that no consensus on the Whois-privacy tradeoff exists, some Council members are proposing to throw out those parts of the registrar accreditation contract that require a Whois service. The idea is not to abolish Whois per se, but to create a "clean slate" for the renegotiation of a new Whois policy that everyone can agree to. Under the current arrangement, one side of the controversy gets exactly what it wants -- completely open access to all registrant contact data -- and therefore has no incentive to agree to any changes.

The Whois-Sunset proposal could pass the GNSO Council, but would it get by the US government-supervised management and Board? In its participation on the Whois working group and in its formal JPA with ICANN the US government has already made it clear what kind of an outcome it wants. There will be ample opportunities for it to pressure Board members formally and informally prior to and at the LA meeting.

Read a summary on the politics of Whois Task Force:

<http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2007/8/22/3174023.html>

======================
[3] IDNs Finally Here?
======================

A Script for Every Surfer, Washington Post, October 12

"On Monday, ICANN will conduct a test to see whether domains written entirely in foreign scripts can work without crashing the Net. For several years, the company has allowed domains that are half in foreign characters, such as [Chinese text].com or [Arabic text].org. For the test, domain names will look like [Korean text].[Korean text]. The long road to this stage, which comes nearly a decade after the technology for creating multilingual domains was invented, has left many in the non-English-speaking world impatient and angry. Questions of political and linguistic sovereignty, alongside 
accusations of American "digital colonialism," have motivated some countries to create their own Internets, effectively mounting a challenge to the World Wide Web....At least a dozen countries, including China and Saudi Arabia, have created their own domains in different alphabets and their own Internets to support these domains. A Russian newspaper article last July reported that President Vladimir Putin was commissioning the creation of a Cyrillic Internet. Users of Russia's 
Internet, like current users of China's and Saudi Arabia's, could surf the Web without going through U.S.-controlled ICANN servers."

Read the whole story:

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/10/AR2007101002642_2.html>

See also our blog post on the threatened Russian Internet:

<http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2007/9/24/3250527.html>

==================================================================
[4] IANA's DNSSEC Best Practice: No One Party Should Be in Control
==================================================================

Outlining a DNSSEC digital signing process for the critical Internet zones under their direct control, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) expressed to the DNSSEC-Deployment group that "no one party be in control" when it comes to key generation and signing activities for security reasons.  While IANA's approach does not distribute digital signing in the traditional technical sense (e.g., using split keys, or multiple signatures), it does introduce split-knowledge techniques into the management of a DNSSEC signed zone, and IANA should be commended for this.  Additionally, IANA is 
pushing laudable design goals including easy maintainability, reliability, and transparency in securing .arpa and its subzones, and .int. The hardware specified is generic and widely available, the software scripts involved will be "open" with BSD style licensing. But most importantly, the process design requires two individuals to sign any zone.  The critical decision of who these parties are has yet to be made, but IANA intends to have .arpa and subzones signed by the ICANN meeting in LA.  However, IANA has not yet confirmed plans to have .int signed by then.  It is unclear if IANA is negotiating with the various international organizations which use the .int top level domain.  As you probably know from IGP's extensive coverage on DNSSEC, the issue of who should have authority over key generation and signing of the Internet's root zone has been in contention for some time. Assuming that IANA follows thru on diversifying control in 
its zone signing process, the parties involved in managing and signing the root zone (ICANN/IANA, US-DoC, VeriSign) might be able to learn from IANA's example.

View the IANA presentation:

<http://internetgovernance.org/pdf/IANA_zone_signing_process.pdf>

=============================================================
[5] The Politics of DNSSEC: The Light Begins to Dawn at IETF
=============================================================

IGP is sometimes accused of needlessly "politicizing" Internet policy issues, especially by a few members of the  technical community.  But fortunately, there are community members who understand that technology does not exist in a vacuum, and that simple game theory and its application to the politics of the root zone can predict likely outcomes.  One of these people is Dr. Phillip Hallam-Baker, a DNS expert at VeriSign, who incisively described in a post to an IETF list the political implications of deploying DNSSEC with a single entity signing the root, something we at IGP have been trying to do for about a year now. Some excerpts:

"I think that some folk besides myself have to do some wargaming to consider what the political consequences of signing the root might be...If the root is signed by a unitary entity, that entity has absolute power...The idea that control of [signing] the DNS root will not be subjected to even more considerable geo-political pressure is naïve...So no, I don't think that there will be a unitary signer. The [DNSSEC] architecture is inherently flawed. Rather than have a single party sign the root we should probably look to a situation where there are multiple signer entities."

Read Dr. Hallam-Baker's entire post here:

<http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2007/9/9/3217425.html>

Read the IGP proposal arguing for multiple signers (released May 2007) here:

<http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2007/5/17/2957108.html>

==================================
[6] GigaNet Symposium program set
==================================

A new network of academic researchers focused on Internet governance is flourishing. The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) holds an annual symposium alongside the Rio Internet Governance Forum (IGF). This year's program was drawn from three times as many submissions as last year. It focuses on three themes: "A Development Agenda for Internet Governance," "The Changing Institutionalization of the Internet" and "Critical Policy Issues in Internet Governance."

See the complete program here:

<http://internetgovernance.org/pdf/GigaNet2007Program.pdf>

===============================================================
[7] OECD: Mobilizing Civil Society for the Internet Ministerial
===============================================================

A series of meetings in Ottawa, Canada last week started setting the foundation for civil society participation in the Seoul Ministerial on The Future of the Internet Economy. IGP is involved in this initiative, along with APC and EPIC's Public Voice, as part of the reference group coordinating civil society participation. There were 3 meetings of interest: an initial exploratory gathering of civil society Forum participants on Wednesday October 3rd; official OECD intergovernmental meetings on Thursday October 4th; and a liaison between non-state actors and the South Korean government officials responsible for organizing the logistical aspects of the Seoul meeting.

Read the OECD planning meeting summary here:

<http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2007/10/5/3273492.html>

======================
[8] Upcoming IG Events
======================

17-19 October 2007, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA ARIN XX
<http://www.arin.net/meetings/>

22-26 October 2007, Amsterdam, the Netherlands RIPE 55
<http://ripe.net/ripe/meetings/>

29 October-2 November 2007, Los Angeles, US 30th International Public ICANN Meeting
<http://losangeles2007.icann.org/>

11 November 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil GigaNet'07 - Global Internet Governance Academic Network 2nd Annual Symposium
<http://www.igloo.org/giganet>

12-15 November 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2007 UN Internet Governance Forum hosted by The Government of Brazil
<http://www.igfbrazil2007.br/>
<http://www.intgovforum.org/>
<http://cgi.br/igf/>

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